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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
All the numerous castles and palaces, the battles and adventures, of the courtly romances – especially of the Breton cycle – are things of fairyland: each time they appear before us as though sprung from the ground; their geographical relation to the known world, their sociological and economic foundations, remain unexplained. Even their ethical or symbolic significance can rarely be ascertained with anything approaching certainty. Has the adventure of the spring any hidden meaning? It is evidently one of those which the Knights of the Round Table are bound to undergo, yet an ethical justification for the combat with the knight of the magic spring is nowhere given.
The world of Chrétien's romances is not ‘real’ […] The landscape of primeval forests peopled only by solitary knights, and of lonely castles with more than an aura of the supernatural about them, bears no more resemblance to twelfth-century France than does the political constitution of Arthur's Court and the Kingdom of Britain to the England (or France) of Henry II. Even when real places are introduced and an echo of real contemporary events, in Cligès, we are given none of the particulars by which we could recognise the terrain of an overland journey to Constantinople or even Constantinople itself. The ‘realism’ of Chrétien, if that is the correct word for it, lies in his giving exterior form to an inner quest which is the real and evident subject of his romances.
The contrast in tone between the hero's infernal journey and his dedication of himself to the practical duties of kingship in the last section of the romance (whose 3800 lines comprise about a third of the total number) is conspicuous. In the following discussion I consider the possibility that the tone of pragmatic realism in this section (which is almost certainly a Wirntian innovation) may have contained an implied critique of Wolframian hyberbole in his vaulting but vague evocations of the Grail realm. The assimilative stance towards the non-Christian combatants displayed in Wigalois may in one sense be a working out of the Parzival/Feirefiz encounter in terms of practical ethics, but attention will be directed to the further possibility that Wirnt was anticipating something of the ecumenical ethics of Wolfram's (anti-) Crusade epic, Willehalm.
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