Yvain, Le Chevalier
au Lion
(Yvain, the Knight of the Lion)
Summary: Yvain’s Narrative
Yvain’s story opens at King Arthur’s court at Carlisle, with several of Arthur’s knights huddled before his chamber door, engaged in conversation while he sleeps. One of them, Calogrenant, begins to tell a story of an event that ends with his shame. As the story goes, Calogrenant crosses a bridge to discover a castle, where he is welcomed by the vavasour and his daughter, who show him extreme largesse. After a brief stay in the castle, Calogrenant journeys out to a clearing, where he witnesses a crowd of wild bulls fighting amongst themselves. Among them sits a hideously ugly peasant that claims to tend the creatures; this peasant sends Calogrenant off to find some adventure at a nearby spring. Once he has found the aforementioned spring, Calogrenant is attacked by a knight, summarily defeated, and shamed.
Upon hearing the tale, Yvain, one of the knights present, vows to avenge Calogrenant. Unfortunately, King Arthur emerges from his bedchambers, the story is retold, and he also vows to repeat the journey. Due to the possibility of being unable to avenge his cousin himself, Yvain secretly leaves to complete the quest on his own. When he finally meets and fights the knight that shamed his cousin, he proves to be the better fighter, and the knight flees . Yvain pursues him, only to be led into a trap from which he cannot escape without aid. Fortunately for him, a damsel named Lunete recognizes and saves him by lending him a magical ring of invisibility, permitting him both to escape notice of the castle’s citizens, and to secretly observe the lady of the castle. The knight that fled has died, and Yvain has fallen in love with his wife. Lunete again intervenes on his behalf, and convinces the lady to marry Yvain. In this way, Yvain becomes the new lord of the castle.
At this point, King Arthur finally arrives at the spring. Yvain, acting as lord of the castle, attacks the first knight, Kay, and defeats him easily. Yvain reveals his identity to Arthur, and the king consents to lodge at Yvain’s castle, where he and his retinue are well taken care of. Gawain, who arrived with Arthur, falls in love with Lunete, and pledges to always do as she asks. At the same time, he convinces Yvain to leave his wife for a time to come participate in the tournaments, a request that she grants on the condition that he return within one year.
Yvain wins great renown at the tourneys, and strengthens his friendship with Gawain. He fails to return to his wife in time, however, and she sends a messenger to him to inform him that she no longer loves him and that he is no longer welcome in her castle. Yvain goes mad at the news and disappears into the woods, where he hunts naked, eating the flesh raw, and providing meat to a local hermit in exchange for bread. He is eventually discovered by three noblewomen, who give him a magical potion created by Morgan. The potion immediately cures him of his madness; he dresses, and is helped to a town, where he is cleaned up so as to be presentable again.
Having regained his honor, he single-handedly protects the women that saved him from invaders, and then journeys through the woods until he comes upon a lion being attacked by a dragon. Yvain attacks and kills the dragon, and the lion pledges total loyalty to Yvain as repayment. The two continue through the woods again, until they come upon Lunete, locked away in a prison cell, due to be executed for arranging the marriage between Yvain and Laudine, the lady of the castle. Yvain promises to return the next day before she is burned at the stake, to save her.
He leaves, and finds lodging in a nearby baron’s castle. Here, the baron begs him to save his son from a nearby giant. Yvain agrees to help him, on the condition that he return to Lunete before she is burned. As soon as the giant arrives, Yvain kills him, then rushes back to assist the maiden. She is already tied to the stake, and the pyre lit; he saves her from death, and then he and his lion attack her accusers. He wins, but the lion is injured, and Yvain is forced to lodge at a nearby manor until the beast is healed.
In the meantime, a damsel is sued in King Arthur’s court for her right of inheritance by her sister. She is granted forty days to provide a knight who will fight for her property. She sends a maiden to locate Yvain, and he agrees to help her. Along the way to court, Yvain and the maiden enter the town of Dire Adventure to lodge for the night, but he discovers an entire town in distress. The citizens are all underpaid and overworked, under threat of torture by two demons housed by the lord of the town. Yvain, however, is treated exceedingly well by the lord, until he attempts to leave. He is told that he must defeat the two demons and wed the lord’s daughter. He refuses to wed, but with the help of his lion, defeats the demons. He frees all of the people under the reign of the demons, and continues on with the maiden to win her back her property.
Unfortunately, Gawain was the elder sister’s champion, where Yvain is the younger’s. Neither man, armored as each is, knows the other’s identity. They joust until neither can fight anymore, and both attempt to give the victory to the other. This empowers King Arthur to return to the younger damsel her property, and in the aftermath, Gawain and Yvain realize that they are friends, and reconcile with one another. At this point, Yvain has regained any honor that he previously lost on account of Gawain and the time the two men spent together. His honor restored, Yvain steals away to return to his wife. Because of the number and gravity of his deeds, and due as well to her cunning, Lunete is able to convince Laudine to reconcile with Yvain. The story ends, and the marriage between Yvain and Laudine is repaired.
Author: Chrétien de Troyes
Chrétien de Troyes was born and lived in the mid to late twelfth century in the district of Champagne, Troyes, France. Of his writings, the most well known are the romances Erec and Enide (c. 1170), Cligés (c. 1176), Lancelot , or Le Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight of the Cart ) (c. 1177-81), Yvain , or Le Chevalier au Lion (The Knight With the Lion ) (c. 1177-81), and the unfinished Perceval , or Le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail). Chrétien also dabbled with adaptations of Ovidian poems, and several songs are currently attributed to him.
Though Chrétien’s romances incorporate preexisting literary figures, his romances pay “homage not to the post-Roman Celts of Britain but to the heroes of medieval French chivalry” (Davies 218). In this way, Chrétien manages to adapt the old characters into a new genre of literature: the courtly romance. Several characters from Brittonic folklore remain in his romances, but in barely recognizable form. Cei/Kay has become a rash, bumbling brute; Wawain/Gawain has become the very paradigm of courtliness, and Arthur himself has delegated all of his work to his vassals. It is clear that Chrétien’s intention with the romances is to solidify and promote French courtly culture. It is unsurprising, then, to learn that his patroness was Marie de Champagne, daughter of King Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and that Chrétien himself was active within the French royal courts.
History: What’s what in England and France
Regardless of Chrétien’s ties and loyalty to French royalty, it is thought that he draws upon Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon to inform his romances, and there is even speculation that he draws from a longstanding Celtic oral tradition. Further, though he writes of and for French royalty, he doesn’t write of the Matter of France or Rome. Instead, by adapting the Arthurian characters, he concerns himself with the Matter of Britain, an interesting, though odd literary choice for a French poet.
Twelfth century France and England were bound tightly together due not just to the Norman influence in England, but also because of the second crusade. The French King Louis VII, father of Chrétien’s patroness Marie de Champagne, had “traveled to the Holy Land in the company of his Queen, Aliénor d’Aquitaine [Eleanor of Aquitaine], a woman whose destiny would be closely linked to England” (Davies 309). In the not-distant future, England and Scotland became engaged in a twenty-year war, Eleanor and Louis had a very public and angry divorce, and she eventually married the French-born Henry II, who became the English king.
Because of this marriage, Henry II became more powerful than even Louis VII, and consequently, the newly instituted Angevin Empire, though technically controlled by French royals, was a larger political entity than the Capetian Dynasty in France. As Chrétien was paid to write by Eleanor’s daughter by Louis VII, Marie de Champagne, it is rather unsurprising that he has a noted interest in the Matter of England; it is equally unsurprising that he would impose French chivalry onto its folklore.
Works Cited or Consulted
Alcock, Leslie. Arthur’s Britain New York: Penguin, 2001. Alcock’s text tries to make a solid case for Arthur as a mortal human, but in the meantime provides an excellent background on pre- and post-Anglo-Saxon Britain
Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Trans. William W. Kibler. New York: Penguin, 1991. One of two translations that I used to analyze the text.
Davies, Norman. The Isles: A History. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999. This was an extremely useful history of Britain that covers an immense span of time from BC 600 to the present time. Especially handy to this paper is the detailed political history contained within it.
Kibler, William W. “Chrétien de Troyes: Lancelot, or The Knight of the Cart.” The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Ed. Wilhelm, James G. New York: Garland, 1994. Kibler’s short introduction to Chrétien takes a strangely worshipful stance on Chrétien’s work that utterly ignores the negative cultural and political ramifications that the romances may have had on the British, non-Anglo-Norman culture.
Webliography
Chrétien de Troyes. Yvain or, The Knight with the Lion. Trans. W.W. Comfort. ca.1177-81. Oct. 2005. <http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Yvain/> This site offers the full online text of Yvain, free of charge.
Chrétien de Troyes. 16 Oct 2005. Wikipedia. 26 Oct 2005. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chr%C3%A9tien_de_Troyes> Wikipedia entry on Chrétien.
Uitti, Karl D. Background Information on Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la Charrette : Chrétien de Troyes and some Poetic Issues. 22 Jan. 1997. 26 Oct. 2005. <http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/romance.html> Excellent biographical information on Chrétien.
Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. 24 Oct 2005. Wikipedia. 26 Oct 2005.<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvain%2C_the_Knight_of_the_Lion>
Wikipedia entry on Yvain.
Created by Angela Armitage, 2005