[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

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.

From Norris J. Lacy in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, the article on Courtly Love:

COURTLY LOVE, a term first used by Gaston Paris in an 1883 article. It may well be a misleading designation for the medieval phenomenon it is supposed to identify. A good many scholars criticize the term and propose that it be abandoned. That is unlikely to occur, owing to its familiarity and usefulness. It is often, and probably erroneously, used interchangeably with fin’amors, which is the proper term for a conception of love propounded by the Provençal troubadours. A question that has occupied a good many scholars is whether courtly love, in northern France especially, was a historical and cultural phenomenon or simply a literary convention.

Lacy continues. I realize that most scholars do not deny that the tradition existed, but they do disagree, often vehemently, on what exactly was meant by what they call courtly love by different writers.

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.

I am so aware. However much of it applies only to works in the Thomas tradition, not to other verse Tristan material and the prose material. You seem not be aware that there were four main streams of Tristan material in European tales: the Welsh tradition, the so-called folk tradition found in the works of Béroul and Eilhart von Oberge, the more refined so-called courtly tradition in the version of Thomas and adaptations into other languages, and the later immense prose romances in four main versions with adaptations into other languages.

Not all tales of adultery need also be tales of what some modern writers call courtly love.

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.

Campbell unfortunately so greatly oversimplifies that his work in that area is almost useless.

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.

Yes, I have read all of extant Chrétien de Troyes. That Chrétien so concentrates on marriage is why many commentators don’t think that Chrétien was much influenced by so-called courtly love, at least in its extreme form. I do not see that marrying the widow of a knight whom one has slain should be seen as an aspect of courtly love. I suspect that you may be seeing something you call “courtly love” when the text only tells of love by one person of another.

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.

Chrétien comes close to an adulterous relationship in his Cligés and steps over the line in his Lancelot. These, to judge by adaptations into other languages, were the least popular of his poems. Many commentators consider that Chrétien somewhat distanced himself from the morality of his Lancelot when he ascribed both the source material and its treatment to Marie of Champagne and then did not even finish the poem, leaving that to Godfroi de Leigni. This surviving poem by Chrétien alone praises an adulterous hero.

Chrétien’s most popular poems praised married life and dealt with difficulties that arose in marriage. Have you never noticed that only one poem by Chrétien really fits in the courtly love tradition, such as it may be?

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).

Fair enough. But that is only one story. You indicated more when you wrote:

… and nearly all the important tales of courtly love ended tragically (with the heart of the doomed lover sent in a box to his amour).

One example is not “nearly all”.

I am quite aware of the customs of saving embalmed body parts as relics. But that is not a common motif in medieval adventure romances.

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.

Nor is there in many medieval poems, including most of Chrétien. And you can’t bowdlerize something which is mainly your own invention, unless you produce a cleaned-up version of your own work. Even Tennyson produced a mostly faithful Victorian version of Chrétien’s Erec et Enide in his two idylls The Marriage of Geraint and Geraint and Enid. He did not need to bowdlerize it in any way. I fail to see how Chrétien is more explicitly telling a tale based on the ideals of courtly love than Tennyson.

Tolkien introduces a version of courtly love only in Gimli the dwarf’s deep love and affection for Galadriel, when Gimli desires only a lock of Galadriel’s hair as a gift.

This is the antithesis of Tolkien's view of love. There is no sex outside of marriage, …

What of Beren and Lúthien? From the published Silmarillion:

But as she [Lúthien] looked on him [Beren], doom fell upon her, and she loved him; yet she slipped away from his arms and vanished from his sight even as the day was breaking.

What do you imagine Lúthien was doing in Beren’s arms and on subsequent meetings when she rejoined him again? I admit that this account is not explicit and the verse versions published in The Lays of Beleriand are also not explicit. In contrast, Chrétien has Perceval share a bed for the night with Blanchefleur but explicitly indicates that no sex occurred, not something one would expect in someone pushing courtly love as commonly understood.

Christopher Tolkien in The Book of Lost Tales Part II remarks on page 52:

In the old story, Tinúviel had no meetings with Beren before the day when he boldly accosted her at last, and it was at that very time the she led him to Tinwelent’s cave; they were not lovers.

This implies that in the later story Christopher Tolkien understands that at the same point Beren and Lúthien had become lovers.

Note also in Sir Thomas Malory’s “Tale of Sir Gareth” in his Le Morte d′Arthur there is emphasis on preventing Gareth and Lady Liones from lying with one another until they are properly married. Courtly love is not nearly as common in medieval tales as you think it is, and even where the idea of an adulterous relationship occurs as true love in a story, other more conventional ideas may occur in the same tale without forcing the reader to choose between them.