HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 399tournaments and the hunt, often involving fabulous animals; the subsequentpassage into the Other World, realm of the fantastic; theabolition of evil customs; finely developed portraits of chivalrouslovers and their ladies—these are just a few of the more characteristicaspects of the romances of Chrétien de Troyes, with their enigmaticsen and si belle conjointure. 43 The backdrop for Chrétien’s heroes(and the audience’s assumed familiarity with the Arthurian worldand its inhabitants) has been summarized in the following terms byMichel Zink:Not only does Chrétien, unlike Geoffroy of Monmouth and Wace, notset out to provide a narrative of the reign of King Arthur; he assumessuch familiarity on the part of his public with the Arthurian universethat explanations and information alike are rendered superfluous. Eachindividual narrative work is presented as a fragment, an uncoveredpart of a vast story whose underlying continuity, it is assumed, maybe readily mastered by any reader. None of the romances explicitlydepicts King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, the Round Table, its customsand knights. The poet is content to list these, assuming familiarity, asand when their presence is required to dignify a ceremony, tournamentor feast. To this is added that blend of disorientation and familiaritywhich accompanies the progress of the hero and his adventures.Hardly out of Arthur’s castle and under cover of the nearest forestmargin, he enters an unknown world, strange and threatening, but inwhich news circulates at an astonishing speed and where he constantlymeets characters who know him (sometimes better than he knows himself) and who reveal to him, in imperious and fragmentary fashion,his destiny. Like him, the reader evolves in a world of signs whichperpetually refer him back, implicitly and enigmatically, to a meaningpresented as self-evident and, for this very reason, hidden. The worldof these romances is a world laden with meaning yet mysterious in itsvery obviousness. 44This is less true of the romans d’antiquité and their authors who, inthe words of Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “do not seem to have travelledto the very end of the adventure of fiction”. 45 The earliest ofthese, the Roman de Thèbes (composed ca. 1150–55), obviously predatedChrétien’s earliest romance by a few years. Like the Romand’Enéas (ca. 1160) and the Roman de Troie (composed between 116043See in particular Chrétien’s Œuvres complètes, ed. D. Poirion, in Bibliothèque dela Pléiade (Paris, 1993).44Zink (1992), 144; my translation.45Baumgartner (1994), 2; my translation.