SOURCE: Sturm-Maddox, Sara. “‘Tenir sa terre en pais’: Social Order in the Brut and the Conte del Graal.” Studies in Philology LXXXI, no. 1 (winter 1984): 28-41.

[In the following essay, Sturm-Maddox argues that Chretien de Troyes' reading of Wace's Brut influenced his elevation of social concerns over individual chivalric values in his version of the grail story.]

In the wake of recent demonstrations that the traditional criteria of veracity versus fictionality are not universally pertinent to the classification of medieval narrative,¹ the question of generic differentiation acquires new prominence. The conventional distinction, of course, has its twelfth-century antecedent in Jehan Bodel's often-cited enumeration of three matières:

N'en sont que trois materes à nul home entendant:
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la Grant;
Ne de ces trois materes n'i à nule samblant.
Li conte de Bretaigne s'il sont vain et plaisant
Et cil de Romme sage et de sens aprendant,
Cil de France sont voir chascun jour aparant.(2)

Such designations, however, are themselves a matter of reception—“à nul home entendant”—and their relevance assumes a complicity between writer and public in terms of what constitutes “historicity” in its relation to “truth.” For twelfth-century narrative, a particularly apt case in point is afforded by the relation between the Brut of Wace, the text generally assumed as intermediary between the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth and the French romances, and the poems of the acknowledged originator of courtly romance, Chrétien de Troyes. In the transition from what has long been considered “historical writing” to romance, Wace has perhaps more to do with literary history than with history in its modern acceptation, as one of his readers has observed;³ nonetheless, his narrative not only presents itself as a translation of Geoffrey's Historia, but shares the announced historical project of its Latin model.

At the end of his study of The Vision of History in Early Britain, Robert Hanning briefly describes what he terms the metamorphosis of that vision, a reorientation occurring as the “kind of historical literature” written by Geoffrey of Monmouth gave way to the new narrative genre that we now call romance. The works of this new genre may be immediately recognized as distinct from their literary and historical antecedents because they are both vernacular in language and poetic in form—criteria satisfied, of course, by Wace's Brut. But they are also to be distinguished, on the level of content, in the relation of protagonist to society: these new poems “presented and examined personal destiny in a deliberately ahistorical context.” This context, Hanning concludes, is that best suited to the representation of a new hero, the hero as individual: a hero whose personal destiny is not conditioned or directed either by lineage or by a vast national cause.⁴

It is in fact to Chrétien that Hanning directs our attention to illustrate his definition of the shift from historical literature to romance. “At no point in a romance of Chrétien de Troyes,” he writes, “can we speak of an historical level.” This absence, he continues, is not only deliberate but ironic, because the social context of Chrétien's heroes is frequently the court of a King Arthur borrowed from Geoffrey of Monmouth, but “from whom all British historical associations have been carefully pruned.”⁵ There has been an unusual degree of critical consensus concerning this ahistorical nature of the romance monarch. Jauss, intent to distinguish the roman courtois from the chanson de geste, notes that in Chrétien's poems almost no trace remains of Arthur's epic past;⁶ Frappier remarks that “un hiatus énorme” separates the Arthurian legend as related by Geoffrey and by Wace from “les fictions utilisés par un Chrétien de Troyes.”⁷ And certainly these “fictions,” these Arthurian adventures related by Chrétien, appear to be of the type whose “historicity” Wace himself was most inclined to question. Wace's attitude is avowedly ambiguous about the widely circulated stories of the period following Arthur's pacification of his inherited realm: so many stories of marvels and adventures have circulated, he tells us,

Que a fables sont atornees:
Ne tot mançonge ne tot voir,
Ne tot folor ne tot savoir.
Tant ont li contëor conté
Et li fablëor tant fablé
Por lor contes anbeleter,
Que tot ont fet fable sanbler.(8)

This scepticism does not confirm, of course, that Wace considered these deeds to be merely fabulous; rather that their proportion of truth is now impossible to determine. Would Chrétien's poems, then, necessarily have been perceived, like those “contes de Bretagne” cited by Jehan Bodel, to be “vain et plaisant,”⁹ while Wace's Brut was received as “history?” There are indications that for the twelfth-century audience the distinction between what we now term histoire and roman, types of vernacular narrative that shared the same octosyllabic form, may have been rather less evident than that drawn by Bodel between the matière de France and the matière de Bretagne—between which, according to his categories, “n'i à nule samblant.” Consider the case of the thirteenth-century scribe who prepared a Picard manuscript of the Brut. At the point where Wace, unable to verify, declines to relate the chivalric adventures that proliferated during the twelve years of peace in Arthur's reign, this scribe fills Wace's deliberate lacuna with the poems of Chrétien de Troyes, and reassures his own public that “ce que Crestiens tesmoigne / Porrez ci oïr sans alogne.”¹⁰ For this scribe at least, Wace's Brut and Chrétien's romances appear to share the same status.¹¹

Whatever the historical pedigree of Chrétien's Arthur, within the narratives themselves the function of this ruler appears to have little to do with history: this Arthur, observes Zumthor, “est moins un agent dans le récit qu'une sorte d'indice d'historicité. … Il fixe un temps et un lieu … Il prouve que cela fut.”¹² In most of Chrétien's poems this historicity is very narrowly defined: with the important exception of Cligès, in which the prominence of a variety of “historical” elements is utilized to very different ends,¹³ the Arthurian present in the poems preceding the Conte del Graal is a perpetual present, idealized in its courtly ritual, extended only infrequently and ritually in the observance of a long-established coutume. The reader's recognition of Arthur's function in the text as an indice d'historicité is not provoked by textual allusion; it is due simply to an extra-textual condition, to familiarity with the widely circulated accounts of the Arthurian era promulgated by Geoffrey of Monmouth and by his successors.

A different configuration confronts us, however, when we turn to the Conte del Graal. In this final, unfinished poem, for which Chrétien, like Wace, invokes the authority of a written source, details of both lineage and geography locate the action of the poem with regard to the historical tradition as elaborated by Geoffrey and by Wace. Early in the poem, Perceval's mother identifies Uterpandragon “qui rois fu / Et peres le bon roi Artu”;¹⁴ at La Roche de Chamguin, Gauvain will find his grandmother (Arthur's mother, Uther's wife Ygerne) and his mother (Arthur's sister Anna, wife of King Lot). And the Arthurian canvas that serves as background for the parallel adventures of the two heroes in this poem is of particular interest in relation to the chronicled efforts of both Uther and Arthur to pacify the northern regions of the kingdom. Perceval, we know, is galois, raised in the Waste Forest, protected from the sphere of Arthurian influence. But his parents had fled to the Waste Forest from the Isles de la Mer, very probably, as it has long been suggested, the Insulae Oceani or Hebrides, where both were members of distinguished families. Gauvain, to reach his final adventure in the extant text, must cross the boundaries of Galvoie, and Galvoie or Galloway, in the extreme south of Scotland, is the ancient Loenois assigned by Uther to his son-in-law King Lot in Geoffrey and in Wace. William of Malmesbury had already made of Gauvain the exiled prince of this region; in Chrétien's romance, it is here that Gauvain finds the remnants of his dispersed family.¹⁵

Chrétien's familiarity with the detail of Wace's account is confirmed by numerous instances of textual recall. For the nature of the poet's indebtedness to his source, however, we must turn to the detail of his own narrative. An implicit contrast imposes itself as point of departure: Chrétien's evocation of an “Arthurian past” in his final romance refers us not to the glorious adventures of Arthur's later reign, that high age of fabled chivalric exploits noted but not described by Wace, but rather to the period immediately preceding and following the death of King Uther. This emphasis has been a source of puzzlement to readers: Margaret Pelan, for example, remarks that “on se demande finalement pourquoi au fond Chrétien a fait cette allusion aux événements historiques du règne d'Uther qui ont l'air d'être un pur placage.”¹⁶

Let us examine more closely, then, the manner in which Uther, and with him a particular period of the Arthurian past, is introduced into Chrétien's narrative. Perceval's mother, the Widowed Lady of the Waste Forest, evokes an apparent Golden Age of chivalric society: an age of peace, when good knights found their recompense in land and in renown.¹⁷ That age ended abruptly with Uther's death. Tragic in its personal detail, the widow's account of the events that followed also describes widespread social, political, and economic disorder:

Apovri et deshireté
Et escillié furent a tort
Li gentil home aprés la mort
Uterpandragon qui rois fu,
Et peres le bon roi Artu.
Les terres furent escillies
Et les povres gens avillies,
Si s'en fuï qui fuïr pot.

(442-9)¹⁸

We recall that it was in the north, according to the legendary history, that Uther at last succeeded in establishing peace following his long and arduous campaign against the Saxons. Let us follow Wace, who is following Geoffrey:

La terre a tote avironee
Tant com ele est et longue et lee;
La gent, qui estoit sanz justise,
A tote atrete a son servise.
Par tot le regne tel pes mist
Onques ainz rois si grant n'i fist.

(5-10)

Wace insists on the peaceful aspect of this reign, that after the birth of Uther's children Arthur and Anna the king “regna bien longuemant / Sains et saus et peisiblemant” (283-4). Is this not the period in which the father of Perceval, the best knight of all the Isles de Mer, enjoyed renown and prosperity? Let us continue to follow Wace. The powerful king Uther fell ill, and his ancient enemies profited from his illness to fall upon Scotland; that region, entrusted to King Lot, husband of Uther's daughter Anna, was overrun by the enemy; Wace tells us that the land was ravaged and burned, “ars et gasté” (306). Before succumbing to treachery and poison, Uther engages in a final heroic confrontation in which he defeats the invaders. Upon his death, however, his successor Arthur is immediately obliged to defend the kingdom on this same northern frontier. Is this the period of troubles that resulted both in the flight of Perceval's father and in the retreat of the aged queens to La Roche de Chamguin?

In this light, the evocation of the end of Uther's reign and the localization of the action of the Conte del Graal in the northern regions of the kingdom is far from a “pur placage”; nor does the evocation of historical and geographical names function to create an “atmosphère galloise” necessary to the humor of Perceval's story, as Pelan again proposes.¹⁹ Instead, it conditions our reception of the conflict that characterizes the Arthurian court in this poem. In Chrétien's earlier romances, reunions of the Arthurian court are animated and often festive assemblies; when Perceval arrives at court, however, seeking armor from “li roi qui fait les chevaliers,” he finds the king silent and pensive at table, surrounded by a number of knights, many of them wounded. Ambiguous indices, but already explained in part by the report of the charbonnier who had indicated to Perceval the route to Cardoeil:

Li rois Artus et toute s'ost
S'est au roi Rion combatus;
Li rois des illes fu vencus,
Et de c'est li rois Artus liez.

(850-3)

In no other of Chrétien's romances, again with the exception of Cligès, are the knights convoked for serious military activity. Furthermore, prior to Perceval's arrival, the Red Knight has penetrated into the court, abused the king, and carried away the royal coupe d'or after spilling its contents over the queen. The serious nature of the Red Knight's defiance already pronounced to Perceval is quite explicit:

Et tant diras al mauvais roi,
Que s'il ne velt tenir de moi
Sa terre, que il le me rende,
Ou il envoit qui la desfende
Vers moi qui di que ele est moie.

(889-93)

While king and knights sit at table, the Red Knight waits still for a reply to his challenge, and Arthur excuses his silence to the new arrival in terms of the gravity of this menace:

D'ire respondre ne vos puec,
Que li pire anemis que j'aie,
Qui plus me het et plus m'esmaie,
M'a chi ma terre contredite.

(944-7)

This depiction is as unlike that of Chrétien's earlier poems as it is like that of Wace's Brut, where hatred is frequently translated into open challenge and into attempts at vengeance. That Chrétien directly recalls Wace in this regard appears confirmed by the fact that the king Rion, whom Arthur has just defeated upon Perceval's initial venture into the court, derives his name from the giant Rithon of Geoffrey and of Wace, whom Arthur was obliged to combat shortly after Uther's death.²⁰ In fact the depiction of vast political conflicts in terms of the antagonism of individuals is characteristic of Wace's account of this period. We recall the vengeful Octa, only surviving son of the Saxon leader Hengist slain in Uther's reconquest of the north, whose opposition to King Lot was particularly fierce and unyielding:

Octa les Bretons guerrea,
Molt ot grant gent, molt s'orguilla.
Tant por la foibleté del roi,
Tant por vangier son pere et soi,
Bretaigne mist an grant esfroi
N'i volt doner trives ne foi.

(317-22)

Equally implacable, and with a more explicit motive of vengeance, is Guiromelant, who challenges Lot's son Gauvain and whose mortal hatred extends also to Arthur. Encountered not far from La Roche de Chamguin, Guiromelant recounts the slayings that motivate his antagonism toward a Gauvain whom he has never seen and now fails to recognize:

Mais quant de Gauvain me recort
Coment ses peres ocist le mien,
Je ne li puis voloir nul bien.
Et il meïsmes de ses mains
Ocist de mes cousins germains
Un chevalier vaillant et preu.
Ainc puis ne poi venir en leu
De lui vengier en nulle guise.

(8778-85)

In this context of violence and conflict, established in part through the evocation of a legendary history dominated by the efforts of a series of kings to secure and pacify the realm, Chrétien founds a new level of coherence in the Conte del Graal. Whether through the noble fallen knight who was Perceval's father, through the Fisher King, through King Lot father of Gauvain, through Belrepaire which remains vulnerable in the hands of a young heiress after the death of her father, through the stance of Arthur himself at the opening of the poem: Chrétien's text underlines again and again the necessity for a ruler who can “tenir sa terre en pais” as an indispensable condition of social stability and social justice. Here the impassioned lament of Perceval's mother, identifying the disruption of political and social order as the source of suffering for the ruined nobility as well as for the weak and dispossessed, is programmatic for the narrative. Her account anticipates numerous other descriptions of violence and injustice, just as her personal loss is mirrored in that of the bereaved damsels whose tales of misfortune punctuate the adventures of both Perceval and Gauvain; her words themselves find a distinct echo in those of the Hideous Damsel who later intrudes into the Arthurian court to announce to Perceval the disastrous consequences of his silence in the castle of the Fisher King:

Et ses tu qu'il en avendra
Del roi qui terre ne tendra
Ne n'iert de ses plaies garis?
Dames en perdront lor maris,
Terres en seront escillies
Et puceles desconseillies,
Qui orfenines remandront,
Et maint chevalier morront.

(4675-82)

Despite the undeniable mythic resonance of plague and malediction in this passage,²¹ and despite the likelihood that Chrétien found in Celtic story the relation between the blighted land and the affliction of its sovereign,²² it is explicit here as in the case of Perceval's exiled family that the general ruin is consequent upon the incapacity of the ruler to “(tenir) sa terre en pais,” and this emphasis Chrétien found in Wace; it is not insignificant in this regard that Wace's portrait of the suffering Uther, obliged to have himself transported en litière to meet the Saxons who have ravaged the kingdom during his illness, serves as model for the depiction of both Perceval's father and the Fisher King.²³ And it is the lack of an effective sovereign that is once again implicated in a more distant echo of the words of Perceval's mother, as Gauvain learns that the occupants of the mysterious castle on the border of Galvoie, who had come there following the death of Uther, include

          dames ancïaines
Qui n'ont ne maris ne seignors,
Ainz sont de terres et d'onors
Desiretees a grant tort
Puis que lor mari furent mort.
Et damoiseles orfenines
I ra avec les deus roïnes.

(7574-80)

Whatever the symbolic identity of lance and grail, the quests of both Perceval and Gauvain in the Conte del Graal bear directly upon a fundamental question, one that appears to have preoccupied Chrétien from his first romance.²⁴ It is the question of anarchy latent in the chivalric system, from whose consequences none is exempt: neither the nobles, who are subjected to brutality as well as to unjust exile and disinheritance; nor the “povres gens,” who find themselves debased; nor women and orphans, whose protection the chivalric order had assumed, with ecclesiastical encouragement, as part of its ethic in Chrétien's day.²⁵ It is the dramatization of this question that Chrétien found in Wace's Brut, in a legendary history in which periods of peace and stability under strong rulers alternate with periods of political chaos, devastation of the land, and widespread suffering. Whether or not we find in the poem portents of the violent end of Arthur's reign, it is difficult here to accept the conclusion of Paule Le Rider that in writing his tale of Perceval and Gauvain Chrétien “est plus eloigné de Wace qu'il n'a jamais été.”²⁶ In the famous passage describing the misfortunes of the Fisher King's realm, as Delbouille observes, we find one of the most direct recalls of the Brut in Chrétien's poem, and that recall occurs within an appeal for mercy addressed to Arthur as conqueror of Scotland:

“Sire, merci! ce dient tuit;
Por coi as cest païs destruit?
Aies merci des antrepris
Que tu, sire, de fain ocis.
Se tu nen as merci des peres,
Voies ces anfanz et ces meres,
Voies lor filz, voies lor filles,
Voies lor gent que tu essiles!
Lor peres rant as petiz fiz,
Et as dames rant lor mariz;
Et les freres rant as serors,
Rant a ces dames lor seignors!

(937-48)²⁷

In this celebrated passage from the Brut, it is notable that the depiction of suffering and essil is immediately followed by an affirmation of the ability of the sovereign to restore normalcy to the disrupted social order.

The particular significance of the evocation of the Arthurian past in the larger structure of Chrétien's final romance is suggested by the fact that the singular chronological precision concerning the death of King Uther is the point of coordination of the family histories of the two protagonists. Perceval's encounter with knights in the forest prompts his mother's disclosure of a family exile that occurred “apres la mort Uterpandragon”; Gauvain learns that his grandmother, his mother, and his sister had gone to La Roche de Chamguin when Uther “fu mis en terre”; and it is in relation to his own familial history that each hero appears destined to assume a liberator's role. Perceval at the Grail Castle, as Frappier observes, “n'est pas n'importe qui,”²⁸ and Gauvain is unique in his relation to the inhabitants of La Roche de Chamguin.²⁹ Both heroes are clearly determined, at least in part, by their lineage.³⁰ The prediegetic dimension of the Conte del Graal is radically extended in comparison with Chrétien's earlier poems,³¹ and it is principally in terms of lineage that the past has consequences for the narrative present.

Thus not only does Chrétien in his final romance reinscribe his King Arthur into the legendary history whence he came; it is evident also that both heroes of the Conte del Graal differ markedly from the “hero as individual,” that hero “liberated from the tyranny of history” described by Hanning as characteristic of romance. In the terms of this classification, the Conte del Graal appears closer to the “historical writing” of Geoffrey of Monmouth and of Wace than to Chrétien's own earlier portraits of the Arthurian court and of its heroes. Throughout Wace's description of the events of this period, the words “essilie,” “deseritez,” and “gaster” occur with notable frequency; and in that account, the action of the hero is not merely to conquer and to rule, but to counter actively the suffering occasioned by war and injustice—to “restorer” and to “randre.”³² It is the same for Chrétien's two heroes, in spheres marked by an identical vocabulary of exile and distress. As the larger narrative lines of the Conte del Graal tend toward restoration, here again the emphasis falls on the need for a seigneur who can maintain peace within the social order. At the culmination of his chivalric initiation, Perceval promises Blanchefleur before his perilous defense of her city “Ainz avrai tote vostre terre / En pais mise, se j'onques puis” (2098-9), and after his victory he is proclaimed seigneur. When he departs to pursue his search for his mother, he promises again to “tenir la terre” of Belrepaire; if he finds her alive, he will return

Et d'enqui en avant tendra
La terre, ce sachent de fi,
Et se ele est morte, autresi.

(2930-2)³³

Gauvain too is a restorer, of the small courtly society of his maternal relatives at La Roche de Chamguin, whose circle awaits its chevalier élu:

Qu'elles atendent qu'il y viegne
Uns chevaliers qui les maintaigne.
.....Cil porroit le chastel tenir;
Cil rendroit (as dames) lor terres,
E feroit pais des morteus guerres,
Les puceles marïeroit
Et les vallés adouberoit.

(7584-5, 7598-7602)³⁴

This pattern, as well as the later episode at his uncle's hermitage, suggests that Perceval will one day find again and restore the lands of the Fisher King; but here the expectations of the reader are thwarted by the incomplete state of the extant text.

“Roman et histoire,” suggests Zumthor, “comme types de discours, sont des jumeaux nés d'une certaine crise (ou prise) de conscience qui affecta la classe dominante de la société occidentale en des temps et des lieux relativement bien déterminés.”³⁵ Here the relation of Chrétien's final poem to Wace's Brut affords a particularly suggestive comparison. The medieval chroniclers, we are reminded, were not primarily concerned with “objectivity” or “factuality” in the modern sense; in an age when all history was ultimately providential history, the concern with factual truth was secondary to a project of illustration and eventual edification.³⁶ To an even greater extent than Geoffrey's Latin Historia, Wace's Brut dramatizes the questions of war versus peace, of the consequences of anarchy versus social order.³⁷ From the preceding observations, there emerges a reading of the Conte del Graal that centers not on the chivalric hero but on the role of the chivalric order; not on the destiny of the hero as individual, but on the destiny of a society troubled by conflict both without and within. The adventure of the hero in service to the community, as Köhler and others have shown, is never absent from Chrétien's earlier romances; here it is given a structure and a particular ethical coherence through the poet's recourse to the legendary history of Britain from which his Arthur came.³⁸

Notes

1. See Paul Zumthor, “Roman et histoire: aux sources d'un univers narratif,” in his Langue, texte, énigme (Paris, 1975), pp. 237-48; Hans Robert Jauss, “Chanson de geste et roman courtois (analyse comparative du Fierabras et du Bel Inconnu),” in Chanson de geste und höfischer Roman (Heidelberg, 1963), esp. p. 65; Donald Maddox, “Pseudo-Historical Discourse in Fiction: Cligès,” in Essays in Early French Literature Presented to Barbara M. Craig (Columbia, S.C., 1982), pp. 9-24; Douglas Kelly, “Matiere and genera dicendi in Medieval Romance,” YFS, LI (1974), 147-59.

2. Saisnes, ed. F. Menzel and E. Stengel (Marburg, 1906), 6-11.

3. See, for example, J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain: Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and its Early Vernacular Versions (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1950), p. 463.

4. The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York and London, 1966), pp. 174-5. This distinction recalls that proposed by Jauss between the action of the epic hero and the hero of romance: “l'action épique du héros reste subordonnée, dans la chanson de geste, à la destinée plus vaste de la communauté chrétienne et nationale, et s'intègre ainsi dans un ordre d'événements supra-personnels et objectifs” (“Chanson de geste et roman courtois,” p. 72).

5. The Vision of History, p. 175. Hanning elaborates this concept in The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven and London, 1977): the fundamental character of the “romance plot” is that it “organizes incidents ranging widely in space and time around the life of the hero without any larger controlling narrative context, action, or system (such as fate, providence, or national destiny)” (p. 196).

6. “Chanson de geste et roman courtois,” p. 73.

7. Jean Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes (Paris, 1957), p. 35.

8. La Partie Arthurienne du Roman de Brut, ed. I. D. O. Arnold and M. M. Pelan (Paris, 1962), 1252-8. All references to Wace's text will be from this edition.

9. R. Guiette argues in the affirmative in “‘Li conte de Bretaigne sont si vain et plaisant’,” Romania, LXXXVIII (1967), 1-12.

10. See Hans-Erich Keller, “Wace et Geoffrey of Monmouth: Problème de la chronologie des sources,” Romania, XCVIII (1977), p. 11.

11. See the comments of Pelan, La Partie Arthurienne, p. 17. In the manuscript tradition, observes Pelan, the Brut appears frequently in conjunction both with the romans antiques, with which it bears evident affinities, and the romans courtois (p. 33).

12. Paul Zumthor, “Le roman courtois: Essai de définition,” ELit, IV (1971), p. 76.

13. See the detailed observations of Maddox, “Pseudo-Historical Discourse.”

14. Le Roman de Perceval ou Le Conte du Graal, ed. William Roach (Paris, 1959), 445-6. All references to the text will be from this edition.

15. For these correspondences see R. L. Graeme Ritchie, Chrétien de Troyes and Scotland (Oxford, 1952); Maurice Delbouille, “Les hanches du Roi-Pêcheur et la Genèse du Conte del Graal,” in Festschrift Walter von Wartburg, ed. K. Baldinger (Tübingen, 1968), pp. 371-5; idem., “Des origines du personnage et du nom de Gauvain,” TLL, XI (1973), 549-59.

16. L'Influence du “Brut” de Wace sur les romanciers français de son temps (Paris, 1931), p. 62.

17. See Jacques Ribard, “L'Ecriture romanesque de Chrétien de Troyes d'après le Perceval,” MRom, XXV (1975), 75-6, and Chrétien de Troyes: Le Conte du Graal: anthologie thématique (Paris, 1976), p. 66.

18. Delbouille observes the resemblance of this account of exile to the description of calamity in the Brut: “molt veissiez terre essilier. … Ki plus tost puet fuïr si fuit” (“Les hanches du Roi-Pêcheur,” p. 376).

19. L'Influence du “Brut” de Wace, pp. 57-8.

20. Among the several notations of this derivation see Arthurian Names in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. William A. Nitze and Harry F. Williams (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1955), p. 289.

21. See Daniel Poirion, “L'Ombre mythique dans le Conte du Graal,” CCM, XVI (1973), 191-2, 195. S. Bayrav notes in this regard the belief that “une sympathie magique lie le destin du souverain et celui du royaume”; see Symbolisme médiéval: Béroul, Marie, Chrétien (Paris, 1957), p. 194.

22. R. S. Loomis calls attention to Bran the Maimed King of the Waste Land, Bryderi his deliverer, and the “Unspelling Quest”; see Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes (New York and London, 1949, repr. 1961), p. 354.

23. See Pelan, p. 62; Delbouille, pp. 377-8.

24. For the fundamental importance of the tension between individual and society, monarchy and feudal aspirations see Erich Köhler, L'aventure chevaleresque: Idéal et réalité dans le roman courtois, trans. E. Kaufholz (Paris, 1974), esp. Ch. I. On its prominence in Erec et Enide see Donald Maddox, Structure and Sacring: The Systematic Kingdom in Chrétien's Erec et Enide (Lexington, Ky., 1978).

25. The best-known example is Bernard of Clairvaux's De Laude Novae Militiae; see the discussion of Paule le Rider, Le Chevalier dans le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes (Paris, 1978), esp. pp. 319-23.

26. Le Chevalier dans le Conte du Graal, p. 316.

27. “Les hanches du Roi-Pêcheur,” pp. 375-6.

28. Jean Frappier, “Le graal et la chevalerie,” Romania, LXXV (1954), 174.

29. For Gauvain's role see Paul Imbs, “La reine Guenièvre dans le Conte du Graal de Chrétien de Troyes,” in Mélanges Teruo Sato (Nagoya, 1973), pp. 53-9.

30. See the suggestions of Bayrav, pp. 154-5, 163-4; Poirion, 192-3; and most recently Madeleine Blaess, “Perceval et les ‘Illes de Mer,’” in Mélanges Jeanne Lods (Paris, 1978), 69-77.

31. For this temporal dimension see Philippe Ménard, “Le Temps et la durée dans les romans de Chrétien de Troyes,” MA, LXXIII (1967), 16, 28-9; Rupert Pickens, “Temporal Style in Chrétien's Conte del Graal,” unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Language and Style at the Graduate Center, CUNY (1977). R. S. Loomis believed a vengeance quest to be one of the primary motifs of Chrétien's poem; see Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes, ch. lxix; see also David Fowler, Prowess and Charity in the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes (Seattle, 1959), pp. 25ff, and Blaess, pp. 72-4.

32. See, for example, La Partie Arthurienne du Roman du Brut, 1065-76.

33. Belrepaire too is infertile and described as gaste; for Perceval as its liberator see François Suard, “Place et signifiance de l'épisode Blanchefleur dans le Conte du Graal,” Mélanges Le Gentil (Paris, 1973), esp. p. 809; see also Stanton de V. Hoffman, “The Structure of the Conte del Graal,” Romania, LII (1961), pp. 90-1.

34. The question of Gauvain's function in this episode is discussed by Régine Calliot, “Le Voyage de Gauvain à la Roche de Champguin chez Chrétien de Troyes et Wolfram d'Eschenbach,” in Voyage, Quête, Pèlerinage dans la Littérature et la Civilisation Médiévales (Aix-en-Provence, 1976), 325-38.

35. “Roman et histoire,” p. 242.

36. See the observations of Roger D. Ray, “Medieval Historiography through the Twelfth Century: Problems and Progress of Research,” Viator, V (1974), 33-59, esp. 47.

37. Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann has related this emphasis in the Brut to the political objectives of its patron Henri II, resolved to restore order in a divided kingdom; see Arthurian Literature II (1982), 41-75.

38. An earlier version of this paper was read at the Thirteenth International Arthurian Congress in Glasgow, 1981.