Chivalric romance

• 1. Introduction

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  Chivalric romance shaped the modern idea of what the Middle Ages looked like. When most people picture a knight riding out to rescue a lady from a dragon, they are drawing not from history but from a literary genre that flowered in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe. These were fantastic stories, stuffed with marvels, quests, and love, and they ran so deep into the culture that even after falling out of fashion around 1600, their images never truly left. What drove this genre into being? Why did it eventually invite satire and scorn? And how did a medieval nobleman's bedtime story come to define the word romantic itself?

• 2. Marvels and Structure

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  Vladimir Propp identified a basic form underlying these narratives: initial situation, departure, complication, a first move, a second move, and finally resolution. That sequence maps onto romance as cleanly as it maps onto folk tales, and scholars have long noted how close the two genres sit to each other. Romance was distinguished from the earlier epics, though, by something the epics mostly lacked: a dense web of interwoven storylines rather than a single main character carrying a single plot.

  The earliest forms were written in verse without exception. It was not until the 15th century that prose became common, and even then those prose versions were often retellings of older rhymed originals. Adventure was the engine of the form: the heroes and heroines represented the ideals of the age, while the villains embodied threats to that order. A persistent archetype was the hero's quest, which served as the structural framework holding the whole narrative together. The rescue of a lady from a monster was a perennial theme that ran from the earliest examples straight through to the end of the medieval period.

• 3. The Three Matters

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  Jean Bodel, a French poet writing in the 12th century, was the first to describe the three great cycles that organized most of these stories. In his epic "Song of the Saxons" he named what medieval authors called all romances: the Matter of Rome, the Matter of France, and the Matter of Britain.

  The Matter of Rome, despite its name, centered on the life of Alexander the Great as conflated with the Trojan War. The Matter of France followed Charlemagne and his principal paladin Roland. The Matter of Britain concerned King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the quest for the Holy Grail. The epics of Charlemagne already possessed feudalism rather than the tribal loyalties found in a work like Beowulf, which made the transition to romance relatively smooth. The Matter of France was the most popular early cycle but it resisted courtly love themes; in The Song of Roland, Roland is betrothed to Oliver's sister yet never thinks of her throughout the events of the poem. Courtly love would find its true home in the Matter of Britain instead.

  Not every romance fit neatly into one of these three cycles. A significant number of non-cyclical romances were written without any such connection, among them King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Ipomadon, and Emaré.

• 4. Folklore, Fairy, and Persecution

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  Morgan le Fay never loses her name across the centuries of romance tradition, but in Le Morte d'Arthur she studies magic rather than being inherently magical. That small shift captures a broader pattern: the earliest medieval romances drew heavily on folklore, but over time fairy characters were transformed into wizards and enchantresses. Sir Launfal meets fairy ladies; Huon of Bordeaux is aided by King Oberon. The Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight remains an otherworldly being even in a late tale, evidence that fairies never fully disappeared.

  Even through the Reformation and post-Reformation era, when popular opinion increasingly cast fairies as demons working alongside witches, romances continued to portray them positively. The printing press later spread these sympathetic portraits of fairies to an even wider audience.

  Persecuted heroines follow their own distinct pattern. Early heroines are driven from their husbands' homes by mothers-in-law who accuse them of bearing monstrous children, committing infanticide, or practicing witchcraft. These are motifs shared with fairy tales like The Girl Without Hands. Over time a new persecutor emerged: a courtier rejected by the woman or threatened by her, who accuses her of adultery or high treason. This second type has no fairy-tale equivalent. Nicholas Trivet's Chronique Anglo-Normane, the source for both Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale and John Gower's variant in Confessio Amantis, carries this pattern of the calumniated wife into the heart of canonical English literature.

• 5. Courtly Love Arrives

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  Chrétien de Troyes introduced courtly love to the romance, combining it with the Matter of Britain. In his Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, that combination produced something new: the behavior of Lancelot conforms to the courtly love ideal, and the text devotes an unprecedented amount of attention to the psychological dimensions of love rather than simply the mechanics of adventure.

  By the end of the 14th century, French and English romances had moved well past the earliest formulations of courtly love. Rather than treating love as an ennobling but unconsummated devotion, works like Sir Degrevant, Sir Torrent of Portyngale, Sir Eglamour, and William of Palerne combined love sickness and devotion with the couple's subsequent marriage. Ipomadon goes further still, explicitly describing a married couple as lovers. Iberian romances of the 14th century pursued the same direction: Tirant lo Blanc and Amadís de Gaula both praised monogamy and marriage. The plot of Sir Otuel was actually altered to allow the title character to marry Belyssant, where the original had not permitted it.

  Contemporary society shaped every layer of this. Alexander the Great appeared as a fully feudal king. When Priam sends Paris to Greece in a 14th-century work, Priam is dressed in the mold of Charlemagne, and Paris is dressed demurely until he arrives in Greece and adopts flashier clothing with multicolored garments and fashionable shoes cut in lattice-work, signs of a seducer in the era.

• 6. Decline and Satire

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  By 1600 secular readers had largely turned against the genre. In the shifting intellectual climate of the 17th century, many learned readers judged romance to be trite and childish literature. The humanists of the Renaissance had already attacked it as barbarous and silly, exalting Greek and Latin classics instead, though that attack was not very effective among common readers in the 15th and 16th centuries.

  Miguel de Cervantes, born in 1547 and dying in 1616, gave the decisive satirical blow with Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. It is the story of an elderly country gentleman living in the culturally isolated province of La Mancha who becomes so obsessed with chivalric romances that he tries to emulate their heroes. The joke cuts both ways: it skewers the reader who cannot distinguish fiction from the world, and it skewers the genre for inspiring such confusion. Hudibras offered a similar lampoon from an ironic and consciously realistic standpoint.

  Yet the tradition did not simply vanish. Some of its magical and exotic atmosphere fed into stage tragedies like John Dryden's collaborative The Indian Queen of 1664 and into opera seria, including Handel's Rinaldo of 1711, which was based on a magical interlude in Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Queen Elizabeth I's Accession Day tilts drew freely on romance incident for the knights' disguises. Knights even assumed the names of romantic figures such as the Swan Knight, or carried the coat-of-arms of Lancelot or Tristan.

• 7. Into the Modern World

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  From around 1760, usually cited as 1764 at the publication of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, the word romance began to absorb new meanings. Gothic adventure narratives by writers like Ann Radcliffe, whose A Sicilian Romance appeared in 1790 and The Romance of the Forest in 1791, pulled the word toward the fantastic and eerie. Nathaniel Hawthorne used the term deliberately to distinguish his own works as romances rather than novels, and literary criticism of the 19th century often accepted that contrast. H. G. Wells called his early science fiction works "scientific romances."

  The Swedish work Frithjof's saga, based on the Old Norse Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna, became successful in England and Germany in 1825 and was translated twenty-two times into English and twenty times into German, reaching even modern Icelandic in 1866. Its influence, along with other Norse-inflected material, was considerable on writers including J. R. R. Tolkien, William Morris, and Poul Anderson, and on the subsequent modern fantasy genre.

  Robert Greene's Pandosto became the source for Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, itself based on the medieval romance Gamelyn, became the source for As You Like It. Shakespeare's later comedies, including The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, are sometimes called his romances outright. The genre that clerical critics of the high Middle Ages dismissed as harmful worldly distraction had, in the end, seeded an extraordinary range of what came after it.