The Birth of Epic and Romance Literature

The Birth of Epic and Romance Literature

War was not as common a topic in lyric poetry as love, but some long vernacular poems, called chansons de geste (“songs of heroic deeds”) and later termed epic poems, were all about warriors and their battles. They were written down at about the same time as love poems. Like the songs of the troubadours, these epic poems implied a code of behavior for aristocrats, in this case on the battlefield. They served as heroic models for nobles and knights, whose positions were being threatened by the newly emerging merchants in the cities on the one hand and newly powerful kings on the other. The knights’ ascendancy on the battlefield, where they unhorsed one another with lances and long swords and took prisoners rather than killing their opponents, was also beginning to wane in the face of mercenary infantrymen who wielded long hooks and knives that ripped easily through chain mail. A knightly ethos and sense of group solidarity emerged in the face of these social, political, and military changes. Even while heroic poems celebrated battles, they explored the moral issues that made war tragic, if inevitable.

Other long poems, later called romances, explored the relationships between men and women. Often inspired by the legend of King Arthur, romances reached their zenith of popularity during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. In one romance, for example, the heroic knight Lancelot, who is in love with King Arthur’s wife, Queen Guinevere, chooses humiliation over honor because of his love for the queen. When she sees him—the greatest knight in Christendom—fighting in a tournament, she tests him by asking him to do his “worst.” The poor knight is obliged to lose all his battles until she changes her mind.

REVIEW QUESTION What do the works of the troubadours and vernacular poets reveal about the nature of entertainment—its themes, its audience, its performers—in the twelfth century?

Lancelot was the perfect chivalric knight. The word chivalry derives from the French word cheval (“horse”); the fact that the knight was a horseman marked him as a warrior of the most prestigious sort. Perched high on his horse, his heavy lance couched in his right arm, the knight was both imposing and menacing. Chivalry made him gentle—except to his enemies on the battlefield. The chivalric hero was a knight constrained by a code of refinement, fair play, piety, and devotion to an ideal. Historians debate whether real knights lived up to the codes implicit in epics and romances, but there is no doubt that knights saw themselves mirrored there. They were the poets’ audience.