[89] Ed. Stehlich. Halle, 1881.

[90] Ed. Foerster. Berne, 1880.

CHAPTER VIII.

ROMANS D'AVENTURES.

[Sidenote: Distinguishing features of Romans d'Aventures.]

The remarkable fecundity of early French literature in narrative poetry
on the great scale was not limited to the Chanson de Geste, the
Arthurian Romance, and the classical story wrought into the likeness of
one or the other of these. Towards the end of the twelfth or the
beginning of the thirteenth century a new class of narrative poems
arose, derived from each and all of these kinds, but marked by important
differences. The new form immediately reacted on the forms which had
given it birth, and produced new Chansons de Gestes, new Arthurian
Romances, and new classical stories fashioned after its own image. This
is what is called the Roman d'Aventures, of which the first and main
feature is open and almost avowed fictitiousness, and the second the
more or less complete abandonment of any attempt at cyclic arrangement
or subordination to a central theme.

[Sidenote: Looser application of the term.]

[Sidenote: Classes of Romans d'Aventures.]

Until quite recently it was not unusual to apply the term Roman
d'Aventures with less strictness, and to make it include the Romances of
the Round Table. There can, however, be no doubt that it is far better
to adopt Jean Bodel's three classes as distinguishing into separate
groups the epic poetry of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and to
restrict the title Romans d'Aventures to the later narrative
developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth. For the second
distinguishing mark which we have just indicated is striking and of more
or less universal application. In these later poems the ambition of the
writer to class his work under and with some precedent work is almost
entirely absent. He allows himself complete freedom, though he may
sometimes, in order to give his characters greater interest, connect
them nominally with some famous personage or event of the earlier
cycles. This tendency to shake off the shackles of cyclicism is early
apparent. There are episodes even in the Chansons de Gestes which have
little or no reference to Charlemagne or his peers: the Arthurian
Romances in prose and verse contain long digressions, holding but very
loosely to the Table Round, such as the adventures of Tristram and
Percivale, and still more the singular episode of Grimaud in the _Saint
Graal_. As for the thi