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中世纪英国文学：亚瑟王
The illustration on the right shows a detail of a magnificent 21-by-16-foot tapestry of King Arthur woven about 1385. The tapestry comes from a set of the "Nine Worthies," who were regarded in the late Middle Ages as the greatest military leaders of all times. Chaucer's French contemporary Eustace Deschamps wrote a ballade about them as a reproach to what he regarded as his own degenerate age. Arthur and his knights, although believed by most medieval people to be historical, are almost entirely products of legend and literature, made up by many authors writing in different genres, beginning not long after the fifth and early sixth centuries, the time when he supposedly lived, and culminating with Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur in the latter part of the fifteenth century (NAEL 8, 1.439-56). The very absence of historical fact to underpin the legends about Arthur left writers of history and romance free to exploit those stories in the service of personal, political, and social agendas.
The man who inspired the Arthurian legend would have been a Briton, a leader of the Celtic people who had been part of the Roman Empire and had converted to Christianity after it became the official religion of Rome. At the time, the Britons were making a temporarily successful stand against the Anglo-Saxon invaders who had already occupied the southeastern corner of Britain. The Roman Empire was crumbling before the incursions of Germanic tribes, and by the late fifth century the Britons were cut off from Rome and forced to rely for protection on their own strength instead of on the Roman legions (NAEL 8, 1.4).
Arthur was never a "king"; he may well have been commander-in-chief of British resistance to the Anglo-Saxons. In the Welsh elegiac poem Gododdin, composed ca. 600, a hero is said to have fed ravens with the corpses of his enemies, "though he was not Arthur," indicating that the poet knew of an even greater hero by that name. According to a Latin History of the Britons around the year 800, ascribed to Nennius, "Arthur fought against the Saxons in those days together with the kings of Britain, but he was himself the leader of battles." Nennius names twelve such battles, in one of which Arthur is said to have carried an image of the Virgin Mary on his shoulders. The Latin Annals of Wales (ca. 950) has an entry for the year 516 concerning "the Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the Britons were victorious."毕业论文网 meiwen.anslib.com 论文网
Not until the twelfth century, though, did Arthur achieve a quasi-historical existence as the greatest of British kings in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Layamon (NAEL 8, 1.118-28). At the same time, Arthur was flourishing in Welsh tales as a fairy-tale king, attended by courtiers named Kei (Kay), Bedwyn (Bedivere), and Gwalchmain (Gawain). It was in the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that Arthur and his knights came to embody the rise, and eventual decline, of a court exemplifying an aristocratic ideal of chivalry. In the verse romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the focus shifts from the "history" of Arthur to the deeds of his knights who ride out from his court on fabulous adventures and exemplify the chivalric ethos. Chrétien's works were adapted and imitated by writers in German, English, Dutch, and Icelandic. The new genre of romance focused not only on the exploits of knights fighting in wars and tournaments or battling against monstrous foes but also on the trials and fortunes of love, and romances addressed mixed audiences of men and women.
In the thirteenth century, a group of French writers produced what modern scholars refer to as the Vulgate Cycle, in prose. This consists of a huge network of interlocking tales, featuring hundreds of characters. The Vulgate Cycle presents a darker side to Arthur and to the Round Table as a center of courtesy and culture.
In the chronicle histories, as a Christian king, Arthur had borne the cross and fought valiantly against barbarian enemies and an evil giant. In romance, both Arthur's role and his character undergo changes inconsistent with his reputation as one of the worthies. His court continues to be the center from which the adventures of his knights radiate, but Arthur himself becomes something of a figurehead, someone whom French scholars refer to as a roi fainéant — a
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