Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/457

 MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 407 current of European literature. The stories of King Arthur, like other French romances, spread to Germany and there Under "the matter of Rome" we shall have to include not only the story of JEneas and the siege of Troy, but many other Greek legends such as the stories of Thebes Romances of and of the Argonautic expedition. Many changes antlc i ult y were made in these tales from their original classical ver- I sions, and the heroes and their environment were repre- sented as knights of feudal times. An especial favorite was the romance of Alexander who became almost as celebrated in medieval vernacular literature as his tutor Aristotle was esteemed in medieval Latin learning. And as Aristotle had been admired and commented upon by the Arabs before most of his works were known to the Christian West, so the story of Alexander exists in Persian, Syriac, Coptic, I iEthiopic, Hebrew, and Armenian as well as in Greek, Latin, and Romance versions. The story of his early career in Macedon, his victories over the Persian Empire, and his campaigns to the frontiers of India and Tibet had grown under the workings of Oriental and medieval imagination into a series of marvelous adventures in the Far East and of feudal mklees after the style of the chansons de geste. From the twelve-syllable lines employed in these romances Two of the most interesting and important of the medie- val French romances do not belong to any of the above cycles, but stand each by itself, namely, the Reynard Romance of Reynard the Fox and the Romance the Fox of the Rose. The former is really a collection of narratives by divers authors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In part, at least, it is of Flemish origin. It draws its characters from the animal world, but often attributes hu- man traits to them, just as the books of science in Latin often did in listing the qualities and properties of the lion and other beasts. Reynard is a clever rascal, full of tricks and plausible talk, gay and well-pleased with himself, but 1 sharp and malicious, and without any moral scruples what-
 * gave rise to the two great epics, Tristan and Parsifal.
 * concerning Alexander comes the term " Alexandrines."