Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/666

Rh 642 ROMANCE Frocheur, " Histoire roinanesque d' Alexandra " (Messager des Sc. Hut., Ghent, 1847)- H. Miclielant, Introduction to Li Romans d'AI(Miid,e, Stuttgart, ]Mi>; J. Mael.lv, "Zur Alexandersage" (Z. /. deutsche Pkilol., Hi., 1871); HoinlieU, Die AlexanderMgc, Hersfeld, 1873 ; W. Wackernagel, " Zur Alexandersage (/. /. deutxJie Phil., i., 1869); Dem. P. de Gobdelas, Hist, d Alexandra suivant Us terUs oruntaux, Warsaw, 1822 ; F. Spiegel, Die Alexandersage bei den Orientalcn, Leiiisic 1S01 L. Donath, Die Alexandersage im Talmud u. Mtdrash, Fulda, 18.3. For ' theVinnl myth see D. Comparetti, Virgilio nel Medio Evo, Leghorn, 1872, 2 vols W. J. Thorns, Early Eng. Prose Romances, 1858, 3 yols. ; G. Brunet, Les/aitzmervnilleuxdc VirgUe, Geneva, 1867 ; E. Dumeril, "Virgile enchanteur" (Melanges Arch., 1850) ; Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imper., ed. Liebrecht, 1850 ; P. Schwubbe I'irgilius per mediam letatein, Paderborn, 18J2 ; Siebenhauer,De/a6ris mix media atate de Virgilio circumf., Berlin, 1837 ; J. G. T. Graesse, Beitrage zur Litt u. Sage des Mittelalters, 1850 ; Bartsch, " Gedicht auf d. Zaub. Virgil" Albrecht v. Halberstadt u. Ovid im Mittelalte'r, Quedlinburg, 1861. II. MEDIEVAL ROMANCE. (a) Arthurian Cycle. igines. The oldest and certainly the most important of the cycles of mediaeval romance is that which passes under the name of King Arthur, or of the Round Table. The names, characters, and actions of its heroes have permeated modern literature throughout Europe ; yet so little do we know concerning the origines and the first authors of the tales which form the body of Arthurian romance that there are few subjects in literary history more obscure and undefined. It can only be said with assurance that from about the year 1150 several poems 1 were composed by minstrels (a class of men recruited from all ranks of society) upon incidents and personages familiar to readers of what is called the Morte Arthur, a compilation of the second half of the 13th century. The Morte Arthur was not originally so called, and it was not a direct compilation from the ballads of the 12th century, but seems rather to have been a mere unskilful reduction into a single corpus of some five or six prose romances which had already grown out of the poems, and each of which professed to relate the adventures of nearly the same set of heroes. The first appearance of these stories in prose compositions is here our chief concern ; and it is, unfortunately, likewise our chief difficulty. The sources of information upon the subject are defective and vitiated to a singular degree; and the light thrown by the investigations of recent writers is frequently of the nature of cross-lights. The following attempt at constructing a brief literary history of the Arthurian romances is not offered as a complete analysis of the work which has been done, but as a sum- mary of facts and probabilities. The Roman conquests in Spain, Gaul, and Britain im- posed upon a large portion of the conquered peoples the necessity of using the Latin language, which thereby be- came, and for centuries remained, the medium of educated intercourse and the language of the towns and the centres of government in those countries. In common speech, naturally, it became depraved in course of time, and the pure lingua Latino, of the high officials and the clergy existed side by side with the corrupt lingua Romana of the Romanized people. The latter was, however, ignored by polite literature, and probably never appeared in a written form till it was used for political purposes on the occasion of the celebrated partition of Charlemagne's empire among his grandsons. We may say that the literature of romance begins with popular poetry of the 10th or llth century; but, as its subject-matter was derived to some extent from the more respectable lingua Latina, we must go back a few centuries earlier to find the origines. When the people of Rome became acquainted with the civilization and literature of Greece they framed a fabu- lous history to connect themselves with the superior race, 1 Chansons de geate, or ballads of knightly adventure, produced by wandering minstrels called in northern France and England tromxres, in southern France, Spain, and northern Italy trobadors (troubadours), in Germany minnesanger, and intended for recitation with more or less musical accompaniment. and the JZneid exhibits that pseudo-tradition in its most permanent and powerful embodiment. A similar desire affected the Romanized Britons, and we may confidently assume that before the end of the 3d century a poetical form had been given to the story of the Trojan Brutus who founded the kingdom of Britain, blended with some- thing of the real traditions of the Celtic race. No such form survives at present, but we may discern its traces and results in Nennius (sec. viii.-x.), Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1154), and in all the subsequent chronicles. In the llth century the Anglo-Saxons of England hadEthno- their old Germanic stories of Beowulf, Sigfrid, and theS!^ Nibelungen ; the Britons of the west enjoyed their Celtic ^^1 and Britanno-Celtic myths ; the Saxonized Britons of Wilt- a i n) m shire and elsewhere combined the legends of both the century others; and the best educated men amongst the clergy had an acquaintance with Virgil, Ovid, and Statius. Here was a rich material for the imagination, and the invasion of the Normans brought a fructifying element. In France, Roman, Franco-German, Celto-Breton, and Scandinavian traditions were already intermingled ; and the reintroduc- tion into Saxonized England, from the south, of Celtic myths nearly identical with those which the Anglo-Normans found in Wales before the end of the llth century gave to the latter a fresh life and a distinct predominance over all the other traditions of the composite people. Hence arose the British cycle of romance, accepted partly as history, partly as fiction by the new people of Norman England. Bretons, Britons, Normans and French, the Saxonized Britons, the Franco -Gallicized Scandinavians, and the Dano-Saxons all found a common basis of amalga- mation, and it is no mere metaphor to say that the publi- cation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's fabulous chronicle formed a momentous era in the history of England. When the Saxons entered Britain in the 5th century they found in the middle and the south a Romanized kingdom ruled by a monarch with a British or Cymric name. The vernacular tongue of Britain was then and for centuries afterwards much nearer in form to the Gaelic of Ireland and of western and northern Scotland, the Pictish of Scotland, and the Gaulish of France than the Cymric of Wales is now or was then. It was a long time before the Saxon conquests extended so far as to leave the Cymry or Welsh the sole distinct people of the original inhabitants of the country. In the meantime there had been con- flicts with the Pictish kings of the north, the Gaelic or Cambro- Gaelic kings of Strathclyde, and the princes of North and South Wales. Amongst their opposers the most successful and the most memorable was a prince or chief of Strathclyde, who is called by Nennius "Arthur dux bellorum," by the English "King Arthur," by the Welsh "the Emperor Arthur." After the departure of the Romans there were several independent monarchies or principalities in the island that of the Romanized Britons occupying the centre, south, and south-east of the country; two Cymric principalities in Wales (North and South) ; the Cambro -Gaelic kingdom of Strathclyde, extending from the Clyde to Chester; the unmixed Gaels in the north-west of Scotland ; the Pictish kingdom in the north- east; and a Scandinavian population between the Firth of Forth and Norwich. It is now settled by scholars that the Pictish speech was a dialect, like Gallic, Gaelic, and Cymric, of the common Celtic language ; and in the early centuries of the Christian era the radical unity of all these tongues had not yet been effaced by the action of local varieties of pronunciation and arbitrary rules of orthography; consequently there was no such sentiment of national or racial distinction between the divisions of the Celtic race as is nowadays produced by political frontiers. The real Arthur, whoever he was, has been claimed by the