The first developments of Geoffrey’s Arthurian material were in French. After
Wace came Marie de France, the first known French woman poet, who lived in
England in the late 12th century and wrote a number oflais– a lai is a Breton
minstrel’s tale. Marie turns these songs into verse stories, brief and mysterious Celtic
fairytales. An English example of this genre is Sir Orfeo, a romance of Orpheus.
Marie de France should be distinguished from Marie de Champagne, daughter of
Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was for Marie de Champagne that Chrétien de Troyes wrote
the French Arthurian romances,Erec et Enide,Cligès,Yvain,Lancelot, and Perceval,
the first vernacular story of the quest for the Grail (the legendary vessel used by
Christ at the Last Supper). Chrétien was the first to turn the matière de Bretagne, the
matter of Britain, from legend into literature; his couplets have a French economy
and a light touch. Some of Chrétien and Marie was translated into English.
To go from Chrétien to English romance is to enter a simpler world. Famous
examples of this large category are King Horn (c.1225),Floris and Blancheflour (early
13th century),Havelok the Dane (c.1300),Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick.In
octosyllabic rhyming couplets, Christian knights prove themselves against the
Saracen. The most skilful and magical early romance is Sir Orfeo, found in the
Auchinleck manuscript of c.1330, which Chaucer may have known. The Greek
Orpheus and Eurydice become English. Sir Orfeo is lord in Traciens (Thracians,
Thrace), identified as Winchester; he loses Dame Heurodis to a Fairy King who
abducts her from her orchard to a Celtic underworld. After ten years grieving in the
wilderness, Orfeo follows a fairy hunt through a hillside into the underworld, where
he wins back Heurodis with his harping. He returns to Winchester disguised as a
beggar, and plays so well that the Steward asks about the harp. When told that the
harper had found it by the corpse of a man eaten by wolves, the Steward swoons.
King Orfeo knew wele bi than that
His steward was a trewe man
And loved him as he aught to do,
And stont up, and seyt thus: ‘Lo!
Yif ich were Orfeo the king, If I
Steward, herkne now this thing: hear
And hadde y-suffred ful yore long ago
In wildernisse miche sore,
And hadde y-won mi quen o-wy away
Out of the lond of fairy,
And hadde y-brought the levedi hende gracious lady
Right here to the tounes ende ...’These ifs end in recognition and reunion, and Orfeo and his queen are joyfully
restor ed to the throne.
Harpours in Bretaine after than Brittany that
Herd hou this merv aile bigan,
And made her-of a lay of gode likeing, popular
And nempned it after the king. named
That lay ‘Orfeo’ is y-hote: called
Gode is the lay, swete is the note. sweetThe romance is a lasting legacy of the Middle Ages, not only to works of fantasy
such as Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene or the Gothic novel, but also to such
marvellous but pseudo-realist works as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel
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