Epic and Romance | Page 6

the "matter of Britain"
334
Blending of classical and Celtic influences--e.g. in Benoit's Medea 334

Methods of narrative--simple, as in the Lay of Guingamor; overloaded,
as in Walewein 337
Guingamor 338
Walewein, a popular tale disguised as a chivalrous romance 340
The different versions of Libeaux Desconus--one of them is
sophisticated 343
Tristram--the Anglo-Norman poems comparatively simple and
ingenuous 344
French Romance and Provençal Lyric 345
Ovid in the Middle Ages--the Art of Love 346
The Heroines 347
Benoit's Medea again 348
Chrestien of Troyes, his place at the beginning of modern literature 349
'Enlightenment' in the Romantic School 350
The sophists of Romance--the rhetoric of sentiment and passion 351
The progress of Romance from medieval to modern literature 352
Chrestien of Troyes, his inconsistencies--nature and convention 352
Departure from conventional romance; Chrestien's Enid 355
Chrestien's Cliges--"sensibility" 357
Flamenca, a Provençal story of the thirteenth century--the author a
follower of Chrestien 359
His acquaintance with romantic literature 360 and rejection of the

"machinery" of adventures 360
Flamenca, an appropriation of Ovid--disappearance of romantic
mythology 361
The Lady of Vergi, a short tragic story without false rhetoric 362
Use of medieval themes by the great poets of the fourteenth century
363
Boccaccio and Chaucer--the Teseide and the Knight's Tale 364
Variety of Chaucer's methods 364
Want of art in the Man of Law's Tale 365
The abstract point of honour (Clerk's Tale, Franklin's Tale) 366
Pathos in the Legend of Good Women 366
Romantic method perfect in the Knight's Tale 366
Anelida, the abstract form of romance 367
In Troilus and Criseyde the form of medieval romance is filled out with
strong dramatic imagination 367
Romance obtains the freedom of Epic, without the old local and
national limitations of Epic 368
Conclusion 370
APPENDIX
Note A--Rhetoric of the Alliterative Poetry 373
Note B--Kjartan and Olaf Tryggvason 375
Note C--Eyjolf Karsson 381

Note D--Two Catalogues of Romances 384
INDEX 391
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
I
THE HEROIC AGE
The title of Epic, or of "heroic poem," is claimed by historians for a
number of works belonging to the earlier Middle Ages, and to the
medieval origins of modern literature. "Epic" is a term freely applied to
the old school of Germanic narrative poetry, which in different dialects
is represented by the poems of Hildebrand, of Beowulf, of Sigurd and
Brynhild. "Epic" is the name for the body of old French poems which is
headed by the Chanson de Roland. The rank of Epic is assigned by
many to the Nibelungenlied, not to speak of other Middle High German
poems on themes of German tradition. The title of prose Epic has been
claimed for the Sagas of Iceland.
By an equally common consent the name Romance is given to a
number of kinds of medieval narrative by which the Epic is succeeded
and displaced; most notably in France, but also in other countries which
were led, mainly by the example and influence of France, to give up
their own "epic" forms and subjects in favour of new manners.
This literary classification corresponds in general history to the
difference between the earlier "heroic" age and the age of chivalry. The
"epics" of Hildebrand and Beowulf belong, if not wholly to German
heathendom, at any rate to the earlier and prefeudal stage of German
civilisation. The French epics, in their extant form, belong for the most
part in spirit, if not always in date, to an order of things unmodified by
the great changes of the twelfth century. While among the products of
the twelfth century one of the most remarkable is the new school of
French romance, the brilliant and frequently vainglorious exponent of

the modern ideas of that age, and of all its chivalrous and courtly
fashions of thought and sentiment. The difference of the two orders of
literature is as plain as the difference in the art of war between the two
sides of the battle of Hastings, which indeed is another form of the
same thing; for the victory of the Norman knights over the English
axemen has more than a fanciful or superficial analogy to the victory of
the new literature of chivalry over the older forms of heroic narrative.
The history of those two orders of literature, of the earlier Epic kinds,
followed by the various types of medieval Romance, is parallel to the
general political history of the earlier and the later Middle Ages, and
may do something to illustrate the general progress of the nations. The
passage from the earlier "heroic" civilisation to the age of chivalry was
not made without some contemporary record of the "form and
pressure" of the times in the changing fashions of literature, and in
successive experiments of the imagination.
Whatever Epic may mean, it implies some weight and solidity;
Romance means nothing, if it does not