[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by jallanite

First, it depends on what one means by courtly love, a term that is never used in the medieval texts themselves.

The term "courtly love" (cortez amors in Provençal) appears as early as the 12th century, but the terms fin'amor ("fine love") and cortez' amors de bon aire ("well-spirited courtly love") used by Occitanian troubadours are also cognate with the concept of courtly love, and widely used. That there was such a literary tradition is beyond doubt, and though added emphasis was placed on the specific term "courtly love" in the 19th century, scholars do not consider it neologistic when referring to the tradition.

Originally Posted by jallanite

That said, there are certainly many tales of tragic lover affairs that are tragic, but not all are courtly by most definitions. The great Prose Tristan ends tragically but is far more focused on Tristan’s knightly exploits than on the love affair between Tristan and Yseult. It has never been called a courtly romance as far as I am aware.

Then you are not aware of the tremendous amount of scholarly work regarding the courtly love aspects of Tristan and Iseult. A simple Google look-up of "Tristan and Iseult Courtly Love" yields over 47,000 results. Or you can simply read up on it in the works of Joseph Campbell, who used Tristan and Isolde to illustrate the conventions of courtly love.

Originally Posted by jallanite

A popular medieval love story that ends happily is Aucassin and Nicolette. More often a love affair is just part of a medieval romance of adventure which tends to end with the marriage of the hero, or may contain a second movement in which the marriage falls into difficulties which are resolved, as in Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide or his Yvain

Have you even read any Chrétien de Troyes? In Le Chevalier au Lion, Yvain is a landless hero who kills a knight and then marries the dead knight's widow and takes his lands and titles (after several pages of protestation of his adoration for the lady). That is hardly an acceptable moral convention of the time, but more an apsect of courtly love. Le Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight on the Cart) is one long swooning mess of courtly love, where Lancelot undergoes all sorts of melancholy, ridicule and embarrassments to prove his ardor to Guinevere (again, like Isuelt, a married woman). Chrétien de Troyes' work is one of the earliest and clearly defined examples of fin' amour. de Troyes was influenced by Marie of Champagne (daughter of the sexually uninhibited Eleanor of Aquitaine), and through her, de Troyes remade the Arthurian romances in the image of courtly love.

Originally Posted by jallanite

I only vaguely recall any medieval romance in which the heart of the dead hero is sent to his lady love in a box. That is far from being a normal motif in medieval tales.

On the contrary, "Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy", which I mentioned previously, was the favorite and most widely known in the courts of 14th century dukedoms in France and in Italy (retold there by Boccaccio in The Decameron). The hero, the châtelain of the castle Renault, falls madly in love with Dame de Fayel. The jealous husband of the Dame tricks the hero into joining the Third Crusade, where he covers himself in glory but is fatally wounded by a poisoned arrow. The dying châtelain composes one last love song and a farewell letter for the Dame, and in his will requests that his heart be embalmed and sent in a box with the song, the letter and a lock of the lady's hair. The box is duly dispatched to the Dame, but is intercepted by the jealous husband, who has the heart cooked and served to his wife. When he informs her what he she has eaten, she swears that she will never eat again after having had such noble food. She starves herself to death.

In addition, it was quite common for medieval nobles to send body parts to different places after death. At his request, Robert the Bruce's embalmed heart was placed in a silver casket and carried to the crusades in Spain by Sir James Douglas. When Sir James died gloriously in battle, Muhammed IV, with as much chivarly as the Christian knights, sent Sir James' body with an honor guard back to his enemy, King Alphonso. The remaining Scottish knights embalmed Sir James' heart and it is now buried in St. Bride’s Kirk, and the silver casket with the Bruce's heart was buried in Melrose Abbey. French nobles often requested the body, heart and entrails to be buried in three separate places, while English lords preferred only the body and the heart be buried separately. The Holy Roman Empire also had such post-mortem extractions for separate burial. The practice had chivalric, political and religious implications.

Originally Posted by jallanite

Tolkien hardly bowdlerizes his sources because he does not follow any sources closely. Rather, he picks and chooses even within the same tale and most often freely invents.

I used the qualifier "If anything", as in, had Tolkien paid any attention to the conventions of courtly love at all, he bowdlerized it beyond recognition. There are really no elements of courtly love as I have heard it defined in Tolkien's work.

Referencing Barbara Tuchman from her book A Distant Mirror she states the following:

"Courtly love was understood by its contemporaries to be love for its own sake, romantic love, true love, physical love, unassociated with property or family, and consequently focused on another man's wife, since only such an illicit liasion could have no other aim but love alone...As formulated by chivalry, romance was pictured as extra-marital because love was irrelevant to marriage, was indeed discouraged in order not to get in the way of dynastic arrangements."

This is the antithesis of Tolkien's view of love. There is no sex outside of marriage, and even forced-marriage in the case of Eol and Aredhel leads to both of their deaths and the doom is visited down up their son Maeglin as well.

Originally Posted by jallanite

That said, Tolkien was more interested in adventurous tales than in love tales per se. The same is true of the author of Beowulf.

I agree.