[701] Unless indeed Oberon, the fairy king, be a romantic form of the Alberich of the Nibelungen (Gaston Paris).
[702] See Gaston Paris, Lit. française, etc., chaps. iii. and v.; and Émile Littré in vol. 22 of the Histoire littéraire de la France. For examples of these romans, see Langlois, La Société française au XIIIe siècle d’après dix romans d’aventure (2nd ed., Paris, 1904).
[703] Chrétien, Cligés, line 201 sqq.
[704] The Old French from vol. ii. of P. Paris, Romans de la Table Ronde, p. 96. One sees that the coronation is a larger knighting, and kingship a larger knighthood.
[705] Romans de la Table Ronde, iii. 96. This scene closely parallels that between Bernier and Raoul de Cambrai, instanced above.
[706] See the first part of vol. iii. of Romans de la Table Ronde, especially pp. 113-117.
[707] It would be easy to go on drawing illustrations of the actual and imaginative elements in chivalry, until this chapter should grow into an encyclopedia. They could so easily be taken from many kinds of mediaeval literature in all the mediaeval tongues. The French has barely been touched upon. It affords an exhaustless store. Then in the German we might draw upon the courtly epics, Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan or the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach; or on the Nibelungenlied, wherein Siegfried is a very knight. Or we might draw upon the knightly precepts (the Ritterlehre) of the Winsbeke and the Winsbekin (printed in Hildebrand’s Didaktik aus der Zeit der Kreuzzüge, Deutsche Nat. Litt.). And we might delve in the great store of Latin Chronicles which relate the mediaeval history of German kings and nobles. In Spanish, there would be the Cid, and how much more besides. In Italian we should have latter-day romantic chivalry; Pulci’s Rotta di Roncisvalle; Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato; Ariosto’s Orlando furioso; still later, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, which takes us well out of the Middle Ages. And in English there is much Arthurian romance; there is Chevy Chace; and we may come down through Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, to the sunset beauty of Spenser’s Fairie Queen. This glorious poem should serve to fix in our minds the principle that chivalry, knighthood, was not merely a material fact, a ceremony and an institution; but that it also was that ultra-reality, a spirit. And this spirit’s ideal creations—the ideal creations of the many phases of this spirit—accorded with actual deeds which may be read of in the old Chronicles. For final exemplification of the actual and the ideally real in chivalry, the reader may look within himself, and observe the inextricable mingling of the imaginative and the real. He will recognize that what at one time seems part of his imagination, at another will prove itself the veriest reality of his life. Even such wavering verity of spirit was chivalry.
[708] See Gaston Paris in Journal des savants, 1892, pp. 161-163. Of course the English reader cannot but think of the brief secret marriage between Romeo and Juliet.
[709] Marriage or no marriage depends on the plot; but occasionally a certain respect for marriage is shown, as in the Eliduc of Marie de France, and of course far more strongly in Wolfram’s Parzival. In Chrétien’s Ivain the hero marries early in the story; and thereafter his wife acts towards him with the haughty caprice of an amie; Ivain, at her displeasure, goes mad, like an ami. The romans d’aventure afford other instances of this courtly love, sometimes illicit, sometimes looking to marriage. See Langlois, La Société française au XIIIe siècle d’après dix romans d’aventure.
[710] On Provençal poetry see Diez, Poesie der Troubadours (2nd ed. by Bartsch, Leipzig, 1883); id., Leben und Werke der Troubadours; Justin H. Smith, The Troubadours at Home (New York and London, 1899); Ida Farnell, Lives of the Troubadours (London).