Old French Romances

Old French Romances

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Old French Romances, by William
Morris (#13 in our series by William Morris)
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Title: Old French Romances
Author: William Morris
Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5988] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on October 8, 2002]
Edition: 10

Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, OLD
FRENCH ROMANCES ***

Transcribed from the 1896 George Allen edition by David Price, email
[email protected]

OLD FRENCH ROMANCES DONE INTO ENGLISH BY WILLIAM
MORRIS

INTRODUCTION

Many of us have first found our way into the Realm of Romance,
properly so called, through the pages of a little crimson clad volume of
the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne. {1} Its last pages contain the charming
Cante-Fable of Aucassin et Nicolete, which Mr. Walter Pater's praises
and Mr. Andrew Lang's brilliant version have made familiar to all
lovers of letters. But the same volume contains four other tales, equally
charming in their way, which Mr. William Morris has now made part
of English literature by writing them out again for us in English,
reproducing, as his alone can do of living men's, the tone, the colour,
the charm of the Middle Ages. His versions have appeared in three
successive issues of the Kelmscott Press, which have been eagerly
snapped up by the lovers of good books. It seemed a pity that these
cameos of romance should suffer the same fate as Mr. Lang's version of
Aucassin et Nicolete, which has been swept off the face of the earth by
the Charge of the Six Hundred, who were lucky enough to obtain
copies of the only edition of that little masterpiece of translation. Mr.
Morris has, therefore, consented to allow his versions of the Romances

to be combined into one volume in a form not unworthy of their
excellence but more accessible to those lovers of books whose purses
have a habit of varying in inverse proportion to the amount of their love.
He has honoured me by asking me to introduce them to that wider
public to which they now make their appeal.
I.
Almost all literary roads lead back to Greece. Obscure as still remains
the origin of that genre of romance to which the tales before us belong,
there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once
extant at Constantinople. Though in no single instance has the Greek
original been discovered of any of these romances, the mere name of
their heroes would be in most cases sufficient to prove their Hellenic or
Byzantine origin. Heracles, Athis, Porphirias, Parthenopeus,
Hippomedon, Protesilaus, Cliges, Cleomades, Clarus, Berinus--names
such as these can come but from one quarter of Europe, and it is as easy
to guess how and when they came as whence. The first two crusades
brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored
that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had
been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.
The crusaders came mostly from the Lands of Romance. Permanent
bonds of culture began to be formed between the extreme East and the
extreme West of Europe by intermarriage, by commerce, by the
admission of the nobles of Byzantium within the orders of chivalry.
These ties went on increasing throughout the twelfth century till they
culminated at its close with the foundation of the Latin kingdom of
Constantinople. In European literature these historic events are
represented by the class of romances represented in this volume, which
all trace back to versions in verse of the twelfth century, though they
were done into prose somewhere in Picardy during the course of the
next century. Daphnis and Chloe, one might say, had revived after a
sleep of 700 years, and donned the garb and spoke the tongue of
Romance.
II
The very first of our tales illustrates admirably the general