Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 17.djvu/266

* KOMANCE. 242 KOMANCE LANGUAGES. by Benoit de Sainte-ilore in his Roman de Troie (late twelfth century), from which the great story of Troilus and Cresseide (Cressida) was af- terwards taken up by Boccaccio in Italy and by Chaucer in England, receiving dramatic form from Shakespeare. The legend of Charlemagne, telling of the destruction of the Emperor's rear guard by the Saracens in the passes of the Pyrenees, is extant in two principal forms: the Chanson dc Jtohiiid (close of eleventh century) and the Latin romance of the pseudo-Turpin (abovit 1125). Later romancing on Charlemagne led to the legends known in their English dress as The Sotrdonc of liahylonc ; Otuel; Sir Firumhras ; and the prose Huon of Bordeaux, which first make known to England Oberon, the king of the fairies in Shakespeare's Midsummer Xight's Dream. Beautiful as many others may be, the mediaeval romances that appeal most strongly to the Eng- lish race are those celebrating the deeds of King Arthur and the knights of the round table, on which the French and Anglo-Xorman poets built up a vast romantic structure in harmony with the ideals of chivalry. Reduced to prose, Arthu- rian romance was handed over to later times by Sir Thomas ilalory in his Morte d' Arthur ( US.5). These cycles which have been described are onlj' sections of an immense body of romance current in the Jliddle Ages. Other heroes were Alex- ander, King Richard Lion-Heart, King Horn, Havelok the Dane, Guy of Warwick, and Sir Bevis of Hamtoun. The later romances in prose are more definite- ly connected with the history of the novel, under which head they are noticed. We may cite Amadis de Gaiila, the flower of Spanish romance, Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia, the historical ro- mances of Sir Walter Scott, and the revival of adventure in Robert Louis Stevenson and his nu- merous followers. The legends of King Arthur have been adapted to the nineteenth centurj' by Tennyson, Swinburne, and others; and a group of tales, Greek and raedifeval, have been delight- fully retold by William ]Iorris in The Earthly Paradise. See the articles on the Grail and on the ro- mantic heroes: Arthur, Gawain, Guinevere, Guy of Warwick, Lancelot, Merlin, Perceval, and Tris- tram. For the relation of romance to the novel, see No"EL. The revival of romance is discussed un- der the head Romanticism. Consult also : Saints- bury, The Flourishing of Romance (London, 1897) ; Ker, Epic and Romance (ib., 1897) ; Billings, A Guide to the Middle English Ro- mances (New York, 1901) ; Korting, Orvndriss der Geschichte dcr englischen Eitteratur (Miinster, 1899) ; and Gaston Paris, La littdrature fran- faise ttu moyen-age (Paris, 1890). KOMANCE. In music, a vocal composition in epic-lyrical style resembling in form the bal- lad. But while in the ballad Nature, or some natural power personified, constitutes the theme, the romance draws its subjects from stories of knightly adventure. In recent times the term romance has also been applied to purely instru- mental compositions of a romantic character the form of which is as elastic and indefinite as that of the instrumental ballad. The term originally meant nothing more than a narrative in Romance ( Provencal ) verse as distinguished from Latin verse (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). In France a romance is mereJy a sentimental love- song. KOMANCE LANGUAGES. The languages sprung from Latin and bearing its impress strongly in vocabulary and grammar. In a rough way, the Romance territory in Europe corre- sponds to what belonged to the ancient Roman Empire. It is bounded approximately by the English Channel, the Atlantic Ocean, the Medi- terranean Sea, the Adriatic, and a line drawn through Belgium from Gravelines to Eupcn, and then from Eupen to the Alps and the Adriatic. In the East, isolated from the rest, is Rumania. Colonists have also carried these forms of speech to other continents, and they are spoken in Can- ada, Mexico, Central and South America, and in various settlements in Africa and Asia. It is usual to speak of seven or eight Romance lan- guages, though the division is more a matter of convenience than of scientific accuracy. These are Rumanian, Romansh (Rhetian, Ladin), Italian, Frenoli, Provencal, Spanish, and Portuguese, to which is added, according to the views of the in- dividual scholar, Catalan or Franco-Provengal or Sardinian. . Though contemporary references show the ex- istence of the lingua romana in the seventh cen- tury, nothing was at that time written in this form of speech. Every one who could write at all wrote, or attempted to write, in Latin. The earliest known monument in any Romance lan- guage is the Strassburg Oaths, sworn in a.d. 842 by the armies of Louis the German and Charles the Bald, and preserved in the Latin history of Nithard. These oaths consist of a little more than 100 words in French. To the end of the ninth century belongs the Sainte Eulalie, a short poem, also in French. There are a few other documents belonging to the tenth centurj', bit extended literary works are not found before the eleventh. To this same time belong the earliest writings in Provencal, while, with the exception of a few formulas, there is nothing in Spanish earlier than the twelfth, nor in Italian earlier than the thirteenth century. Between the classical Latin, therefore, and the earliest written specimens of the Romance lan- guages, there is a great gap, which philologists attempt to bridge as well as they may by recon- structing the forms of popular or late spoken Latin. The materials available for this task are inscriptions, dialogue in the old comedies, errors reprehended by Roman grammarians, spe- cimens of early mediseval Latin, documents writ- ten by ignorant scribes, and, above all, the features of the Romance tongues themselves. However wide the gap which exists between the written documents in the two forms of speech, there is nevertheless not the least break in the continuity of the development from spoken Latin to the various modern Romance languages. The Romanization of the West, so thoroughly accomplished, went on actively for about four centuries, though it is quite impossible to fix ac- curate dates for a process of this kind. Begin- ning in Italy itself with the subjection of non- Latin neighbors, it spread to Sicily in the third century B.C.. a century later to the Jlediter- ranean coast of Gaul and Spain, and to Gaul proper only after the beginning of the Chris- tian Era. During this period the Latin lan- guage itself naturally underwent changes, and