Chivalric romance
As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of high medieval and early modern Europe.
Romances reworked legends, fairy tales, and history to suit the readers' and hearers' tastes, but by c. 1600 they were out of fashion, and Miguel de Cervantes famously burlesqued them in his novel Don Quixote.
These were distinguished from earlier epics by heavy use of marvelous events, the elements of love, and the frequent use of a web of interwoven stories, rather than a simple plot unfolding about a main character.
[4] The romantic form pursued the wish-fulfillment dream where the heroes and heroines were considered representations of the ideals of the age while the villains embodied the threat to their ascendancy.
[7] The three "matters" were first described in the 12th century by French poet Jean Bodel, whose epic Chanson des Saisnes [fr] ("Song of the Saxons") contains the lines:
As time progressed, a new persecutor appeared: a courtier who was rejected by the woman or whose ambition requires her removal, and who accuses her of adultery or high treason, motifs not duplicated in fairy tales.
When he loses this love because he does not comply with her conditions, Gherardino reconquers his lady after a series of labours, including the prison where he is rescued by another woman and a tournament that he wins.
[23] The romance form is distinguished from the earlier epics of the Middle Ages by the changes of the 12th century, which introduced courtly and chivalrous themes into the works.
[29] Hereward the Wake's early life appeared in chronicles as the embellished, romantic adventures of an exile, complete with rescuing princesses and wrestling with bears.
[38] Similarly, Iberian romances of the 14th century praised monogamy and marriage in such tales as Tirant lo Blanc and Amadís de Gaula.
[39] Many medieval romances recount the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ability, who, abiding chivalry's strict codes of honor and demeanor, goes on a quest, and fights and defeats monsters and giants, thereby winning favor with a lady.
[43] Originally, this literature was written in Old French (including Anglo-Norman) and Old Occitan, later, in Old Spanish, Middle English and Middle High German – amongst the important Spanish texts was Book of the Knight Zifar; notable later English works being King Horn (a translation of the Anglo-Norman (AN) Romance of Horn of Mestre Thomas), and Havelok the Dane (a translation of the anonymous AN Lai d'Haveloc); around the same time Gottfried von Strassburg's version of the Tristan of Thomas of Britain (a different Thomas to the author of 'Horn') and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival translated classic French romance narrative into the German tongue.
These were collated in the vast, polymorphous manuscript witnesses comprising what is now known as the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, with the romance of La Mort le Roi Artu c. 1230, perhaps its final installment.
These texts, together with a wide range of further Arthurian material, such as that found in the anonymous English Brut Chronicle, comprised the bases of Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.
The genre began in thirteenth-century Norway with translations of French chansons de geste; it soon expanded to similar indigenous creations.
The early fourteenth century saw the emergence of Scandinavian verse romance in Sweden under the patronage of Queen Euphemia of Rügen, who commissioned the Eufemiavisorna.
Another trend of the high Middle Ages was the allegorical romance, inspired by the wildly popular Roman de la Rose.
Exemplary work, such as the English Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1408 – c. 1471), the Valencian Tirant lo Blanch, and the Castilian or Portuguese Amadís de Gaula (1508), spawned many imitators, and the genre was popularly well-received, producing such masterpiece of Renaissance poetry as Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and other 16th-century literary works in the romance genre.
(Don Quixote [1605, 1615], by Miguel de Cervantes [1547–1616], is a satirical story of an elderly country gentleman, living in La Mancha province, who is so obsessed by chivalric romances that he seeks to emulate their various heroes.)
[50] The Acritic songs (dealing with Digenis Acritas and his fellow frontiersmen) resemble much the chanson de geste, though they developed simultaneously but separately.
These songs dealt with the hardships and adventures of the border guards of the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) – including their love affairs – and where a predominantly oral tradition which survived in the Balkans and Anatolia until modern times.
