Stavenhagen, Lee

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THE ARENA I N  THE EARLY COURT NOVEL by Lee Stauenhagen In the "Adventure of the Fountain" as told by Chritien de Troyes in his le chevalier azb lyon, the knight Calogrenant, adven- turing in the forest, is directed to a magic spring by a hideous vilairz, a monster who shepherds an extraordinary flock. In the edition by Mario Roques, this encounter takes place in a clearing described as filled with "tors salvages, ors et lieparz / qui s'antre- conbatoient tuit" (lines 278-279). In a note to this passage, the editor defends this reading on the basis of analogies among the manuscripts as  preferable to the eni-matic "tors sauvages et espaars" given in the edition by Foerster, and goes on to  remark: "La rkunion des ours et des Ikopards avec les taureaux, mQme sauvages, serait de toute facon trhs singulihre. . . . La leqon . , . comporte certainement des erreurs que nous ne savons comment corriger."l Studies on the origin of this tale have led to CeItic sources, which preserve versions of a katabasis or Hirnmelsreise showing some general similarity with the "Adventure of the Fountain," but the animals in these parious episodes in the Celtic versions are always bulls or oxen only.2 This would appear to support the authenticity of Foerster's reading, and seems to f i t  better with the following passages. Calogrenant goes on to say that "nule beste n'est tant fiere / ne plus orguelleuse de tor," and when Ivain ac- complishes the adventure, he sees only bulls, "si vit les tors et le vilain" (794). But there seems to have been a general tendency toward pro- liferation of the beasts involved. According to Hartmann von Aue, translating Chr6tienYs romance near the end of the twelfth cen- tury, Kalogreant says: "da gesach ich mir vi1 leide / eine swaere ougenweide, / a1 der tiere hande / die man mir ie genande, / vehten unde ringen / mit eislichen dingen" (403-408), and Iwein finds Editor's Note: Mr. Stavenhagen is Assistant Professor of German a t  Rice University. 238 RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES "den griulichen man / uf jeneme gevilde / sten bi sinem wilde" (980-982). Could Chrktien or Hartmann have been influenced in presenting this odd scene by a contemporary convention or source? Its very oddity gives one the impression that we have here a stock incident of some kind, such as the later court novel used so freely. The Rolandslied, a didacticized German version of the Chanson de  Roland, done by the cleric Konrad about 1170 or earlier, men- tions a park full of battling animals. Messengers from the heathen king of Sarraguz, Marsilie, come to the Carolingian camp and are astonished a t  the splendors of a Christian court, among them the zoo: "si chomen zu einem bougarten / der was gecieret harte: / da uundin si inne / di lewen also grimme / mit den beren uechten" (643-647). None of the surviving French versions of the Chanson de  Roland mention any such component of Charlemagne's retinue; Konrad must either have used a version now lost or have drawn on a popular convention of some kind that assigned this unusual garden to the imperial camera. The Chanson de  Roland does enu- merate the animals sent as gifts from Marsilie to the emperor: ' I .  . . urs e leuns e veltres enchaignez / set cenz cameiiz e mil hosturs muez" (stanza IX). These are of course perfectly proper gifts to a medieval emperor. Charlemagne had in fact received apes, bears, lions, and an elephant from Oriental rulers as tokens of amity, the latter from Harfin arRashid h i m ~ e l f . ~  The elephant, which arrived in 801, was not intended only as a munificent gesture; since the end of the Roman republic ownership of elephants had been reserved specifically to emperors, and thus the gift marked diplomatic recog- nition of Charlemagne's imper i~ rn .~  Otto I, Friedrich Barbarossa, and Henry I of England all are known to have received specimens of Oriental fauna from various foreign states. Friedrich 11, with typi- cal flamboyance, had himself followed everywhere by his entire zoo; his elephant of state constituted the most fantastic recognition of all, coming from the mythical Prester John, and was the center of all kinds of antics reported with characteristic gusto by the chroniclers of that stunning reign.j And so Marsilie's ambassadors need not have been surprised to find that Charlemagne had brought his animal park with him to Cordova. The author of the Rolandslied was only citing a convention of the imperial majesty. That same convention guided the scribes who embellished Chrhtien's account of the "Adventure of the Foun- tain" with bears and lions, and was known to Hartmann, who pre- ferred a version with every possible kind of animal over the relative- ly unmajestic spectacle of mere battling bulls. THE ARENA I N  THE EARLY COURT NOVEL 239 But why do the animals fight? In the case of Ivain's adventure, such a feature would obviously serve to reinforce the miraculous quality so indispensable to knightly encounters. But again, a cer- tain conventionality is evident in the description; the animals in the Rolandslied fight, even though the context is only weakly colored with chivalrous adventure. The narrative intent there too, of course, is to present a marvel, but there is now an obvious source for the idea. That is what the imperial animals do: fight. The spectacles in the arenas of the Roman Empire consumed ani- mals in such numbers that the ecology of vast areas of North Africa and the Middle East was drastically altered. Nor was beast against beast the only kind of entertainment offered; men and women, slaves, criminals, free or even noble, fought for their lives against every sort of dangerous creatwe the provinces and expedi- tions were able to p r o ~ i d e . ~  And so the Carolingian imperial ideal could call attention yet again to its claim to Roman succession with an arena, park, or circus of battling lions, bears, and leopards, and the knight of the chivalrous age also could find a parallel for himself in the great tournaments of the past, Martial praises an outstandingly heroic gladiator for subduing twenty wild beasts and remarks that the ancient world would never have had to fear animals had this champion lived then, whose deeds the poet likens to Hercules' task of ridding the world of  monster^.^ So must the dragon-slaying knight have imagined his services. These observations tell us a little more about the literary tech- nique of the early continental court novelists. The beauty of ChrBtien's accomplishment exemplifies how aware these artists were of their own modernity, which distinguishes them like nothing else not only from their literary predecessors but contemporary practitioners of other genres as well. "Das grundlegend Neue im Werk Chretiens," observes Brogsitter, "lafit sich freilich nicht aus seinen Quellen begreifen, sondern entspricht ganz den ver- feinerten Anspriichen der neuen ritterlich-hofischen Kultur, wie sie sich in Frankreich bis zur Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts entwickelt hatte."s For Konrad, whose Rolandslied contains little more than the very rudiments of courtly polish, the arena and private mena- gerie remain a stock imperial perquisite. B~zt for Chrhtien and his circle, and Hartmann's modish knighthood, imperial majesty ran a very poor second to the dash and tragedy of King Arthur, who was himself first and foremost a knight. Stock themes and incidents were reworked to f i t  new tastes, sometimes seemingly almost over- night, resulting in the imaginative detail so characteristic of 240 RICE UNIVERSITY STUDIES Arthurian romance. The arena, once a kind of personal symbol for the emperor, was quickly converted to yet another opportunity for knightly involvement, for the adventures that now were so strenuously applied as tests of innate virtue, the one real touch- stone of nobility. That is why modern literary research still finds a riddle in nearly every Arthurian motive; everything has to be dismantled, cleaned off, and examined, and always rewards the effort by turning out to be composed of the most surprising variety of ideas. NOTES 1. L e s  romans  de  Chre'tien de Troyes  (Paris, 1960), IV, 213. W. Foerster, Der Lb'wenritter (Halle, 1887), lists in the note to line 278 all variants known to him, including proposed translations. 2. See W. A, Nitze, "Yvain and the Myth of the Fountain," Speculum,  XXX (1955), 170-179; A. C. L. Brown, "Iwain," Harvard  S tud ie s  and No te s  in Phi lo logl~  and Li terature ,  VIII (1903), 70-74. 3. Annales  E i n l ~ a r d i ,  anno 801, in M G H ,  SS., I, 190, and Gesta  Karoli ,  11, ibid., 11, 752. 4. The Histor ia  A u g u s t a  lists among the signs of Aurelian's coming em- perorship the gift of a huge elephant, "quem ille imperatori optulit, solusque onlniunl privatus Aurelianus elefanti dominus fuit" (XXVI, 5, 6 ) .  5. The elephant came in fact from the Sultan alKamiI of Egypt, with whom Friedrich sought an alliance for the Crusade of 1228 against the Sultanate of Damascus. See Ernst  Kantorowicz, Kaiser  Friedrich der  Zzveite (Berlin, 1928), pp. 168-169, 286-287, and bibliography in the Erganxungsband to both passages. 6. See George Jennison, Animal s  for S h o w  and Pleasure in Ancient  Rome  (Manchester, 1937), and F. Drexel, "Uber die bei den rijmischen Venationen verwandten Tiere," in Ludwig Friedlaender, Darste l l z~ngen a u s  der  S i t ten-  geschichte Ronts (Leipzig, 1921), IV, 268-275. 7, Liber  spectaculorum, XXVII, 8. Ar tusep ik  (Stuttgart, 1965), p. 3. 

The Arena in the Early Court Novel

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The Arena in the Early Court Novel

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