The Afterlife, Reincarnation, and Courtly Love

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

In addition, he uses the utterly weak phrase "probably erroneously" in regards to the interchangeability of "courtly love" and "fin'amors". Bravo! This scholarly gibberish equates to nothing but equivocation. Usually posters use sources to bolster their argument, not weaken it.

This and other comments I have read make perfect sense to me. I could provide other quotes but to what point? You believe what you want to believe and ignore the evidence and resort to name-calling. Is that really the best you can do? You can easily look up Norris J. Lacy on the web and see that he is at least one of the most prominent and respected medievalists of our day and well versed in what most people would call courtly love literature.

I suggest you begin by looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtly_love . I realize that source is not the best. But it mostly agrees with what I have learned though other channels.

I am certainly aware of different Tristan traditions, but I am speaking in context to the subject at hand, courtly love and Tolkien, not layering the discussion with superfluous and spurious addenda. When referring to the “Welsh tradition” it would be just as contextually useless to discuss the development of the Arthurian cycle prior to Chrétien de Troyes. Gildas, Geofrey of Monmouth and Wace have little to do with the discussion of courtly love in L’ Morte d’Arthur or Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, so why throw in the Mabinogion, or even a possible Irish antecedent like The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne?

It is hard to know what the other person in a discussion knows. But it don’t see any courtly love in Yvain.

But even the courtly romances of Tristan fall far beneath the idealogy imagined for courtly love. Even in the courtly romances Tristan does not hang on every word of Yseult like Lancelot does to Guenevere in Chrétien. That Tristan goes so far as to marry another woman is still part of this version of the tale, something not to be thought of if courtly love as commonly understood is the guide to Tristan’s actions.

This version appears to be written to fit the tastes of the courtiers of the time, a modification of an earlier form of the tale, but far from the ideal courtly love. Tristan is to a degree a more courtly knight, who does not kill any of the lepers from whom he rescues Yseult, unlike in other versions. Tristan does not simply camp out in the forest or live in a deserted mansion, but dwells in a fantastic cave built by giants. He later has a fantastic hall built by a giant with a statue of Yseult within.

The courtly love literary tradition is markedly different in approach to the earlier traditions, and it is the Prose Tristan that was the most popular version in the High Middle Ages and throughout the 14th century, and was influential in Malory’s development of Le Morte d’Arthur, the most popular of all the retellings of the Arthurian Cycle.

While more courtly than the folk version or Welsh version, it is more chivalric than the so-called courtly version. And it introduces Dinadan in a great many episodes, Dinadan being very much an anti-courtly and anti-chivalric character who pokes fun at chivalric pretensions.

The “common stream (or branch)” of the Tristan saga, as written by the like of Béroul, is noncourtly and unchivalric, bearing more resemblance to the Dark Ages than the High or Late Middle Ages, and it was not the version popular in English, German, French or Italian courts.

So by medieval you mean only “late medieval″? A convenient way to throw out a large body of medieval works.

And yet the most popular exemplars of courtly love tales in the 13th, 14th and 15th century, Prose Tristran, Châtelain de Coucy, and Le Morte d’Arthur, each have adultery as a main theme, a cuckolded husband and the tragic demise of the lovers.

You really shouldn’t be including Le Morte d’Arthur as Lancelot and Guenevere’s deaths in that version are not intended to be seen as tragic. They are arguably the best deaths possible under the circumstances. And Le Morte d’Arthur was only written in 1470 and so obviously not one of the most popular tales of the 13th, 14th, and most of the 15th centuries.

You have really only provided two romances and ignored the many, many, many other medieval romances that don’t fit your idea of what people should have been reading.

You are like a broken record, not seeing anything but courtly love and not seeing anything outside French tales. At least some English were also as well or instead reading things like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Havelok the Dane, Floris and Blauncheflour, and various other works. Even French works contain many in which no love-affair even occurs or in which it is hardly treated in a courtly manner, for example Huon de Bordeaux or Le Roman de Mélusine by Jean d’Arras. Even the French Vulgate Merlin was adapted into English by three different authors and it has almost nothing in it that anyone would call courtly love.

In addition, both Chaucer and Boccaccio had as their ultimate influences courtly romances. Courtly love abounds in The Canterbury Tales: The Miller’s Tale, The Franklin’s Tale, The Merchant’s Tale, etc., are all of the courtly tradition, which Chaucer was immersed in at the court of the Duke of Lancaster. All of these, even the fabliaux of the Miller’s Tale (a direct criticism of courtly love) has adultery or the coveting of another man’s wife as its central premise.

The Odyssey, the Aeneid, and other classical works and works from Germanic tradition also have lots of adultery. And those traditions also provide tales in which there almost no sexual activity. You are so overstating the presence of courtly love.

Replace the words “greatly oversimplifies” with the phrase “I don’t agree with Campbell” and we’re more likely closer to the truth.

Sticks and stones ... Call me a liar if you want. Who are the we of which you speak?

I have never denied, ever, that tales of adultery are a commonplace in medieval literature. Even the Bible tells of David and Bathsheba. But also a commonplace are tales in which adultery never occurs

I would suggest that if a villain slew a knight, took his widow to wife and stole his lands and title, he would be viewed as reprehensible, yet here de Troyes envisages the character as heroic within the conventions of courtly love, which are indeed skewed and artificial, and certainly against the societal norms of the times.

Provide a medieval source of your idea that Yvain was in any way following some courtly tradition in marrying the widow of the man he had killed. I note the word would which is often a sign that the speaker is not very sure of what he is saying. Chrétien could not have considered anything as occurring within ″the conventions of courtly love″ since the concept was only pinned down by Matthew Paris in 1883. Perhaps you mean fin’ amour. But where are these supposed conventions stated clearly?

If you claim that anything occurs within some conventions, you surely must have a source. No fair making it up.

And no fair claiming Yvain stole Lady Laudine’s lands. Laudine freely granted them to Yvain after she realized that this was the man who had slain her former husband and just as easily took them away again when Yvain broke his vow. That Yvain apparently accepts Laudine’s right to do this is, it seems to me, the only point in which the tale accepts the supposed tenants of courtly love, in that Yvain accepts his lady’s superiority.

And this is a romance of marriage, in which according to some of those pushing what some now call courtly love true love cannot occur.