My lord Yvain was delighted
To hear such news; he'd never 6690
Expected to hear it. He couldn't
Stop thanking Lunette
For having accomplished it. He kissed
Her eyes, and then her face,
And said: “Oh, my sweet friend! 6695
How could I ever repay you,
What could I possibly do?
There'll never be time enough
To honor and serve you as I'd like.”
“My lord!” she said. “It’s not 6700
Important. Don't give it a thought!
You'll have time enough and to spare
For helping me—and others.
If I’ve paid this debt, which I owed you,
Then you owe me no more 6705
Acknowledgment than anyone who borrows
Anything and later returns it.
Nor do I think, still,
That I've truly repaid you what I owe.”
“You have, as I stand in God’s sight, 6710
Five hundred thousand times over.
And now, if you're ready, let us go.
But what have you told her? Does she know
My name?” “No, by my faith!
The only name she knows 6715
For you is the Knight of the Lion.”
And so they chatted as they rode
Along, the lion behind them,
Until they came to the castle.
And they spoke not a word to anyone, 6720
Neither to a man or a woman,
Until they stood in the lady’s
Presence. And the lady couldn't
Have been happier, hearing the news
That the girl was coming and bringing 6725
With her both the lion
And his knight. She longed to see him
Again, and come to know him.
And my lord Yvain, dressed
And all, fell at her feet,
And Lunette, standing next to him,
Exclaimed: “My lady, raise him,
And use your best wisdom and all
Your power to bring him peace 6735
And a pardon, as no one else
In the world could possibly do!”
So the lady asked him to stand,
And said: “Anything I can do
I will do! If I possibly can 6740
I wish to procure him what he asks for.”
“My lady! I shouldn't say it,”
Said Lunette, “if it weren't true.
But it’s even more possible, and within
Your power, than I've told you. But now 6745
I'll tell you everything, and you'll see
How truly I spoke. You've never
Had so good and loyal
A friend as this man here.
God Himself, who wishes 6750
For peace and love between you,
Love and peace unending,
Led me to find him, today.
And to prove how rightly I speak
All I need to say is: 6755
My lady! Forget your anger!
His only mistress is you.
This is Yvain, your husband.”
The lady trembled at these words,
And said: “May God save me! 6760
You've hooked me beautifully, haven't you?
You'll make me love him in spite
Of myself, though he neither loves
Nor respects me. A fine bit of business!
You've served me remarkably well! 6765
I'd rather spend my life
Buffeted by storms and wind!
And if breaking an oath weren't low
And villainous and ugly, I'd never
In all this world come to terms 6770
It would have burned inside me,
Like a hidden fire smouldering
Under cinders—but I have to make peace,
So I wish to speak of it no more, 6775
Nor ever mention it again.”
And Yvain heard, and understood
That things were going well,
That he'd have his peace and forgiveness,
So he said: “Lady! We ought 6780
To show pity to sinners. I've had
To suffer for my folly, and I ought
To have suffered, it was only right.
It was folly that kept me away;
I was guilty, you were right to punish me. 6785
It’s taken courage to come
And stand before you. I've risked it.
But now, if you'll take me back,
I shall never injure you again.”
“Surely,” she said, “I'll consent. 6790
If I didn't do everything in my power
To bring peace between us, I'd be guilty
Of perjury. And now, if you wish it,
I grant you your request.”
“Lady!” he exclaimed. “A thousand 6795
Thanks! The Holy Spirit
And even God Himself
Couldn't make me happier than that!”
And now Yvain had his peace,
And surely, believe me, nothing 6800
Had ever pleased him better,
However miserable he had been.
It had all come right in the end.
His lady loved him again,
And cherished him, and he cherished her. 6805
He'd forgotten all his worries,
Wiped away by the joy
He felt with his dear sweet love.
And Lunette was vastly relieved:
Nothing she'd wanted was denied her, 6810
Now that she'd fashioned an unbreakable
Yvain and his one true love.
So ends The Knight of the Lion,
A story told by Chrétien, 6815
For nothing more’s been heard of it,
And no one will ever tell more—
Unless he feels like lying.
Afterword
Joseph J. Duggan
Chrétien de Troyes wrote in the second half of the twelfth century. What little we know about him comes from the prologue to his romance Cligés, where he identifies himself as the author of six other works: Erec and Enid; a tale about King Mark and Isolt the Blonde; adaptations into Old French of Ovid’s Art of Love and Remedies of Love; two stories from that same author’s Metamorphoses—“Philomène,” probably preserved as part of the thirteenth-century Ovide moralisé, and the lost “Bite on the Shoulder,” perhaps a version of the story of Pelops.
That Chrétien was schooled in Latin is certain, and he may well have been a clerk in at least minor orders. The other romances ascribed to him with assurance, namely Yvain, Lancelot (The Knight of the Cart), and Perceval (The Tale of the Grail), are assumed to have been written after Cligés. Both Lancelot and Perceval are unfinished, the first because for some reason Chrétien gave it over to another writer, Gode-froy of Lagny, to complete, and the second probably because he died before bringing it to a conclusion. Erec and Enid is thought to have been written around 1170 and Perceval in the decade before 1191, the year in which Phillip of Flanders, the poem’s patron, died. Most scholars also take that year to mark the latest possible date of Chrétien’s poetic activity. Yvain was probably composed around 1177, either shortly after or shortly before Lancelot. Another romance by a writer named Chrétien Guillaume d'Angleterre, is sometimes assigned to Chrétien de Troyes, but the attribution is dubious. Two of Chrétien de Troyes' love poems have, however, survived.
The town of Troyes, located southeast of Paris, was in the Middle Ages the residence of the count and countess of Champagne and the site of a very important fair to which merchants from all over Europe came annually to sell their wares. Working in such a cosmopolitan center, at a court frequented by Andrew the Chaplain (author of that astonishing treati
se known as “The Art of Courtly Love”), the poet Conon of Béthune, the romancer Gautier of Arras, the chronicler Villehardouin, the epic poet Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube, and many other authors, must have exposed Chrétien to a multitude of influences. Marie, countess of Champagne, under whose guidance and patronage he wrote Lancelot, was the daughter of King Louis VII of France and Eleanor of Aquitaine. After her divorce from Louis, Eleanor had married the young Henry Plantagenet, who shortly thereafter succeeded to the throne of England as Henry II. Although we are particularly ill-informed about the relationship between Marie and her mother, this link with the British Isles may ultimately be responsible for the Celtic background of Chrétien’s romances.
Yvain is such an entertaining story that it is easy to overlook its moral tenor. From the opening lines, Chrétien invokes the Arthurian milieu as an exemplary world capable of teaching values to his contemporaries, and he contrasts the way people loved in his own period with the ways in which love flourished in King Arthur’s day. For him the “modern” age does not come off well in the comparison. Always looking for a way to justify his own pursuits as a writer—a commonplace among medieval authors—he asserts that it is better to speak of those endowed with true courtly virtues, even if they be dead, than to waste one’s time on uncouth contemporaries. The emphasis on characters as models of conduct leads one to understand that the story of Yvain’s adventures has more than mere entertainment value. For
Words can come to the ear
Like blowing wind, and neither
Stop nor remain, just passing
By, like fleeting time,
If hearts and minds aren't awake,
Aren't ready and willing to receive them.
[11. 157-62]
In fact, although the hero manages to win out in the end over the hostility of Sir Kay, the prowess of Gawain, his own wife’s quite justifiable anger, and various preternatural forces, his demeanor in the early sections of the romance is by no means unblemished. Indeed, beginning with his furtive departure from Arthur’s court, his behavior is initially quite problematic.
Yvain’s purpose in seeking out the fountain that had been the occasion of Calgrenant’s shame is praiseworthy in itself, since he wants to avenge his cousin. But to call the latter a fool and then set off against Kay’s advice, without taking leave of the king or telling any of his companions where he is going—without any public revelation of his actions, in fact—is conduct that hardly qualifies as courtly. That he does not want to request from King Arthur the right to challenge the knight of the fountain, for fear of losing the opportunity to Kay or Gawain, does not justify his stealing off, especially in a society in which openness of conduct was a guarantee of its probity. Defending himself against the knight of the fountain is a legitimate act, but he only pursues the wounded Esclados to his castle in order to procure evidence that will satisfy Calgrenant and Kay, an impetuous decision that leads to his confinement between the sliding blade and the gate, in an enclosure that Chrétien compares tellingly to
a trap
Set for a rat when he comes
Hunting what was never his.
[11. 913-15]
That the charming and clever Lunette saves the hero is, on the other hand, a gesture in repayment of his courtesy on a previous occasion when he alone had helped her at court. This long first section of the romance takes Yvain from King Arthur’s entourage to Laudine’s castle, where the royal court eventually comes to him. It also serves to familiarize the reader with Yvain’s courage, physical abilities, and temperament. This prepares us for the testing of his moral character in the conflict between loyalty to Laudine and the allurements of knightly fame, as Gawain entices him to depart on a prolonged series of tournaments. The two courtly heroes are so successful that they attract more and better knights than Arthur himself has done, inducing the king to come to their court rather than to await their attendance at his. Yvain’s forgetfulness and haughtiness at this stage fall into the same category as his lack of courtesy in slipping away from court: it is the conduct not of a bad character but of a self-indulgent one, lacking at times in the concern for the feelings of others that lies at the root of courtliness.
Yvain begins to redeem himself only in the second part of the tale, after the terrible ordeal in which he loses his senses, tears off his clothes, and lives as a wild man in the forest— the hermit his only contact with civilization. In order fully to appreciate the significance of this crisis, one has to remember that in the Middle Ages the deep woods were not an inviting place of repose from the hubbub of town life. Rather, they were considered primarily as threatening, the locus of encounter with savage beasts and with creatures that we nowadays consider fantastic and legendary but which for medieval society were very real. To minds accustomed to thinking of both nature and human actions as representative of some hidden and higher reality, the stripping of the accouterments of ordinary social life from Yvain must have symbolized a radical transformation—not just physical and, as we would say today, psychological, but spiritual and moral—an external manifestation of his shame. When those trappings are restored to him by the lady of Noroison’s servant, who applies to his body perhaps a little too eagerly the unguent whose ultimate source is Morgan le Fay, he is quite meaningfully a new man, no longer the Yvain of old whose reputation was destroyed by his public shame, but as it were a man without renown, with a new name to make for himself.
That name presents itself to him in the guise of the lion, a sensitive beast human enough in its capabilities to attempt suicide when it thinks its master is dead. The lion’s unalloyed fidelity acts as an antidote to the selfish lack of concern for others whose consequences drove Yvain to madness. The beast’s moral characteristics immediately begin to rub off on his master. With each of the major adventures in the second half of the romance—the struggle against Count Alier, the defense of Lunette against her three accusers, the defeat of Harpin of the Mountain, the combat with the “sons of the devil” in the Castle of Infinite Misfortune—Yvain builds another reputation, but always under the new name of “Knight of the Lion.” When he finally rejoins Arthur’s court he is for the king’s entourage another person entirely, only to be identified as Yvain when he reveals himself to Gawain, but at that point already marked as one of the greatest of knights because he has proven himself to be Gawain’s equal in combat. Yvain starts, then, from relative mediocrity as an untested and unpolished knight, rises in stature as the successful suitor of a rich widow, then fails through his own un-courtly behavior. After performing a series of exploits—alone, then in the company of the lion—he finally triumphs, fighting Gawain to a draw without the lion’s help amid the general admiration of Arthur’s courtiers, the ultimate judges of chivalric worth. It is noteworthy that the deeds he performs after the balm has taken effect are progressively more disinterested. He first helps the lady of Noroison, to whom he is indebted for his recovery, then the relatives of his close friend Gawain, and finally Lunette, who is only in her predicament because of his own failure to return to Laudine at the appointed time. But in the Castle of Infinite Misfortune he liberates captives to whom he owes nothing, and his defense of the younger daughter of the lord of Blackthorn is undertaken “for charity and noble generosity,” in spite of the fact that he does not know the woman and she does not know him (11. 5987-90).
But what about Laudine of Landuc? This much-tried lady loses two husbands in the course of the romance, although one eventually comes back to her under what might not seem to be the most desirable of circumstances. The gradual reversal of her initial feelings for Yvain is a miniature masterpiece of storytelling. The art of weaving a good tale had never died out during the hiatus between the decline of Roman civilization and the revival of learning that began to gather force in the twelfth century. But psychological analysis was practically unknown in narratives of the early Middle Ages. In the earliest extant romances, written in France in the mid-twelfth century, authors had to grapple with the problem of re
presenting the workings of the human personality, a process of exploration that ran parallel to renewed interest in the psyche. Chrétien, who as far as we know was the first poet to write romances about King Arthur, exploited the innovations of his predecessors in depicting the complexities of Laudine’s sentiments. The internal dialogue in which she debates whether to admit that Yvain might have had some justification in mortally wounding Esclados shows her taking the part of both accuser and defendant and coming to the conclusion she had wished to reach in any case,
And all the time igniting
Herself, like smoking wood,
Bursting into flame when it’s stirred,
Smouldering if no one blows it
Awake.
[11. 1777-81]
The transformation is orchestrated by the resourceful Lunette, who pays for her daring but is still there at the end, restored to favor and up to her old deceptions. Just as Lunette maneuvered her mistress into a position in which she would be receptive to Yvain’s attentions, despite the fact that he had given her husband his death blow, so here she tricks Laudine into saying that she will procure for the “Knight of the Lion,” whom Laudine does not recognize as her offending husband, all that he asks for.
But in her mythic past Chrétien’s courtly character Laudine, lady of the fountain and bestower of the magic ring of invulnerability, was in all likelihood no simple mortal. There is virtually universal agreement that somewhere in the tradition from which Chrétien took many of the elements of his tale, Laudine was a fairy and her kingdom an Otherworld realm. One of the ways that travelers enter the Otherworld in folklore and romance is through water, and the fountain, its wonders, and the test to which they give rise are no doubt the frontier between two existences—a frontier that Calgrenant failed to merit crossing. Lunette too, with her ring of invisibility, was once a helper-fairy, although in Chrétien’s tale her character, like that of Laudine, is much more complex.
Yvain, whose role corresponds to that of the mortal held captive by the fairy so that he might defend her kingdom against intruders, has rich antecedents in the history of northern Britain and in the traditional literature, folklore, and mythology of the Celtic realms. In the medieval Welsh triads, a storehouse of traditional lore, “one of the three fair princes of the Isle of Britain” is Owein,1 a name for which the French equivalent is “Yvain.” This Owein, who appears as a character in native Welsh poetry and narrative prose, notably in The Dream of Rhonabwy, where he is accompanied by a flock of ravens who fight Arthur’s men, was in fact a historical king of the late sixth century; he was the son of Urien of Rheged, an ancient British kingdom situated in what is now northwest England and southwest Scotland. While Chrétien’s other works contain the names of numerous figures also found in Celtic sources, Yvain is one of the few to have come over into continental romance still associated with his father.2