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CONTINUED
A Study of the Conte du Graal
and its Verse Continuations

MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER

The Je-Ne-S«*,„ 4. 1 -arly Modem Europe
Encounter's with a Certain Something
Richard Scholar

‘Richard Scholar’s book is a cheerful and

exhaustive attempt to describe this phenom¬
enon, readily—and consciously—embracing its
inarticulability even while exploring nearly
every corner of its territory ... I applaud ...
Scholar’s willingness, throughout the book,
to attempt to explain something that by
definition cannot be explained: as his own
argument clearly shows, if you know what
it is, it’s not what you’re looking for’
David M. Posner, Renaissance Quarterly

‘riveting.. .The history of theje-ne-sais-quoi

tells us a good deal about how human beings
inhabit the world.’
Jenny Diski, London Review of Books

Madness in Medieval French Literature

identities Found and Lost
Sylvia Huot

Winner of the R. H. Gapper Book Prize,

awarded by the Society of French Studies

‘a highly distinctive contribution to the

study of cultural concepts of madness. It is
an excellent achievment.’
Times Literary Supplement

French Romance of the Later Middle Ages

Gender, Morality, and Desire
Rosalind Brown-Grant
 *### #><§ tlMHIWt ### ####**'
# # ##
##* ## ###

CAnno 1778 •

PHILLIPS • ACADEMY
# * # # # # # #*

OLIVER • WEN DELL • HOLMES

LIBRARY

■####*

IN MEMORY OF
DAVID S. TOWNEND
PA 1964
CHRETIEN CONTINUED
Chretien Continued
A Study of the Conte du Graal
and its Verse Continuations

MATILDA TOMARYN BRUCKNER

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

MAY 2 6 ?noq
.

*
 Preface

This book grows out of a certain sense of dissatisfaction, that other side of desire.
Having avoided writing on the Conte du Graal for a good part of my career, given
its unfinished state and the thorny question of religion’s role, which frequently
leads to readings that place the complex ambiguity of Chretien’s romance on a
reductive rack of allegorical explication, I preferred to avoid Perceval in favor of
Chretien’s other romances. But the Conte eventually proved irresistible: once
Keith Busby, Douglas Kelly, and Norris Lacy asked me to write a chapter on
intertextuality for The Legacy of Chretien de Troyes, I could no longer avoid its
claims as I tackled its relationship to the Perceval Continuations.
Dissatisfaction and desire combined to make me, like so many others, a
prisoner of what continues to seem like the unattainable achievement of the
Grail, no matter how many endings accumulate for Chretien’s initial romance.
But I determined to find a better way—better at least from my critical view¬
point—to deal with the issues of religion atypically inserted into the Arthurian
world, a more satisfying way to understand how they relate to the other parts of
Chretien’s romance. Through analysis of narrative and structure, I followed the
religious strands in conjunction with other major threads of the romance, courtly
and chivalric issues that caught my puzzled attention, especially points of
contradiction that marked the paths of my (re)reading and, it seemed to me,
that of successive continuators who were also reading Chretien. Eventually I
discovered that the apparently random accumulation of articles and papers such
analyses generated, at first independent of each other, later brought together, in
fact retraced the three-part sets of advice Perceval received three times—as if even
we dull readers, like the simpleton Perceval, must eventually get the message,
unconsciously and then, if we are persistent, more consciously and perhaps more
constructively.
Hence this book and my argument, pursued from chapter to chapter, that
Chretien’s authorship appears (however surprisingly for modern readers) not
only in the 9,000 verses of his unfinished romance but across four continuations
whose successive authors follow the guiding hand inscribed in ‘the old Perceval’.
I do not spend much time at the Grail Castle: it has already received so much
attention. I have preferred to look elsewhere to pursue less obvious points of
dialogue between Chretien and the continuators. But there again you will see that
I have eventually been lured back to the Fisher King’s castle and the Grail, as
I move toward the end of this quest. And so, this is not a book about the
Grail... though it is a book about the Story of the Grail.
In pursuit of that story, I have benefited from the help and support of many
people and institutions. I would first like to thank the presses who granted me
viii Preface

permission to reproduce material from already published articles: Editions

Rodopi, Rowman & Littlefield, Librairie Droz, Kiimmerle Verlag, and Palgrave
Macmillan. Parts of Chapter 1 are based on Bruckner (2006a); Bruckner (1996)
forms the basis of Chapter 3. Earlier stages of the fourth chapter appear in
Bruckner (1999), (2003a), and (2003b). Finally, Bruckner (2000a) provides the
starting point for Chapter 5.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the Bibliotheque nationale de France
for permission to reproduce the manuscript images that appear on the dust jacket
and throughout the book. In particular, I would like to thank Philippe Aveline
who steered me to the wonderful transferability of digital images and saved me
from the problems of mistaken orders and the perils of international delivery.
Among colleagues and friends, my personal and professional thanks go first to
Douglas, Keith, and Norris, who started me on this path and supported me in
multiple ways along the byways that led finally to ending it. I am also grateful to a
number of colleagues who read parts of the manuscript in the form of earlier
papers and articles, or as chapters in the process of revision for the book: I have
benefited greatly from the feedback of Virginie Greene and Sophie Marnette on
Chapter 1, Zrinka Stahuljak on Chapters 2 and 3, Peggy McCracken who
encountered an early form of the conclusion when she invited me to speak in a
session at Kalamazoo on ‘Gender and the Grail’ and a version of Chapter 3
presented to the Medieval Seminar at the University of Michigan in October
2005. My thanks to all the participants in that seminar for their receptive eyes
and ears: Elizabeth Allen, Theresa Coletti, Kathy Lavezzo, Paula Leverage, and
Andrea Tarnowski. In particular, I would like to thank Kathy for her suggestion
that the image of the lady and the tent might serve as an emblem for my entire
book.
Several friends and colleagues were instrumental in introducing me to differ¬
ent fields of study connected to this project. Frans van Liere was most generous in
sharing with me his expertise in the areas of biblical reception and exegesis in the
Middle Ages. Dr Joseph Youngerman gave me advice and his own collection of
books and articles for my introduction to the works and theories of Melanie
Klein. An anonymous reader for OUP encouraged me to situate the Perceval
Continuations in the wider context of Grail stories (particularly but not only in
the English tradition), in order to show their common concerns and open my
book to a wider group of readers who could benefit from an overview of how the
verse continuations contribute to later rewritings of the Grail story. To all of them
I offer my gratitude and thanks.
Simon Gaunt, who served as one of the readers for OUP, was equally generous in
his support for my book, not least in recognizing the importance of rediscovering
the first Grail romance in its medieval context as part of an ensemble of romance
continuations brought into alignment in a variety of medieval compilations.
I offer him heartfelt thanks both for specific suggestions for the revision process
(including integration of manuscript illustrations), as well as his general concern
 Preface IX

that the book be accessible to readers beyond the usual suspects of Chretien
devotees. I thank Oxford University Press for accepting his and the other reader’s
recommendations. As I have passed successively through the expert hands of
Valerie Shelley, Andrew McNeillie, and Jacqueline Baker, each of my editors at
OUP has served as a valuable guide. My thanks to all of them for their support,
patience, and precision. I would also like to thank Jennifer Dunn, a doctoral
student at Boston College whose work on organizing the index was indispensable.
Thanks and gratitude for technical support go as well to Robyn Ochs in the
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University,
where I was a Visiting Professor of French through the final stages of preparing
all the materials for publication. As I think back to the beginning of this process,
I cannot forget Sarah Kay who suggested that I consider publishing with Oxford:
a special thank you for her confidence and encouragement.
Support received in the form of grants, not to mention letters of recommen¬
dation for grant proposals, played an important role in helping me secure the
extended time needed to bring such a large-scale project to its conclusion. Warm
thanks for the thankless task of writing those letters goes to E. Jane Burns, Kevin
Brownlee, Peter Haidu, David Hult, Douglas Kelly, Peggy McCracken, and
Nancy Freeman Regalado. I am grateful to Boston College for awarding me a
number of research fellowships, grants, and sabbaticals, as well as to the National
Endowment for the Humanities for naming me a Fellow for the calendar year
2006. Please note that any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations
expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endow¬
ment for the Humanities.
Words will not be sufficient but must nevertheless be pressed into service to
thank most particularly Peter Haidu and Nancy Regalado, two friends and
colleagues who have been my constant teachers and mentors over many years.
Both of them read the complete manuscript in its earliest state and helped me
discover what I had left unsaid, unexplained, unarticulated, unjustified. My
revisions may not have answered all their questions nor reached their highest
standards, but the final shape of this book owes them both a debt of gratitude
that cannot finally be repaid. To Peter, my thanks for the intellectual nourish¬
ment he has unfailingly offered and my gratitude for his ever sharp critique
combined with unshakable enthusiasm for my work. To Nancy, my thanks for
her ever-renewed gift of self expressed in an uncanny ability to put herself in the
service of another person’s point of view, to search out every nook and cranny,
from titles to stylistic tics, from the general argument to specific details, as she
forced me to figure out what I was trying to say. This book is dedicated to them
and to John J. McCann, friend of many years, my earliest mentor and first French
teacher who back in high school inspired me and put me on the ‘droit chemin’
whose curious twists and turns I continue to follow. My deepest thanks to all
three.
X Preface

Finally, I would like to thank my family: Raphael and Daniel, two sons who
listened appreciatively to their mother’s stories about Perceval and taught me
about boys growing up; my husband Edward, whose patience and love accept so
generously the quirks of a medievalist wife.
Newton ' MATB
 Contents

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction 1
Overview of the Corpus 4
Perceval Continuations and Grail Rewritings 11
Verse and Prose/Centripetal and Centrifugal Textuality 15
Key Traits of the Conte du Graal 17
On Ending and Endlessness 22
Reading (Through) Collective Authorship 25

1. Authorial Relays 32

Authors’ Names 33
Anonymous Chretien 42
Interlacing Wauchier de Denain 44
Manessier’s Closing Signature 54
Collective Authorship and Gerbert 59
Back to the Story and Chretien 72

2. Telling Tales, Of Maidens in Tents 86

Textual Intercourse and Human Development 87

Chretien’s Criss-crossing Itineraries 91
Perceval and the Tent Maiden: Simulating Rape 95
Too Little and Too Much for the Ladies’ Man 98
Gauvain and the Male Pucele: Thinking About Rape 100
The First Continuation’s Gauvain: Confessing Rape 105
Gerbert’s Gauvain: Acting out Rape 109
Retelling Love Stories: Writing Forward and Back 112

3. Sons and Mothers, Mothers and Lovers 116

Protecting Mothers: Connections and Contradictions 119

The Sin of the Mother 124
Nature and Nurture 127
The Marginalization and Restoration of Mothers 132
Mothers and Siblings: From the Conte to the First Continuation 135
The Sexuality of Mothers 137
The Good Mother and the Beloved 143

4. Violent Swords and Utopian Plowshares 149

Violence at the Heart of Romance 149
xii Contents

What is a Lance? 153

Collapsing Oppositions 157
Isaiah’s Utopian Vision in Arthurian Garb 163
Re-reading Oppositions 165
Unending Questions 168
Grail Quests and the Ends of Violence 173
Manessier’s Resolution 179

5. Middles, Beginnings, and Ends 187

A Beginning for Middles and Endings 187
Verbatim Repetition: A Biblical Example 192
Gerbert’s Grail-like Barrels 198
Grail Castle Visits Multiplied 204

Conclusion 213

Appendix 1 229
Appendix 2 235
Bibliography 237
Index 255
 List ofIllustrations

Fig. 1. BN, fr. 12576, f. 1. Perceval kneels before a knight he mistakes

for God, as the knight’s companions look on (top register).
On the bottom left, Perceval asks Yvonet to show him King
Arthur (seated at the table); on the right, Perceval kills the
Red Knight with a javelin. By permission of the Bibliotheque
nationale de France. 8

Fig. 2. BN, fr. 12577, f. I49v. Perceval plays with the Magic
Chessboard in the Second Continuation. By permission
of the Bibliotheque nationale de France. 49

Fig. 3. BN, fr. 12576, f. 201v. Gauvain and the lady of the tent in
Gerbert’s Fourth Continuation. By permission of the
Bibliotheque nationale de France. 89

Fig. 4. BN, fr. 12577, f. 1. Perceval says goodbye to his mother, who
then falls down and dies (left top and bottom). On the top
right, Perceval kneels before the first knights he has ever
encountered; on the bottom register, he kills the Red Knight.
By permission of the Bibliotheque nationale de France. 122

Fig. 5. BN, fr. 1453, f. 85. The rubric announces that Caradoc
bathes in a tub, as does his beloved, and the snake entwines
around the knight’s arm. By permission of the Bibliotheque
nationale de France. 144

Fig. 6. BN, fr. 12577, f. 74v. At the Grail Castle, while seated at a
table with the Fisher King, Gauvain witnesses the Grail
procession. By permission of the Bibliotheque nationale de
France. 205
Fig. 7. BN, fr. 12576, f. 261. Perceval kneels before a maiden who
holds the partially covered Grail, while an angel reaches
toward it from heaven. By permission of the Bibliotheque
nationale de France. 224
 Introduction

il faut encore une fois partir de l’image du puzzle ou, si Ton prefere, l’image
d’un livre inacheve, d’une ‘oeuvre’ inachevee a l’interieur d’une litterature
jamais achevee. Chacun de mes livres est pour moi l’element d’un ensemble.
Georges Perec, ‘Entretien: Perec/Jean-Marie Le Sidaner’

From the building of cathedrals to the formation of epic and romance cycles,
continuation assumes many different guises in the Middle Ages. The slow
accretion of large scale projects may reflect contemporary means and technology,
but it represents an aesthetic choice as well: medieval taste delights in continu¬
ation. Within the literary domain, this predilection appears in the grouping of
chansons de geste around the central figures of Charlemagne or Guillaume
d’Orange, in the multiple romance cycles of Alexander or the Grail, in the two
parts of the Roman de la Rose, as in the proliferating branches of the Roman de
Renart. Cycles, sequels, retellings, and rewritings invariably raise questions about
how stories are joined, when and how stories end, what makes a whole, what
changes in meaning emerge across their continuities and discontinuities, what is
the nature of authorship in the context of medieval invention and manuscript
culture. The central argument of this book addresses these questions to demon¬
strate how Chretien de Troyes’s unfinished Grail story, a potent site for generat¬
ing romance continuations from the late twelfth through the fifteenth centuries,
continues to guide his successors through the patterns and puzzles inscribed in
his enigmatic romance. It might be argued that, even before the modern
rediscovery of his romances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Chretien’s influence, exerted directly through his own works or indirectly
through prose rewritings, extends beyond the medieval period across the gulf
typically seen as dividing the Middle Ages from the Renaissance. The work of a
writer like Pierre Sala or the successive editions of medieval romances by early
printers and booksellers suggest that our notions of periodization need a thor¬
ough rethinking in light of textual production and reproduction in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries.1
Chretien Continued: A Study of the Conte du Graal and its Verse Continuations
offers the first book-length examination of all four verse continuations that line

1 See Legacy (1987-8) and Manuscripts (1993) for a large variety of articles that explore
Chretien’s influence and afterlife.
2 Introduction

up in the wake of Chretien’s romance, which medieval scribes as well as modern

editors and readers commonly designate as Perceval, a title conveniently fur¬
nished by the first hero’s name. As my own title indicates, this book is as much
about the Conte du Graal as it is about the continuations. In order to explore their
ongoing dialogue, I analyze key features of.the originating text to establish how
and where the patterns set up by Chretien resurface in the verse continuations,
whose additions and rewritings, in turn, throw new light back on the Conte to
reveal the kinds of problems Chretien’s medieval readers and writers respond to
in his text. On the level of content, these questions focus on society and the
individual; love, gender relations, and family ties; chivalry, violence, and religion;
on the formal level, they highlight issues of collective invention and intertwined
heroes, interpretation, rewriting, and canon formation.
Just as the particular and the general constantly entertain the potential for
interactive dialogue, so my study of Chretien’s strangely decentered romance
joined to successive continuations operates on a more abstract dimension as well:
its very specificity outlines a theoretical reflection on the poetics of continuation
that function in this cycle and widely throughout medieval literature. The
overview that emerges from detailed textual analyses, whether particular to the
Perceval Continuations or shared with other literary cycles in verse and prose,
should thus serve scholars, students, and general readers interested in broader
notions of continuation, contradiction, and collective authorship, as well as
specialists of medieval French literature. While my attention stays squarely
focused on the medieval examples before me (which constitute an enormous
textual edifice through their accumulated length), literary practice and popular
culture in a postmodern world show great interest in similar kinds of experiments
with serial works.
Our understanding of contemporary performance is deepened by expanding
our historical grasp of literary precedents, both as they differ from and anticipate
current productions. If from a modern perspective, we limit Chretien’s author¬
ship to the 9,000-plus verses of his unfinished romance, I demonstrate here that,
within the terms of medieval practice, Chretien continues to exert authorship
throughout the cycle, as continuators write freely but remain faithful to his
tutelage through the continuing presence of the Conte du Graal inscribed at
the head of each manuscript compilation.2
For those already familiar with the continuations and the relatively few studies
they have attracted, this claim may appear surprising. As indicated by multiple
editions, translations, and a rich bounty of critical writings, modern scholarship
has given ample attention to the powerful synthesis offered by the Lancelot-Grail,
the anonymous prose romances (also known as the Vulgate Cycle) that absorbed

2 Genette’s theoretical discussion of continuation and suite includes the same notion of a guiding
spirit extending from the original work, finished or unfinished, on through the (new) ending or
prolongation (1982: 181-3).
 Introduction 3

and rewrote Chretien’s Grail romance into the chronicle of Arthurian history
composed in the early part of the thirteenth century and the source of most
modern rewritings since Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur brought it into the
English literary tradition in the late fifteenth century. By contrast, the four verse
continuations have yet to garner much critical attention, even though they have
been available as a group and in multiple versions since the publication of
William Roach’s monumental, multi-volumed edition, completed in 1983 (an
edition of the Fourth Continuation appeared separately in three volumes, started
by Mary Williams in 1922 and completed by Marguerite Oswald in 1975). The
verse continuations remain undeservedly marginalized in modern critical dis¬
course in large measure because, for modern readers, their apparently miscellan¬
eous and inconsistent accumulation of materials makes it difficult to see them as
acceptable continuations. We are disappointed that the continuators appear to
know no better than we do how Chretien planned to solve the puzzles of a work
that in so many respects seems to challenge the model of Arthurian romance that
Chretien generated in his previous romances.3 To what end did he introduce
religious issues into the matter of Britain? How would he explain the relationship
between the two heroes—and their mothers, usually unnoticed in romance?
Would Perceval return to the Grail Castle and, with the Grail quest completed,
to his beloved Blancheflor? The continuations fail to answer our questions
according to expectation, if at all; they do not form a recognizable or satisfactory
whole in relation to Chretien’s romance.
Yet the manuscript tradition requires us to accept the implicit claim of oneness
extending across the obvious multiplicity of sometimes discordant voices vari¬
ously combined in a dozen manuscript compilations. Indeed, most medieval
readers would have encountered the Conte du Graal not by itself but as part of an
ensemble, diversely combined with one, two, three or four continuations. It
might be argued that Perceval survives in many more copies than other romances
by Chretien (eighteen versus an average of twelve to fourteen for Erec, Cliges, and
Yvain-, seven for Lancelot within the extant corpus of forty-five manuscripts and
fragments) precisely because of the interest generated by the continuations.
Seen in that light, the verse continuations reward our attention not only by
revealing their own underestimated merits but also by helping us discover, as
they pursue their dialogue with Chretien on a variety of levels (narrative and
structural, as well as thematic), the crucial issues embedded in the Grail story
under his authorizing signature.

3 Chretien’s four earlier romances are usually ordered and approximately dated as follows: Erec et
Enide (c. 1165-70) and Cliges (c. 1170-7), followed by Le Chevalier de la Charrette (Lancelot), and Le
Chevalier au lion (Yvain), the last two composed between 1177 and 1181, either simultaneously or
alternately, judging by their intertwined plots and the three references to Lancelot included in Yvain.
4 Introduction

OVERVIEW OF THE CORPUS

A short introduction to the whole corpus analyzed here will help explain a number
of significant choices that underpin this study. At the behest of Philip of Flanders,
Chretien composes Le Conte du Graal (c. 1181—91, the date ante quem furnished by
Philips death on crusade in Acre). When his narrative ends in the midst of the
Guiromelant episode as Gauvain’s messenger arrives at Arthur’s court, the anonym¬
ous First Continuation (late twelfth century) picks up the thread of Gauvain’s tale
and carries his story forward (including one or two Grail Casde visits, depending on
the version), while adding its own displacements by inserting into the narrative
sequence the story of two more heroes, Caradoc and Gauvain’s brother Guerrehes.
The Second Continuation by Wauchier de Denain (late twelfth century) returns to
Perceval and brings him back to the Grail Castle after a long series of adventures
have taken him on parallel quests for the Chessboard Lady (and a brief return to
Blancheflor). A Third Continuation by Manessier (c. 1214—27), which begins
during Perceval’s visit with the Fisher King (interrupted by the untimely end of
the Second Continuation), affirms his achievement of the Grail quest but sends him
off on a quest for family vengeance before completing Perceval’s life story with an
account of his edifying end as king, then hermit and priest. In two manuscripts, a
Fourth Continuation by Gerbert de Montreuil (c. 1226—30) has been inserted
between the Second and Third.4 Gerbert begins at the same place as Manessier
(and probably wrote without knowledge of his continuation), but he interprets
Perceval’s performance at the Grail Casde as still in need of improvement: a new
series of adventures take him back to many of the highpoints of his wanderings in
the Conte and include a chaste marriage with Blancheflor before his now successful
return to the Grail Casde (at which point the narrative of the Third Continuation
resumes). Coming after the popular recasting of Chretien’s romances in the prose
romance cycle, the last two continuators demonstrate the influence of the Questedel
Saint Graal by reinserting religious issues after the more courdy adventures of the
First and Second Continuations. Both Gerbert and Manessier present a Grail hero
who must remain virginal; and both move Gauvain into a marginal role in relation
to Perceval.5
The ensemble of four continuations creates an enormous cycle of romances,
some 75,000 verses long, whose pattern of accumulation can be summarized as
follows:

4 Only the name Gerbert appears in the text of the Fourth Continuation but he has been
identified with Gerbert de Montreuil who also wrote the Roman de la Violette (r. 1227-9).
5 Cf. Busby’s overview of the different spirit that characterizes each segment of the cycle:
‘Chretien, spiritual and mystical; the First Continuation, wildly supernatural, exuberant and
archaic; the Second Continuation, secular and conventional; Manessier, rational and reassuring;
Gerbert de Montreuil, solemn and sermonizing’ (2006: 229).
 Introduction 5

(P) Le Conte du Graal (Perceval) by Chretien de Troyes, c.l 181-91

(1) The First, or Gauvain Continuation, end of twelfth century
(2) The Second, or Perceval Continuation by Wauchier de Denain, end of
twelfth century.6
(3) The Third Continuation by Manessier, c. 1214-27
(4) The Fourth Continuation by Gerbert de Montreuil, written c. 1226-30,
inserted between the Second and Third Continuations in mss TV, c. 1250
(or later)

The anonymous First Continuation shows a particularly complex development.

Roach’s edition offers a selection of manuscripts from three different groups,
published in separate volumes, in order to make available the Mixed, Long, and
Short Redactions (vols. I, II, and III, part 1, respectively). Although the editor
can draw no conclusions about ‘the manner in which the individual redactions
developed into the state in which they now exist’ (I, xxxix), the short version
(found in five manuscripts), with its single, very disparate Grail Castle visit for
Gauvain, appears to have preceded the others. Both the Long Redaction (four
manuscripts) and Mixed Redaction (two manuscripts) add another Grail Castle
visit to bring it more in line with Chretien’s episode, as we shall see in Chapter 5.7 8
A detailed list of manuscripts and their combinations reveals the variety of
states found in the tradition and the great diversity of reception enjoyed by
Perceval (Busby, ed. 1993: xxxix). It also highlights the dominant role played by
the combination P 1 2 3 within the overall distribution, even though different
redactions of the First Continuation add further variations within that ‘canonical’
form. The table orders the manuscripts by sigla; it indicates date and provenance,
identifies which other romances by Chretien are included in the manuscript (if
any) and which continuations (if any) follow the Conte du Graal I Like the
enfances added to epic cycles, ‘prequels’ appear in two manuscripts: the Elucida¬
tion (E) precedes Chretien’s prologue; Bliocadran (B) follows it.9 The former
includes both exordium and narrative, which furnishes explanations (the origins
of disaster for the kingdom of Logres, for example) and anticipates events to

6 Busby dates the earliest form of the First Continuation before 1200 (2006: 222) with the
Second Continuation composed immediately after c. 1200 (229); all four continuations were ‘in
existence by c. 1225, or shortly thereafter’ (228).
7 Roach’s outline of the plot and division into five sections, each with a varying number of
episodes gives a clear overview of what the different versions and manuscripts have in common and
where they differ (I, xlvi-lxii). See App. 1, where I have reproduced Roach’s division into segments
and episodes for the first three continuations and added a similar brief analysis of Gerbert’s
continuation, in order to help orient readers who may be more or less familiar with the Perceval
Continuations.
8 Detailed information on the manuscripts is given in Roach’s edn. of the continuations (1965-83:
I, xvi-xxxii), Busby’s edn. of Perceval (1993: ix-xxxix), and numerous essays in Manuscripts (2003).
9 Both prequels appear in the 16th-cent. French prose version printed in 1530 and in the
German tradition as well (see Pickens 2006a: 215-16). I have not included the prequels in this
study nor the later prose translation, although the persistence of interest in the cycle is noteworthy.
6 Introduction

follow in an extended Grail romance (for example, Grail visits for Perceval and
Gauvain). Bliocadran picks up the Elucidations chronology and leads into
Perceval's opening scene; most particularly it fills in the missing paternal geneal¬
ogy for Chretien’s mother-centered hero (Pickens 2006a: 215—21).

A Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 794, includes all of Chretien’s

romances copied by Guiot, first half of the thirteenth century, Champagne
(P 1 short 2)
B Berne, Bibliotheque de la bourgeoisie (Burgerbibliothek) 354, early four¬
teenth century, Eastern (?) (P)
C Clermont-Ferrand, Bibliotheque municipale et interuniversitaire 248,
second half of thirteenth century, Northern (P)
E Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, 19.1.5, first half of thirteenth
century, Eastern (P 1 long 2 3)
F Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana 2943, mid-thirteenth century, Eastern (P)
H London, College of Arms (Heralds’ College), Arundel XIV, mid-fourteenth
century, England (P)
K Berne, Stadtbibliothek 113, late thirteenth century (2 + conclusion)
L London, British Library, Additional 36614, second half of thirteenth
century, Eastern (B P 1 short 2)
M Montpellier, Bibliotheque interuniversitaire, Section Medecine H 249, late
thirteenth century, Northern (P 1 long 2 3)
P Mons, Bibliotheque universitaire et publique 331/206, mid-thirteenth
century, Northeastern (E B P 1 short 2 3)
Q Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 1429, second half of thirteenth
century, Champagne (P 1 long 2 3)
R Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 1450, inserts all of Chretien’s
romances into Wace’s Brut, second quarter thirteenth century, Northeast¬
ern (P 1 short)
S Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 1453, early fourteenth century, Paris
(P 1 short 2 3)
T Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 12576, second half of thirteenth
century, Northeastern (P 1 mixed 2 4 3)
U Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 12577, first half of fourteenth
century, Paris (P 1 long 2 3)
V Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, nouvelles acquisitions franfaises 6614,
second half of thirteenth century, Northeastern (incomplete, especially
Manessier) (P 1 mixed 2 4 3)
a Annonay fragments, late twelfth or early thirteenth century, includes parts
of all Chretien’s romances except Lancelot, Champagne (P fragments)
1 Two fragments of Perceval, first half of thirteenth century, Northeastern
(P fragments)
 Introduction 7

p Prague, Bibliotheque de l’Universite (Clementium) 220, end twelfth or

early thirteenth century, Northeastern (P fragments)
q Paris, Bibliotheque nationale, fonds fr. 1429, a fragment of Perceval added
to the beginning of manuscript Q, first half of thirteenth century, Cham¬
pagne (P fragments)

A brief analysis of the data included here can give some sense of the dissemin¬
ation and readership that characterize Perceval and the continuations. Among
Chretien’s romances, the Conte du Graal appears in the most varied contexts,
from author collections and romance or genre collections to the cycle of verse
continuations (Busby 2005: 69-72). The geographical distribution of manu¬
scripts indicated by place of origin and dialect particularly associates Perceval and
the continuations with northeastern France, perhaps not surprisingly since the
two patrons named by Chretien and Manessier were both counts of Flanders.10
While the Anno nay fragments suggest the manuscript originally included a
complete collection of Chretien’s romances and thus offer the closest witness to
Chretien’s activity as writer (perhaps as early as the late twelfth century), the
majority of the manuscripts date from the thirteenth century; four are produced
in the fourteenth. But Chretien and the continuations continue to circulate
among readers at least through the sixteenth century, as evidenced by a printed
version in French prose, published in 1530, which contains the Elucidation and a
shortened version of Bliocadran, Perceval and the three standard continuations.
Printing and prosification thus considerably extend the textual life of the entire
cycle, thanks to their modernized forms.11 But there is evidence as well that even
earlier manuscripts continue to circulate in the sixteenth century: in the bottom
margin of ms. T’s first folio (see Fig. 1), a handwritten note extends across two
columns and reads, ‘Ce livre appartient a Mons de la Hargerie qui l’a preste a
madame de Contay qui a promis lui rendre’ (This book belongs to Monseigneur
de la Hargerie who has lent it to Madame de Contay who has promised to return
it to him). These are most likely Franfoise de Contay (born c. 1490) and her
contemporary Francis de Raisse (whose signature appears on f. 284v).12
The entire page gives evidence of the wear and tear of repeated handling, with
its blotches, stains, and rubbings. The historiated letter in the third column,
which shows Perceval standing and looking down (saddling his horse?), is barely
legible, though the miniature on the top left still colorfully represents key
episodes at the beginning of the romance and clearly marks the opening page

10 For an overview of all Chretien manuscripts, see the catalogues presented by Terry Nixon,
particularly those arranged by place of origin (2: 15-16), by scribes and production (17), as well as
the ‘Index of Former Owners’ by Roger Middleton (2: 87—176) in Manuscripts (1993). Of the
eighteen manuscripts and fragments, twelve come from the northeastern or eastern regions of
France, three from Champagne, two from Paris, and one from England.
11 Roach identifies this I6th-cent. printed version as G (I, xxxii).
12 Manuscripts (1993: 2, 117-18, 216-31); see esp. 227-8 (where Middleton cautions us against
assuming that Madame de Contay intended to read the borrowed manuscript) and 275.
8 Introduction

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Fig. 1. BN, fr. 12576, f. 1. Perceval kneels before a knight he mistakes for God, as the
knight’s companions look on (top register). On the bottom left, Perceval asks Yvonet to
show him King Arthur (seated at the table); on the right, Perceval kills the Red Knight
with a javelin.
 Introduction 9

of Chretien’s romance and the entire cycle. As Alison Stones has observed, first
miniatures tend to be different from others (1993: 1, 232) and such is the case
here, since it is the only illustration in the series to represent several scenes
together in an elaborate four-part structure.
The specific images included deserve further commentary, and I shall return to
them in later chapters, but for the moment they may best serve to call attention to
the general pattern of illustration, as well as the individual fit of image and text, as is
typical of all romances, Arthurian or not.13 In general, given the size of the cycle, a
paucity of decoration and illustration characterizes these manuscripts, but among
Chretien’s romances the Conte du Graal is nevertheless the most frequently illus¬
trated, and their iconographic program gives us some insight into the ongoing
medieval reception of Perceval and the continuations. As Keith Busby suggests, the
apparently random choice of subjects chosen for representation in miniatures and
historiated letters is best understood in the context of Chretien’s reception as a
whole: certain scenes, episodes, and themes become favorites for later authors and
no doubt the public as well (1993a: 1, 359). Among the scenes chosen from the
continuations, the Livrede Caradoc is particularly well represented (Busby 1993c: 1,
370), while perhaps surprisingly for the modern public, representations of the Grail
remain scarce across the illustrated manuscripts: only twelve miniatures in the five
illustrated manuscripts, all of which date from the period in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries when prose romances like the Lancelot-Grail and the Prose
Tristan were at the height of their popularity. Laurence Harf-Lancner s analysis of
the fantastic in these illustrations shows that the Christian marvelous (including the
Grail as well as the diabolical) appears on average about as much as the Breton
marvelous (1993: 1, 464). In the Chretien section, only ms. U shows the Grail with
the lance and sword and always shows it as a kind of ciborium, a vision projected
back from the Christianization of the Grail in the later rewritings. Indeed, the
iconography of the Grail, lance, and sword develops in the continuations and
reflects the rival prose cycle (Baumgartner 1993: 1, 489—92). Despite the modern
critical tendency to treat verse and prose romances as separate categories, illustra¬
tions, intertextual references, as well as medieval manuscript tradition in general
suggest rather a dynamic of interaction between them, a continuity of practice and
reception across their differences.14
Margot van Mulken points out that almost every Perceval manuscript is subject
to partner shifts in the process of copying, making the choice of a critical edition
especially problematic.15 The few stable manuscripts, at the center of the manu¬
script configuration, T, L, and M, are the sought-after partners for the scribes of
other manuscripts (1993: 2, 45). Manuscript T (BN, fr. 12576), written in a

13 Baumgartner (1993: 1, 490). I shall have occasion to analyze a number of miniatures from
S, T, and U, in order to follow the play between text and image in their ongoing reception.
14 Busby (1993a: 1, 353-4), Bruckner (2000b: 15).
15 For an overview of the state of scholarship on the entangled filiation of Chretien manuscripts
in general and those of Perceval in particular, see Busby’s introd. to his Perceval edn. (1993: xl-xlviii).
10 Introduction

Picard dialect and dated around 1250, is the most cyclical of the Perceval
manuscripts with all four continuations included.16 In this study, it serves as
the primary object of analysis; it encapsulates one reading of the cycle, even as it
plays off multiple states of the set as a whole. For this reason, I have taken all
quotations of Chretien’s Conte du Graal from Roach’s edition of T, while also
consulting Keith Busby’s more recent critical edition of the romance, for which
T serves as the base manuscript.17 Felix Lecoy, who based his Classiques Fran^ais
du Moyen Age edition of Perceval on Guiot’s copy (ms. A), offered this general
assessment of T: ‘un bon manuscrit, mais dont la regularite est en grande partie
due a une revision ancienne du texte... qui a 1’inconvenient, me semble-t-il, de
donner du poeme une version quelque peu affadie dans le detail de l’expres-
sion’.18 I shall have more than one occasion to refer to T’s efforts to coordinate all
the parts brought together in this rendition of the cycle.
An overview of the manuscript tradition necessitates some reflection on the
choice of title used here and elsewhere to identify Chretien’s work, since in certain
respects the two titles—Le Conte du Graal and Perceval—tell us rather different
things about this romance and how it is viewed. The first is the name as given by
the author in his prologue and, as we shall see in Chapter 1, it is unusual within
Chretien’s corpus, the only title that does not designate the hero either directly by
name or indirectly by pseudonym. To use Chretien’s title is to remind ourselves of
the first author’s point of view on his composition and the air of mystery he has
willingly wrapped around a romance that purports to be about a large serving
dish.19 The anonymous writer who composed the Elucidation similarly refers to Ti
Contes del Great’ (482), when he reframes Chretien’s romance.
The other title naming the first hero does not wait for the shorthand of
modern scholarship to come into currency. Already in the manuscript tradition
the explicits added by scribes to demarcate Chretien’s work, or the series of
romances that end with Manessier’s continuation, privilege Perceval’s name as
synecdoche.20 When Guiot copies all of Chretien’s romances in BN, fr. 794, he

16 The only other manuscript in which Gerbert’s continuation appears is V, fragmentary but
clearly a twin of T: their decorative programs correspond closely; both are from the same exemplar,
and both were copied by the same scribe (Busby 1993b: 1, 52-3).
17 Quotations from Chretien’s other works will be taken from Romans (1994b), unless otherwise
indicated.
18 Quoted by Gouttebroze (1995: 167 n. 5).
19 Pace Robert de Boron’s and later rewriters’ interpretation of the Grail as a cup or chalice,
Chretien’s descriptions make it clear that his Grail is a deep, wide serving dish in which we would
be surprised not to find a large fish (see Ch. 5).
20 A number of medieval writers refer to Chretien in general or allude specifically to his romances
by the hero’s name (see the appendix in Legacy 1987-8: 1, 333-7). Of the thirteen references Van
Coolput lists, eight refer to Perceval or to Chretien in the context of a Grail romance (including
three of the verse continuators). Of particular interest here is the reference in the Roman de Hem,
where Sarrasin seems to acknowledge both titles used to designate Chretien’s Conte-. ‘Oi aves... du
romant que Crestiiens | Trova si bel de Perceval, | Des aventures du Graal’ (475-8; qtd. 336-7: you
have heard about the romance that Chretien composed so well about Perceval and the adventures of
 Introduction 11

writes ‘Explycyt perceuax le uiel’ (‘here ends the old Perceval’) to mark the passage
from Perceval to the First Continuation (Roach I, xvii).21 Ms. B (Berne, Bib-
liotheque de la Bourgeoisie 354), in which the Conte du Graal appears by itself,
ends with Explicit li romanz de perceval’ (Busby, ed. 394). Roach prints the three
colophons found at the end of Manessier’s Third Continuation (V, 344):

M Explicit de perceval le galois

(End of Perceval the Welshman)
T Explicit li romans de percheval
(End of the romance of Perceval)
U Ci fenist li roumans De perceval le galois Le quel fu moult preus Et courtois
Et plain de grant chevalerie Pour lamour dieu feni sa vie
(Elere ends the romance of Perceval the Welshman who was very worthy and
courteous and full of great chivalry. For the love of God I finished his life
story.)22

Each of these variations on Perceval’s name as title reminds us that the first hero
has in the long run been identified as dominant in the story of the Grail (at least
where Galahad has not supplanted him and reduced his status to one among
three). Most of these designations look back from a point of view embedded
within the continuations and their dialogue with the master text, as it has been
reinterpreted over and over again through the process of accumulation. The two
different titles commonly used to designate Chretien’s last romance thus capture
intersecting views, looking forward from his prologue and backward from a series
of stopping points that mark the stages from the unfinished end of Le Conte du
Graal through Manessier’s epilogue.

PERCEVAL CONTINUATIONS AND

GRAIL REWRITINGS

A quick review of Perceval and the continuations in relation to the many

reinventions of the Grail story that proliferate across European literary traditions
can give some idea of their weight and influence. If Chretien has long been
recognized as one of the most important medieval French writers, the focus here
brings out not only how his literary capital generates multiple rewritings; it

the Grail’). Van Coolput does not include the famous passage in Flamenco, where the narrator
enumerates many tales told at the wedding celebration, including references to all five of Chretien’s
romances (1960: 665-83). Among the excerpts named one concerns Perceval: ‘L’autre comtet de
Persaval | Co venc a la cort a caval’ (671-2: another told of Perceval, how he came to court on
horseback).
21 Interestingly, in Guiot’s famous manuscript, Perceval is separated from Chretien’s other
romances and placed at the end of the compilation (Busby, ed. x), where it is followed by the
First Continuation and a fragment of the Second Continuation (Roach I, xvii).
22 Among manuscripts containing Manessier, the end is missing in EQS (Roach V, xv-xvii).
12 Introduction

highlights as well how the Perceval Continuations extend his reach and conse¬
quence. Within the French tradition, Robert de Boron links Grail history and
Perceval’s genealogy to biblical and British history by composing (c. 1200) his
Estoire dou Graal to explain the mysteries of the Grail and its relation to
Arthurian Britain. Robert transforms the Conte s enigmatic object into the
Holy Grail by identifying it with the vessel from the Last Supper in which Joseph
of Arimathea collected Christ’s blood. Robert s work marks the inception of a
‘little Grail cycle’, with versions in verse and prose: it includes the Estoire (or
Joseph d’Arimathie in the prose version), Merlin, and the Didot-Perceval.23 The
last part of the trilogy picks up Perceval’s extended story, eliminates Chretien’s
Gauvain section and the First Continuation, and concludes the story of the Grail
by way of the Second Continuation and the end of Arthur’s kingdom as
recounted by the Roman de Brut (1155), Waces translation and expansion of
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (1138).
The anonymous prose romancers who elaborated Lancelot’s story and com¬
bined it with the Grail quest to form the backbone of the Vulgate Cycle,
composed the Lancelot proper, the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort le Roi
Artu between 1215 and 1230. The Estoire du Saint Graal and the Estoire de
Merlin, though composed after the 1230s, take their place at the beginning of the
cycle as the first two branches according to the story’s chronology. These authors
mined Chretien’s romances as well as the Robert de Boron cycle: Perceval remains
an important knight in the Queste but his status as hero is reduced once the
Christological figure of Galahad takes center stage among multiple questers in
pursuit of the Holy Grail (as we shall see more fully in Chapter 4).
Scholars have not resolved the problem of deciding whether the Perlesvaus, another
Grail story written in prose, precedes or follows the Queste.14 In this anonymous
romance from the first half of the thirteenth century, the author conceptualizes the
Grail quest as a violent struggle between the Old Law and the New. He picks up
Perceval’s suspended story, framing it with a disquieting episode in which Arthur’s
squire Cahus is killed, then elaborates three principal Grail quests: Gauvain’s,
Lancelot’s, and finally Perceval’s. After his successful completion of the quest, Perceval
frees his mother (still alive in this version though she dies at the beginning of
Chretien’s), returns to the Grail Casde, then sails away to an unknown destination.
On the whole, Perlesvaus remains an enigmatic text, not least because of the way it

23 There is some disagreement among scholars as to what exactly Robert wrote and whether the
verse or prose versions came first. Pickens presents an overview that generally credits Robert with the
verse Estoire and Merlin, and some form of the Didot-Perceval (2006b: 247—59). The mises en prose
by anonymous continuators remain identified with Robert in the manuscript tradition, whose
importance is attested by the large number of extant copies (some sixty manuscripts plus fragments).
Gowans argues for the precedence of the prose versions and credits Robert de Boron with only the
Joseph part of the cycle associated with his name. Her analysis has significant ramifications in
assessing the anti-Semitic character of Robert’s writing, since the recurrent vilification of Jews that
appears in the verse Estoire is less prominent in the prose Joseph (2004: 21).
24 For an overview of the romance and current scholarship, see Andrea M. L. Williams (2006).
 Introduction 13

mixes the Grail adventure with other marvels of Logres, contaminating orthodox
Christian allegory with ‘merveilleux paien’25—a trait that may echo Chretien’s own
unexpected insertion of Christian material into the matter of Brittany.
Interestingly, the Perlesvaus romancer includes among Lancelot’s adventures a
beheading contest, a motif that figured prominently in the First Continuation’s
Livre de Caradoc. It will subsequently play an important role in the fourteenth-
century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and later middle English versions. The
Livre de Caradoc also supplies a chastity test that finds echoes in the variants
included in the Lai du Cor and the Lai du Mantel (end of the twelfth century),
and these too have English language equivalents.26 Other parts of the First Con¬
tinuation inspire a number of works from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries. Gauvain’s encounter with the Tent Maiden (which will be analyzed in
detail in Chapter 2) provides the storymatter for The Jeaste of Sir Gawain, which
combines and reinvents the episode’s two stages, widely separated in the Gauvain
Continuation. The Jeaste, like The Knightly Tale ofGologros and Gawane, a Scottish
romance that borrows materials from the adventure of the Chastel Orguelleus, is
largely based on the 1530 printing of the First Continuation.27
With and without continuations, Chretien’s Conte du Graal can be followed
into German, Welsh, and English versions. Widely disseminated in the German
literary tradition, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (c. 1200—10) completes
and expands Chretien’s romance with introductory sections and a conclusion,
redefining the Grail as an emerald stone and organizing his narrative around the
theme of loyalty and faithfulness (Wynn 185, 192).28 In the fourteenth century,
Philipp Colin and Claus Wisse frame Parzival with the two prequels and three
continuations from the French tradition to produce their ‘new Perceval’.29
The Welsh romance, Peredur, dates from the thirteenth century and demon¬
strates a more problematic relationship with Chretien’s romance. Given the sig¬
nificant differences between them, scholars debate whether the author of Peredur
knew Chretien: might both authors have been working from similar materials?
Nevertheless, close analysis of certain parallels between them suggests that the
Welsh romancer, although clearly reworking Celtic traditions, was very likely
influenced by Chretien in parts of his tale.30 Some episodes seem to echo Gauvain

25 Anne Berthelot quoted by Williams (2006: 264): ‘L’Autre Monde incarne: Chastel Mortel et
Chastel des Armes dans le Perlesvaus, in Buschinger and Spielwok (eds.), KonigArtus undder heilige
Graal (Griefswald, 1994), 31.
26 See the discussion by Gillian Rogers in Arthur of the English (2001: 219-24).
27 W. R. J. Baron presents both romances, as well as Gawain and the Green Knight, in Arthur
of the English (2001: 155—83).
28 His later romance Triturel (c.1217) has no previous source but assumes knowledge of Parzival,
as Wolfram elaborates but leaves unfinished a Grail story that later romancers will continue (Wynn
204-5).
29 In his overview of the textual tradition, Roach identifies this German version as D (I, xxxiii).
See also Pickens (2006a: 215).
3° See Ian Lovecys discussion in Arthur of the Welsh (1991: 171-80), as well as Jeffrey Gantz’s
introduction to his translation (1981: 21—5, 217-18).
14 Introduction

materials and Perceval’s chessboard adventures in the Second Continuation

(Peredur has a whole series of love affairs in sequence), but most strikingly there
is no Grail: at his uncle’s castle he sees a bleeding lance and a bloody head carried
on a platter, representing a crime against his family which he will later avenge.
Likewise, the author of Sir Percyvell of .Guiles may or may not have known
Chretien. In the first half of the fourteenth century, he too gives us a Perceval
story in which the Grail has been replaced by the bloody head on a platter.31 In
Ad Putter’s view, the anonymous English romancer has indeed reworked Chre¬
tien’s romance to give a clear direction to his narrative from start to happy
ending. Percyvell’s comic energy propels him ever forward from one adventure
to the next (including the crucial meeting with the maiden in the tent) but
ultimately back to the place he started from, when he is able to reunite with his
mother in the forest, having restored her to sanity by returning with the ring she
gave him at the moment of parting.
This inventory of works orbiting around Chretien’s Conte and the verse
continuations serves to highlight how similar problems arise throughout the
different rewritings, from varied attempts to give closure to the Grail story to
thematic questions, whether centered on the relationship between Grail heroes
and love or the issues raised by family, religion, and violence. But we can see this
dialogue in continuity and difference acted out most directly across the expanse
of the Perceval Continuations whose verses line up immediately with Chretien’s
last, incomplete sentence, an implicit invitation to continue his suspended
narrative.
If individually the continuations do not address all the complexities of Chretien’s
Conte, across the accumulation of all four, they show remarkable fidelity in
integrating important elements distilled from a compellingly dense and mysterious
romance that seems to promise and withhold so much in terms of plot and
meaning. However far they appear to wander from the master text, the continu-
ators considered as a group respond sympathetically to the dynamic incongruities
and essentially paradoxical structure of their model. Even when they cannot resolve
the oppositions and contradictions built into the Grail story, they neither efface
nor eliminate the difficulties. Remaining faithful to the complementary and
contradictory spirit of the decentered Conte du Graal, they do not simplify tensions
but tend rather to follow, through the process of rewriting and continuation, the
impetus of Chretien’s own characteristic techniques.
Properly understood, the same miscellaneous character that strikes modern
readers as inconsistent with our definition of a good continuation is what allows
the set of four verse continuations to function as an appropriate and necessary
response to the impossible combinations that Chretien has written into his
romance, requiring his readers to grapple with without suppressing the apparent

31 While building his comparison on the assumption that the Percyvell poet knew Chretien,
Putter gives a summary of scholars and views for and against (2004: 193 n. 3).
 Introduction 15

contradictions, the multiple strands so resistant to resolution. Even so, across the
meanderings of the four continuations, we can observe a certain flattening or
reduction of the Conte s incongruities, whether in the role of mothers and lovers
or the character of the Grail hero. Such shifts reflect the popular influence of the
Queste del Saint Graal, written after the Second Continuation and significantly
dividing the four verse continuations into before and after.

VERSE AND PROSE/CENTRIPETAL

AND CENTRIFUGAL TEXTUALITY

Since the better-known prose romances serve as a point of comparison through¬

out this study and clearly operate within the same horizon of expectation for
medieval (as well as modern) readers and writers, a brief comparison between
the Lancelot-Grail and the verse continuations, based on their relationship to
Chretien, helps identify both the nature of their differences as well as the features
they share in rewriting his romances. In a chapter on intertextuality for The
Legacy of Chretien de Troyes, I coined the terms centripetal and centrifugal
intertextuality to contrast the prose romances’ absorption of Chretien’s works
into the Vulgate Cycle with the more linear configuration of Perceval and its
continuations. The anonymous author who rewrites Le Chevalier de la Charrette
and places its generative power at the center of the Prose Lancelot uses conden¬
sation, amplification, and displacement to explode the boundaries of Chretien’s
Knight of the Cart episode and expand the hero’s story in multiple directions.
Through the technique of the interlace and a narrator who has eschewed
Chretien’s wit and irony in favor of the objective voice of the story itself (‘ce
dist li contes’), the prose authors recount Lancelot’s entire biography within
the history of Arthur’s reign; they recast the quest for a now Holy Grail with a
new Grail hero, Lancelot’s son, and use it as the pivot between Lancelot and
Guenevere’s love story and the fall of Arthur’s kingdom. In the Queste del Saint
Graal, allegory displaces narrative as a rival mode of continuation. And though
Manessier and Gerbert, the third and fourth continuators, resist the kind of
allegorical program that characterizes the Questes rewriting of the ‘Story of the
Grail’, they must nevertheless reconcile the influence of the prose interpretation
with their fidelity to the Perceval. As a result, we see a difference between the first
two and last two continuations, a new vector set by the Queste affecting their
treatment of the two heroes, the compatibility of love and the Grail, and
the ambiguity sustained by Chretien’s unfinished narrative, which nevertheless
continues to furnish the starting point, quite literally in each of its manuscript
renditions, for the expanding cycle in verse.
On the contrary, except for an abbreviated Charrette episode, Chretiens text is
no longer present in the prose cycle, though it continues to function as an
intertext: a reservoir of material for the anonymous writers, a point of reference
16 Introduction

for readers who know both versions and can compare them.32 But an alternate
point of view for intertextual reception is also built into the prose cycle once its
scope is sufficiently developed. So all-encompassing are its narrative amplifica¬
tions, the Lancelot-Grail provides its own universe of discourse, its own matrix
out of which further reinventions flow through episodes, quests, and branches,
first to the Mort le roi Artu, then back to the prequels, the Estoire del Saint Graal
and the Estoire de Merlin. True to the centripetal movement that characterizes the
prose rewriting of Chretien’s Arthurian romances, the whole Vulgate Cycle
reconfigures Lancelot’s story at its core, just as Le Chevalier de la Charrette
was absorbed into the center of the Prose Lancelot. In the back and forward
movement of their overarching structure, both romance cycles, in verse and in
prose, play with the desire for, as well as resistance to ending.
Centrifugal intertextuality provides an obvious metaphor for a set of texts that
continue to move out and away from their common starting point, as the Conte
du Graal remains in place, the first romance of a gradually expanding sequence.
The phrase represents at the same time an image of the tension between center
and ever receding periphery. Centrifugal intertextuality thus figures the way
Chretien’s model serves as a repeating center throughout the series by remaining
off-center at the narrative beginning, the place where all continuators return for
inspiration and reinvention in order to set out anew, even as they pick up the
linear thread of narration wherever their immediate predecessor left it. In the
Perceval Continuations, the intertextual play goes beyond their common partici¬
pation in models shared by romances in general—types situated at the level of
character (King Arthur, Yvain, dwarves, damsels in distress, etc.), scenes (for
example combat, hospitality), and situations (for example the Fair Unknown
arriving at court). Their intertextual dialogue is more pointed, based on rewriting
specific scenes or patterns from their common center/starting point.33
In this respect, two references to ‘Crestien’ found in ms. T’s version of the First
Continuation appear emblematic as they represent points of maximum conver¬
gence and divergence in the to and fro dialogue between continuators (or scribal
editors) and the master text. The first occurs when Gauvain arrives at the Grail
Castle and the narrator refers back to Chretien’s praise of the fortress: ‘Crestien en
ai a garant’ (I, 1234: ‘I have Chretien as guarantor’34). The reference to an earlier
textual moment and author (who is not the current narratingyV) is unambiguous,
and readers can verify the allusion, should they so desire, by turning back the
folios of any manuscript copy (or pages of a printed edition) to the place where

32 For bibliography on the Charrette and the Knight of the Cart episode in the Prose Lancelot and
further analysis of their relationship, see Bruckner (1987—8: 225, 237—49; 2003c).
33 Burns analyzes the way certain narrative patterns (imprisonment, liberation, etc.) are repeat¬
edly exploited by the prose romancers (1985: 85-109). These ‘allomorphs’ function in the Vulgate
Cycle on a level between the generic patterns of romance and the more specific textual echoes from
Chretien in the Perceval Continuations.
34 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations here and throughout the book are mine.
 Introduction 17

Perceval arrives at the Fisher King’s castle in the Conte du Graal. The second
reference, however, is a fabrication. It occurs in the interpolated Livre de Caradoc
and supports the description of a harper automaton which had a custom ‘for
which Chretien prized it all the more’ (I, 4118: ‘Dont Crestiens mix le prisoit’).
Such an automaton appears nowhere in Chretien’s works and certainly not in the
Conte du Graal, though medieval readers are perhaps less concerned than we are
with the falsity of the claim. The sense of continuing on a narrative path initially
laid out by Chretien, sustained by the allusion to his authority, may satisfy a
public listening to a romance read out loud rather than reading it from
a conveniently edited book.
This initial view of centrifugal intertextuality as a metaphor describing the
links between Perceval and the continuations requires further nuance, inasmuch
as the same movement is already built into the unfinished Conte before being
exploited and expanded by successive continuators. The peculiar nature of
Chretien’s last romance—its decentering through the unexpected doubling of
heroes, the puzzles, parallels, and contradictions set up through contiguity and
accumulation, the logic of and/both operating between its two parts, the distinct
character of its endlessness, and the characteristic indirection and displacement of
its narrative rhythm—will reappear in the continuations. Brief discussion of
these traits will help readers understand more fully in the chapters to follow
what is at stake in the centrifugal textuality that operates within Chretien’s Grail
romance, just as between Perceval and the four verse continuations.

KEY TRAITS OF THE CONTE DU GRAAL

In the Conte du Graal, Chretien introduces a series of enigmas, contradictions,

and incongruities that confront the paradoxes of human experience without
resolving them. Combined with its unfinished state, these puzzles propel succes¬
sive continuators to reread and rewrite Chretien’s story, weaving their continu¬
ations according to its dialectical movement.35 As subsequent writers pick up his
story, they respond to an implicit invitation to interpret as they rewrite, fdling in
the gaps, reorienting, even contradicting what came before. By learning how to
read them as they read Chretien, we may grasp how their additions point to what
remains silent but ready to speak in the interstices of his romance, uncovered by
repetitions and recontextualizations of the master text’s narrative elements.36

35 Is it a coincidence that Georges Perec has named the protagonist of his great book of puzzles,
La Vie mode d’emploi, Percivale Bartlebooth, whose first and last names evoke a variety of possible
literary allusions? In the epigraph cited at the beginning of the Introduction, Perec was speaking of
his whole corpus of works, but his words could also stand as epigraph to Perceval, whether within the
context of Chretien’s own corpus or that of the continuations and the larger ensembles Perec evokes.
36 I have borrowed this notion from Aviva Zornberg who uses it to describe (in psychoanalytical
terms) the intertextual relation between midrash and Torah: the rabbinic glosses reveal what remains
silent, just underneath, on the side, attached to what is there but not already said, uncovered by
18 Introduction

In exploring the varieties of contradictory knowledge and practice, Chretien is

not unique among twelfth-century thinkers. A number of recent scholars have
analyzed the importance of contradiction as a key figure for his contemporaries
across a wide spectrum of writers and disciplines. In Courtly Contradictions: The
Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century, Sarah Kay studies the play
of contradictions common to medieval logic, courtly literature, and the modern
psychoanalytic models of Jacques Lacan. Courtly Contradictions sets up with
broad as well as detailed strokes a historical and theoretical framework for a
field in which much remains to be done. In her review of Kay’s book, the
medieval historian Constance B. Bouchard also points to two other paradigm¬
changing studies, Catherine Brown’s Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic and the
Poetics of Didacticism and her own book, Every Valley Shall Be Exalted’: The
Discourse of Opposites in Twelfth-Century Thought. In Bouchard’s words, all three
seek to ‘reconceptualize the nature of contradictions common in twelfth-century
texts, arguing that they were not (as was once assumed) set up almost accidentally
by pre-modern authors struggling with literary forms, but rather were put into
those texts quite deliberately by their careful and sophisticated authors’ (2002).
Even before this recent attention to the larger currents of ‘the discourse of
opposites’, Rupert Pickens gave his study of the Perceval a subtitle that underlines
this characteristic feature of Chretien’s art: The Welsh Knight: Paradoxicality in
Chretiens Conte del Graal.37 I have been working on issues connected with
contradiction in lyric and romance for many years: the problem surfaces with
particular emphasis in Shaping Romance through discussions of how oppositions
operate in a selection of twelfth-century fictions that typify the romance genre
across a wide spectrum of different forms: their opposed terms are generally
intertwined, mutually implicated and inseparable, that is, non-disjunctive, in
Julia Kristeva’s terminology (1969: 55—62). The current study takes me further
into an exploration of how ‘and/both’ is the characteristic mode in these great
explorations of the human condition, persistent forms of the imagination that
continue to enthrall us.
Indeed, as defined by Chretien’s model, romance continuation eschews the
restrictions of either/or and claims the non-Aristotelian logic of and/both through

repeating and recontextualizing the narrative elements of the biblical text (see the introd. to
Particulars of Rapture, esp. 2—7). The poem by Wallace Stevens from which Zornberg takes her
title, ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, is not without interest for a study concerned with the
creative tension between opposites. As she quotes it (2001: 10):

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

37 Other medievalists working on issues connected to opposition, contradiction, and comple¬

mentarity, and on the connections between 12th-cent. dialectic and courtly literature, esp. in the
romances of Chretien de Troyes, include Hunt (1979) and Vance (1973 and 1987).
 Introduction 19

the process of juxtaposition and accumulation. Contiguity forces interpretation

and further narrative elaboration. Under the impetus of this logic, what first
appears as a predicament of difference becomes complementary rather than
merely contradictory. As I demonstrate later in Chapter 4, Chretien typically
constructs oppositions whose architecture requires us to retain both sides: oppos¬
ing terms remain present, equally valid, as they interact in a potentially creative
tension that neither dismisses nor suppresses either one but forces us to deal with
the paradoxical combination of both. Chretien challenges us to read and reflect
in the same mode of and/both in which he composes. We might compare the
technique to Jean de Meun’s theory of‘contrary things’ (Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun 1970: 21543), the oppositions that necessarily work together to
clarify meaning by providing a gloss of opposing terms: ‘les unes sunt des autres
gloses’ (21544).38 As suggested by the accumulation of continuations and differ¬
ent versions in manuscript compilations, nothing once added may be left out in
the quest for narrative fulfillment. Amplification across the patterns of the
syntagm continually increases the potential for discerning (or changing) possible
meaning(s). In the Perceval cycle, continuation thus encompasses paradox, oppo¬
sitions, and contradictions; it allows their dualities to stand in dynamic interaction
across successive rewritings of the narrative. Continuation operates as a formal
principle, but it is equally constitutive at the levels of content and meaning.
Most significantly, the logic of and/both is already inscribed in the two parts of
Chretien’s Conte du Graal, which begins with Perceval’s story and then without
warning adds that of Gauvain, some 4,000 verses into the narratives. As prom¬
ised, the narrator subsequently returns to Perceval, but only to insert a single
episode, dropped into the middle of the ongoing series of Gauvain’s adventures:
Perceval’s visit to his hermit uncle takes place five years into the future in relation
to Gauvain’s timeline, which nevertheless resumes after the interruption exactly
where the narrator left him. The second hero is now engaged in a quest for the
bleeding lance, thus auguring some convergence with Perceval’s quest to return to
the Fisher King and ask the two questions he failed to ask during his first
calamitous visit: whom does the Grail serve? why does the lance bleed? When
both plot lines are left suspended in midsentence (as confirmed by a number of
manuscripts without continuations), each hero has occupied half of the narrative,
a distribution that the first two verse continuators faithfully imitate along with a
reprise of the lopsided interlace of their overlapping itineraries.39

38 Jean de Meun is a connoisseur of contraries as the author of an enormous and encyclopedic

continuation added to Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la Rose {c. 1230 and 1270-80 for the two parts).
See Regalado on definitions in scholastic reasoning and Jean de Meun’s use of the concept (1981). Cf.
Dragonetti’s discussion in Le Mirage where he links the ‘contraires choses’ to the relationship between
the two authors of the Roman de la Rose (1987: 207-9). We might think of Chretien’s Conte du Graal as
providing a gloss of itself, his previous romances, and romance as genre (see below).
39 Even the last two continuations, remembering the pattern of their two-hero model, reserve
some portion of the narrative for Gauvain within the overall dominance now accorded Perceval.
20 Introduction

It is hard to underestimate the disorienting effect created by Chretien’s

unexpected doubling and decentering of heroes in a romance that far exceeds
his usual 6,000 to 7,000 verses with no end in sight. The confusion registered by
earlier scholars can give some sense of how anomalous the combination appears
in the context of twelfth-century romance in general and Chretiens corpus in
particular. In the 1950s and 1970s, medievalists debated if Chretien had left one
romance or two: one for Gauvain and another for Perceval, scrambled together
by some scribe-editor. Frappier (1977a, 1977b) defended the unity of Chretiens
double-stranded romance against Martin de Riquer’s hypothesis of two distinct
romances (1957). When Stefan Hofer speculated that a remanieur might have
written the Gauvain section and added it to Chretien’s romance of Perceval, the
idea was hotly debated by colleagues who largely disagreed (1956: 15—30). No
one argues nowadays for separating Chretien’s romance into two, but the on¬
going debates about the importance and meaning of Gauvain’s adventures in
relation to Perceval’s quest offer testimony to the continuing difficulties many
scholars have in admitting that the work may have two heroes of equal interest
and value, even if (or as) they differ from each other. ‘Oneness’ produced by a
‘molt bele conjointure’ (Erec 14), however anomalous it may seem to us, still
requires our critical attention as part of the production of meaning in this
romance at both the narrative and semantic levels.
Of course, this is not the first time that Chretien has composed a romance
with more than one hero, but his previous examples look quite different: the
establishment and testing of the couple in Erec et Enide, the two-generational
stories of father and son consecutively told in Cliges. These multiples are more
clearly defined in relation to each other, their hierarchical arrangement more
obviously explained in the narrative design as well as the action of the plot. With
his four earlier romances, Chretien seemed to be systematically rewriting con¬
temporary models.40 Moving from his predecessors’ romances of antiquity and
the highly respected traditions of Greece and Rome—the Roman de Thebes
(1150-5), Eneas (1155—60), Benoit de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (1160—
5)—Chretien claimed value for the matter of Britain. Complaining about the
oral storytellers who corrupted and disrupted their matter by dismembering it, he
touted the ‘beautiful joining’ of his own artful compositions, episodic narratives
more concentrated than the epic scope of the romans antiques but longer and
more complex than the compact, typically single-action plot of contemporary
lays. Removing the tales of Arthur and his knights of the Round Table from the
linear march of history encapsulated in Geoffrey’s Historia and Wace’s Brut,
Chretien opened a space for adventure, the marvelous, and the experiments of
fiction. Across his corpus of five romances we can see both the movement away
from and toward the expansions of antique romance, the tension between

40 For more detailed discussion of how Chretien rewrites his literary models, see Bruckner
(2000b).
 Introduction 21

separating stories and reassembling them into larger groupings and potential
cycles. There are implicit and explicit links connecting Erec and Yvain, Le
Chevalier de la Charrette, and Le Chevalier au Lion, but the first four romances
remain distinct within their textual boundaries, each centered around a single,
primary hero: Erec, Cliges, Yvain, Lancelot.
Having created with this substantial series of works a new horizon of expect¬
ation for the entertainment and edification of his initiated courtly public,
Chretien once again rewrites romance and its connections with history in his
final, unfinished composition. He reinvents quite specifically his own previous
romances as well as more generally the generic model of what romance may be, as
he continues to make it one of the most protean forms of medieval inventio.
With this last work we can no longer take for granted any simple definition of
Arthurian romance: ‘a story of love and combat that (re) builds the hero’s
identity’, or ‘a hero propelled by love of his lady fights his way through
adventures, achieves his quest and the reward for his love’. These formulations
might work for Chretien’s four previous romances and those of his contempor¬
aries who follow the model he distinguished from the romances of antiquity.
Chretien’s reinventions have already resulted in a powerful release of energy for
the imagination, but that process will be exponentially increased after his Conte
du Graal revolutionizes romance yet again. By introducing new and unexpected
matter, new configurations and new roles for his characters, new arrangements
for his narrative and new questions for his readers, Chretien designed a puzzle
that continues to fascinate us today as much as it captivated his contemporaries,
inspiring the multiple rewritings that propose radically different interpretations
of his enigmas and contradictions.
Among the many disruptive questions posed for his readers and continuators
is the problem of how to understand the relationship between two heroes who
seem to start from radically opposed positions: the ‘ex-centric’ and foolish
Perceval, an inexperienced adolescent raised in the Welsh forest far from Arthur’s
court and any knowledge of chivalry and courtliness; the suave Gauvain, the
epitome of courtliness and prowess, central to the values and standards of
Arthur’s Round Table. These two heroes move surprisingly close to each other
in the course of their adventures, strangely mirrored as we shall see in the chapters
that follow. Contradiction and complementarity? The rapprochement between
Perceval and Gauvain may startle us, though it is prepared to a certain extent by
Chretien’s previous romances where each hero’s trajectory moves him into parity
with Arthur’s nephew before surpassing him. In Le Chevalier de la Charrette, the
narrator even gives us glimpses of Gauvain’s quest to rescue Guenevere, which
moves him into parallel with the hero and enhances Lancelot’s success by contrast
with his failure.41

41 I would argue that the ‘proto-quest’ narrative of Gauvain’s effort to rescue the queen in the
Charrette anticipates his move into a more prominent role in the Conte, where his exploits as
22 Introduction

These precedents have led numerous medievalists to continue assigning to

Gauvain the secondary status he enjoys in the romances of Erec, Cliges, Yvain,
and Lancelot. They treat him as a mere foil for Perceval, if they pay any attention
to his part of the romance at all. Many scholars simply leave him out all together.
I have nevertheless argued (1993a) that the Conte du Graal's narrative requires us
to read the two knights’ sameness as well as their difference—the and/both logic
just outlined—in order to recognize their double movement into heroic status. If
we are to understand the kind of answers Chretien may have anticipated for the
questions embedded in his narrative puzzles, without collapsing the heroes’
specificity we must nevertheless read across their interlaced itineraries, as if
what happens to one happens to the other, at least on some level, from crisis
and discovery to extraordinary adventure, from mothers to Grail mysteries (or
the reverse). Dual centers of narrative interest, both heroes also demonstrate
duality in their actions and reputations. They are both good and bad; their
adventures result in success but also failure, which introduces a troubling new
view of what the hero of romance is and does, how he relates to violence and to
love relationships, how he coordinates chivalric practice and religious obligation,
service in love and family ties.42 In some yet to be explained way, Perceval and
Gauvain need each other. The tasks set before them to build and rebuild the
Arthurian ideal require multiple questers and multiple questions—a powerful
model for subsequent romancers in verse as well as in prose. There are no longer
simple solutions for a single hero in this last, unfinished romance, and the four
verse continuators will variously pursue the diverse and intertwined paths out¬
lined by the master text.

ON ENDING AND ENDLESSNESS

The unfinished state of Chretien’s romance is itself a major question that resists
unambiguous answers. Was it left unfinished intentionally or unintentionally?
How does the answer to that question affect the dialogue continuators maintain
with the master text or the way we should read and interpret Perceval and its
continuations? We can know nothing with certainty about Chretien’s intentions,
nor do we know if there is any biographical basis to Gerbert’s claim in the Fourth

liberator and redeemer at the Roche de Champguin echo those of Lancelot in Gorre as much as they
seem to anticipate Perceval’s at the Fisher King’s castle, both as present failure and potential success
(see Chs. 2 and 3). The tendency to rank and compare heroes, already firmly established in
Chretien’s romances, will continue to evolve into the kind of elimination contest that the Grail
quest becomes in the Queste del Saint Graal or the repeated motif of comparing Tristan and Lancelot
as both incomparably the best in the Prose Tristan.

42 Cf. the role played by Gauvain in a series of Arthurian romances (including the Perlesvaus)
collected together and played off against several branches of the Roman de Renan in Chantilly
ms. 472, which Walters considers a Gauvain cycle (1998). As indicated above, Gawain frequently
enjoys the starring role in middle English romance.
 Introduction 23

Continuation (written some thirty to forty years later) that Chretien died before
finishing the Conte du Graal. The historical Chretien remains a cypher except for
what we can glean from the works in his corpus (and that is subject to disputed
attributions). Nevertheless, it seems to me highly unlikely that he would have set
out to write a romance with no ending or without planning to end it. None of the
continuators suggest that the task of continuation is superfluous: they take for
granted that the story is obviously unfinished and calls for more (and more and
more and more) on the way to an ending. Indeed, the pattern is reprised with
the First, Second, and Fourth Continuations, all of which suspend ending but
invite the closure finally offered by Manessier. With other fragmentary twelfth-
century romances—Alberic de Pisan^on’s Alexandre (c.l 110-30), Beroul’s Tristan
(c.l 165—87)—it is equally difficult to determine if they were completed by their
authors.43 We can speculate that Chretien found no way to solve the puzzles put
into place or lost interest or died, but in the final analysis we simply have to admit
that we do not know why the romance remained unfinished by its first author.
On the other hand, the argument advanced by a number of scholars for
reading the Conte as in some sense complete in its unfinished state poses a
different question, a question that may not have occurred to medieval readers
(certainly not in the way we pose it). Given medieval textuality’s different
conceptions of textual unity and coherence, the importance of common sources,
and what Zumthor has called the notion of the ‘texte-fragment’ whose beginning
and ending may be located elsewhere in the literary tradition or in larger cultural
patterns, such a question might be of little interest to medieval readers. But from
a modern critical standpoint, it is clearly of great interest and resembles the sort
of debate that attends the unfinished state of Guillaume de Lorris’s Roman de la
Rose in relation to Jean de Meun’s continuation, though the argument based on
the lyric character of the first part’s suspended ending does not work for
Chretien’s interrupted narrative sequence.44 The tension implied in the notion
that the Conte reaches closure in its unfinished state recalls the and/both logic of
Chretien’s design and will thus be addressed here from different points of view in
the chapters that follow. In particular, in analyzing how questions play a more
important role than chivalric exploits (and even answers) when seeking solutions
to the problems of violence, Chapter 4 argues that the Conte inscribes both the
necessity of suspending closure and the impetus for continuations.
A pattern of problematic endings certainly appears in Chretien’s corpus. Even in
those where the plot is firmly closed, the unresolved character of certain problems

43 For a brief overview of fragmentation versus ending, see Kelly (1993: 6, 15). The hypothesis of
two Berouls further complicates the question of how his version of Tristan may have ended.
Berthelot discusses a later author, Baudoin Butor, who tried repeatedly to start a romance without
advancing beyond the planning phase (2006).
44 The same argument regarding lyric suspension has, however, been proposed for interpreting
the way Chretien ‘ends’ his part of the Charrette with Lancelot imprisoned in a tower, as opposed to
Godefroi’s narrative ‘continuation’ (see below and Ch. 1). For arguments on reading Guillaume’s
part as finished in its unfinished state, see e.g. Hult (1986) or Dragonetti (1987).
24 Introduction

posed may put into the question the value of their narrative closure: in Erec et Emde,
the question of deciding who in the couple and what are at fault; in Cliges, the
incongruous relationship between the happy ending and the epilogue; in Yvain, the
tension between the couple’s reconciliation and Yvain’s characteristic impetuosity.
Although lack of closure operates similarly on the semantic rather than the narrative
level in Le Chevalier de la Charrette, Godefroi de Leigni’s role as a second author,
finishing Lancebt with the first author’s permission and following his guidance,
introduces some notion of continuation into Chretien’s repertoire even before his
last romance and, as such, has elicited extensive debate about possible motivation
for the shift. Much of the speculation hinges on imagined difficulties in Chretien’s
relationship to his patron, Marie de Champagne. Although the Conte du Graal also
names a literary patron who has commissioned the task and supplied its source in a
book, no one has suggested that some disagreement between Chretien and Philip of
Flanders interrupted the work—a reflection no doubt of the kind of gender politics
that operate within romance as well as in the critical tradition.45 In any case, what
Chretien’s previous romances teach us is that the nature of ending (and endings) is
complex; they contain multiple levels and layers of elements, some closed, some left
open, often combined in perplexing ways.
If we focus more specifically on the Conte and its relation to the continuations,
what stands out is the way Chretien’s Grail story both seeks and resists ending.
The pattern instituted in Chretien’s romance is echoed in the accumulation of
continuations, versions, and rewritings that pile up in the manuscript tradition.
The tendency to end at a midpoint that calls for more narrative seems endemic to
Grail romances of all sorts and characterizes Robert de Boron’s trilogy as
much as the verse continuations.46 The peculiar kind of endlessness that charac¬
terizes the Perceval cycle, which appears fragmentary no matter how many
continuations are added, reflects the decentered character of Chretien’s model:
faithful to its logic of and/both, the verse continuations remain untotalizable
across their accumulation and multiplication of possibilities, continuous and
discontinuous, separate yet combined.47 This book is in large measure an effort
to understand, through the dialogue between the Conte and its continuations, the
fundamental dichotomy between a desire for ending and the equally strong
resistance to ending. It is a tension that has a strong stake in middleness, that
is, the necessity to remain in medias res between a beginning and endpoint,

45 See my effort to debunk and explain the persistence of this story of frustrated patronage (2005:
141-2, 151-2).
46 Though his romances do not end mid-scene as Chretien, the Second Continuation, and
Gerbert do, Robert’s trilogy also functioned, as suggested above, as a powerful generator of
continuations in the 13th cent. The Estoire epilogue anticipates four narratives to follow, though
these are not realized in subsequent writings.
47 This feature accords with one of the definitions Michael Wood offers for ‘the genre of the
unfinishable work’ (2007: 1394). Speaking of The Arabian Nights, whose textual tradition, like the
Perceval Continuations’, includes numerous additions, rewritings, translations, manuscripts, and
interpretations, he sums up the view of Abdelfattah Kilito: ‘there isn’t an entirety’ (1396). I shall
return to other issues raised by his discussion in Ch. 4.
 Introduction 25

caught in the centrifugal dynamic that keeps the periphery moving out from yet
still connected to the center. As we shall see, this middleness reflects the continual
reconstruction of an ideal glimpsed by human imperfection, as well as the nature
of the quest as it has been redefined in this romance.

READING (THROUGH) COLLECTIVE AUTHORSHIP

If, as I believe, the tutelary spirit of Chretien guides the hands of successive
continuators and shapes a kind of collective authorship, this should not imply
that they have the authorization Godefroi claims in his epilogue. I do not
imagine them sitting down with Chretien’s notes, as Maurice Wilmotte did in
his effort to explain the accomplishments of the first (and anonymous) continu-
ator, as we shall see in Chapter 1. They have surely not written what Chretien
himself might have written had he continued, but they have struggled with and
engaged the problematics, at the levels of form and content, built into the
initiating text. They continue to reread and rewrite ‘Chretien’, that is to say the
author as translated into the romance he has left them, with all the allure of its
unfinished state. They share the same dynamic of displacement and indirection
that propels Chretien, as they follow in the byways of romance outlined for them
and participate in the hermeneutics of patterning set up in the Conte du Graal.
Commentary, signification, gloss emerge primarily from the designs woven
through the narrative rather than any explicit comments and explanations offered
by an authoritative voice belonging to the narrator or a privileged character.
Hermits speak only occasionally here, more vociferously in the Queste del Saint
Graal where the didactics of allegory and fixed meanings have replaced Chretien’s
decentered, endlessly vital, and renewable quest for meaning.48
Following Chretien’s and the continuators’ lead, I have traced in this book the
sometimes haphazard process of reading an immense and non-totalizable cycle of
romances with many different versions, multiple states reflected in a manuscript
tradition that cannot be pinned down and placed, given the constancy of
variation.49 The textual vastness offers a lesson in humility, in fact multiple

48 Cf. Krause’s analysis of the hermits in Gerbert’s continuation: however authoritative their
statements appear, they fail to account for what the hero actually does (2003).
49 Although the amount and kinds of variation differ significantly across genres and texts, van
Mulken expresses what may have been many a scribe-editor’s point of view (if not that of authors
more concerned to safeguard the integrity of their text, as Chretien demonstrates in the epilogue to
Yvain and as the manuscript tradition of the Conte itself suggests): ‘The literal, univocal transcrip¬
tion of a text was not considered to be extremely important. Of much greater importance was the
“translatio studii”, the accumulation of knowledge and the pursuit of completeness, and each time a
copyist was entitled to adjust, modify, and change the text of successive versions with respect to the
exemplar, the demands of his age, his dialect or his aesthetic sense’ (1993: 48). Van Mulken’s
observation gives a salutary reminder about the materiality of textual transmission in the Middle
Ages and its implications for understanding what concerns a medieval public desirous of finding
the ‘whole story’, the kind of summa made available in vernacular romance cycles. Cf. Suzanne
26 Introduction

lessons in getting lost, remembering (but perhaps inexactly), forgetting and

rediscovering, trying to figure things out, find the right questions, as well as
the right paths, heroes, and authors. Resembling the twists and turns of the droit
chemin, this study is a product of chance and design, directed and undirected,
unconscious and conscious efforts to see where certain inexhaustible patterns,
most especially cruxes involving some kind of contradiction, whether formal or
semantic, have led me (and the readers and writers before me). My path has
followed the dialogue between Chretien and the verse continuators to the places
where I see a conjunction, incongruity, or contradiction that calls for further
inquiry. Are there surprising omissions? No doubt. I have tended to avoid
overworked places like the scene of the three blood drops against white snow
or the mystery of the Grail and its procession, except insofar as they are inevitably
at the heart of the matter, the decentered center of the Conte du Graal and
therefore related to the conjunctions privileged for analysis here. This is not a
book about the Grail, but it is an interrogation of the Story of the Grail launched
by Chretien and continued in verse by a series of writing entities from authorial
to scribal, with many subcategories in between: romancers, continuators, rema-
nieurs, editors, compilatores, redactors, and scribes.50
In the five chapters of this study, basing my argument on close readings of the
texts, as well as detailed analyses of narrative structure and intertextual play, I follow
the complex paths of continuity through contradiction designed by Chretien and
echoed by his continuators. They provide a guiding thread that leads to three
major areas of tension: relations with the other sex, particularly, love and sexuality;
violence and the role of chivalry; religious practice and values. These are the very
topics that reappear in varied guise each time Perceval receives advice, first from his
mother as he prepares to leave his forest home and find Arthur’s court, then from
his mentor, Gornemant de Goort, who officially makes him a knight and initiates
him into the art of jousting along with the fine points of chivalric conduct, and
finally from his hermit uncle during his Easter repentance and the renewal of his
quest. However unusual Perceval’s upbringing, disrupted by the upheavals of civil
war and ongoing chivalric violence, his eventual passage from mother to father
figure to maternal uncle mirrors the normal progress of a noble youth as he is
initiated into family and society in the twelfth century.
Not surprisingly, the counsel so pointedly repeated connects to significant
problems and obstacles encountered in the narrative, by Gauvain as well as Perceval.
Rather more surprisingly, the subject matter privileged in this advice, like
the unusual prologue that introduces Chretien’s Conte, offers new combinations.
Religious elements no longer appear as part of the furniture of the Arthurian world

Fleishman’s (1996) view of the tension between the ‘monoglossia’ of Old French grammars and the
reality of variation in medieval usage.

50 See the collection of articles included in Auctor etAuctoritas and especially the closing remarks
of Jacques Dalarun (2001: 571—3).
 Introduction 27

but become visible as an issue to be addressed for the first time within the context of
romance. Finding the right way to do so while remaining faithful to the incongru¬
ities of Chretien’s romance constitutes a major challenge for medieval continuators
as well as modern commentators. I do not believe that Chretien’s romance offers
itself to allegorical interpretation, for reasons that will become evident throughout
this study, but I have taken authorization from his text to consider biblical reference
where it seems relevant, whether on the level of content or form. In particular,
I examine, as in biblical exegesis, the play of literal and figurative meanings invited
by his elusive narrative. And biblical comparison will be of special interest on the
level of narrative structure, inasmuch as the Perceval cycle viewed from the perspec¬
tive of the manuscript tradition shares certain characteristics with the Bible as
compilation. If the Bible functions as a book of books whose unity is accepted
as a given yet fequires elucidation in light of contradictions, mysteries, gaps, and
repetitions, just so the successive segments of the verse continuations form an
architectural whole whose continuities and discontinuities call for analysis and
demonstration.
While I seek to integrate and account for the way religious issues and models
enter into the complex dialogue of the Grail story, I do not automatically credit
religious discourse as the final ‘truth’ of Chretien’s text, as do the hermits of the
Queste or literary critics who seek a master key in allegory. The Christian practices
and beliefs included in the Conte du Graal are no less problematized than the
courdy and Arthurian values represented, as the verse continuations will confirm
through their varied readings. The difficulties posed by trying to put both
discourses into dialogue can be measured by readers’ resistance (medieval and
modern, my own as well as that of others), emblematized by the tendency of later
romancers and some verse continuators to opt for focusing either on religious
views (as in the Queste) or Arthurian adventure (as in the First and Second
Continuations). If the logic of and/both that characterizes Chretien’s romance
requires the strange mix of social and religious values, Arthurian and Christian
traditions, then any single interpretive focus on one of the two strands comes at
the expense (or neglect) of the other. Yet by the same logic, efforts to combine
religious and secular elements through interpretation may seem equally illogical,
as the forces of contradiction and complementarity continue to make one strand
appear to jar with the other. Such is the predicament where Chretien’s romance
places readers, rewriters, and critics, with no resolution in sight but plenty of
advice to be followed across the complex itineraries represented.
Love, violence, and religion—three areas set an agenda not only for Perceval’s
education but for the writer’s inscription and the readers’ reception of his story;
they continue to do so when readers subsequently take up the role of
continuator or commentator. The set of crucial problems is thus reflected in
the organization of this study’s five chapters. Although each chapter inevitably
involves the dynamic interaction and multiple connections among them,
I generally follow the order of topics as they are introduced for the first time in
28 Introduction

the advice offered by Perceval’s mother at the moment of his departure from her
isolated manor. Each of the chapters explores the principle of continuation not
only at the semantic level, as suggested by the repeated triad of topics, but also
through the multiple forms of expression it assumes within Chretiens originating
romance, as in the reinventions of successive continuators. In Chapter 1, I focus
on the collective nature of authorship linking Chretien and the continuators by
analyzing the rhetorical play of authors’ names, whose placement in the text
never coincides with the move from one segment to the next. Their appearance
thus simultaneously masks and reveals the shifts between multiple authors across
the entire cycle, as authorial naming, present or absent, plays throughout the
continuations in counterpoint with the hidden moments of textual transition. If
the first continuators anonymity suggests a lack of authorization, Wauchier de
Denain’s name placed at the interlace leads to the discovery that, despite his
apparent neglect of the Grail story in the Second Continuation, he remains
paradoxically faithful to Chretien’s model by keeping open, through Perceval’s
adventures with the Chessboard Lady, the problematic conjunction of the Grail
and love for Blancheflor. Manessier, on the contrary, uses his acts of naming in
the epilogue as part of a strategy to put an end to Perceval’s Grail quest, once and
for all. His epilogue names not only himself as author but links his patroness,
Jeanne of Flanders, to her ancestor Philip, thus establishing a genealogy that links
the continuator with the (unnamed) first au thor and obscures the presence of any
intermediary hands.
Gerbert’s repeated self-naming furnishes a frame around his version of Perceval’s
return to Blancheflor. The fourth continuator thus places himself among multiple
tellers of the tale even as he asserts his place as the one who hopes to finish it
(though the manuscript tradition does not allow him to do so). Gerbert seeks
to reconcile the pressures exerted by the prose cycle and its insistence on chastity
for the Grail hero with his own desire to return to the wellsprings of Chretien’s
romance (whose most significant episodes are reinvented through the fourth
continuators own imaginative twists, as Chapters 2 and 5 will show). Finally,
Gerbert’s references to his source lead back to the first author and his
prologue, where Chretien’s own acts of naming are tied to problems of reading
and interpretation, introduced by the fulsome praise of his literary patron, his
acknowledged (and unacknowledged) biblical references, his model exegesis, as
well as his incongruous combinations and clever ambiguities.
Love and sexuality set the agenda for the next two chapters. In Chapter 2,
I examine the relationship within couples by following the interplay between
sexuality, retelling, and rewriting. Perceval’s comic caricature of rape, when he
finds a beautiful maiden sleeping in a tent is reinvented as a more serious erotic
encounter for Gauvain in the First Continuation. Although seduced by a maid
eagerly awaiting his arrival at her tent, he later retells their story as rape. Gerbert
gives Gauvain’s adventure another turn in the Fourth Continuation, where it is
replayed as a real rape, then transformed into love. These variations show how
 Introduction 29

the relationship between love and the Grail remains unresolved across the cycle,
even as competing ideologies (Christian and chivalric) reorient the tale.
Chapter 3 focuses on the alternately protective and destructive relationships
between mothers and sons in Perceval and the First Continuation. Although the
Veuve Dame dies when her son leaves the Welsh forest for the world of knights,
she continues to play a significant role in Perceval’s adventures (including
erotic connections with Blancheflor and family connections to the Grail Castle).
The issue of mothers and marriage unexpectedly returns when Gauvain’s
grandmother, mother, and sister appear at the Roche de Champguin, newly
liberated from enchantment by Arthur’s nephew in the last unfinished episode of
Chretien’s romance. Problematic but essential connections continue to be traced
between mothers, sexuality, sons, and lovers, as the first continuator extrapolates
his anonymouS elaboration of Gauvain’s story and inserts the story of Caradoc, a
son whose revelation of his mother’s adultery leads to punishment and then cure
with the help of his lady, configured as a kind of virginal mother.
Chapter 4 deals with the role of violence within the Arthurian ideal, made
more acute as the heroes themselves are seen as aggressors against the innocent.
Oppositions between courtly and noncourtly weapons, set up and subverted,
suggest how Chretien’s romance explores human nature in relation to Isaiah’s
utopian vision of swords beaten into plowshares. The damage as well as the
necessity of human aggression emerge through the sometimes conflicting regis¬
ters of chivalric and Christian values. The questions Chretien raises about the
legitimacy of violence lead to different responses in the prose and verse rewrit¬
ings: the Vulgate Cycle’s collective Grail quest leads to the destruction of Arthur’s
kingdom, while the verse continuations as finished by Manessier retain Perceval’s
‘ex-centric’, individual quest and tolerate the contradictions written into
Chretien. Prose rewritings of the Grail story offer rival versions that interact
with the verse continuations, though each tradition develops and completes the
Grail quest in radically different ways. Whereas Perceval’s quest in the verse
continuations remains an individual accomplishment celebrated by Arthur’s
court, the Vulgate’s quest for the Holy Grail becomes a collective pursuit of
salvation that heralds the catastrophic end of Arthur’s reign. Contradictions and
competing values are thus amplified to the breaking point in the prose cycle,
while the verse continuations, echoing the dynamic of Chretien’s originating
romance, maintain their tensions without forcing resolution.
Chapter 5 addresses the anomalies of narrative structure within Chretien’s
romance and across the cycle by following the complex and shifting dance of
beginnings, middles, and endings. A new perspective on the religious dimensions
of Chretien’s text and its effects on later rewriting emerges from an odd verbatim
repetition that frames the insertion of Gerbert’s continuation between the Second
and Third, thus creating a kind of loop in the narrative that keeps us in medias
res. A similar pattern of exact repetition appears in the ordering of the history
books within the biblical canon and leads to a comparison, based on compilational
30 Introduction

strategies and methods of reading, between the Bible as a set of books and the
Perceval cycle, seen as a problematic whole with continuities and discontinuities.
After this architectural macroview, analysis at the episodic level pinpoints first
how Gerbert reinvents the Grail as two ivory barrels filled with a life-restoring
balm, then follows the effects of repeated Grail visits in the First Continuation
and in the transitions between the Second, Third, and Fourth (which echo the
repeated retellings of the Grail episode in the Conte). These episodes emblematize
the way the story is continually reborn through the narrative gloss offered by
successive rewritings of Chretien’s Grail story.
As these summaries suggest, each chapter in this study includes analysis of the
master text as well as its dialogue with the continuations, but not every chapter
treats all four of the verse continuations. Chapter 1 does so in order to survey the
question of collective authorship (through progressive discussion of authorial
naming in the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Continuations, then back to
Chretien’s Conte), while introducing the major issues and themes that will be
examined on semantic and formal levels throughout the book. The comprehen¬
sive character of the discussion in Chapter 1 thus accounts for its unusual length
in comparison with the chapters that follow. In Chapters 2 to 4, selected
continuations are introduced, depending on the problems that first emerge in
analysis of the Conte du Graal and then resurface intermittently across the cycle.
In its focus on overall narrative structure, Chapter 5 once again looks over the
entire cycle but also includes more detailed examination of Grail issues that
connect Chretien with Gerbert and the First Continuation.
As I said, this is not a book about the Grail, but rather a book about the ‘Story
of the Grail’, which in its most immediate sense is simply the English translation
of Chretien’s title for his romance, Ti Contes del Graal’ (66), though it can no
longer convey the sense of shock that Chretien’s ‘story of the serving dish’ must
have given his earliest public. But the Story of the Grail also carries other
meanings as well: the formulation implies that Chretien’s story matter is shared,
traditional, not his alone, whether in the pre-history he claims in the book given
by his patron (which may of course be a fiction) or in the post-Chretien history
created by those who take up his story to continue or make it their own. The
Story of the Grail refers to Chretien’s romance, but it also tells the story of how
the Perceval Continuations, the ever-enlarging narrative in verse, accumulate in
the wake of the mother text under the banner of its prologue. This Story of the
Grail rivals with other stories of the Grail, histories (estoire), and quests in prose.
In contrast to the volumes of articles and books that have repeatedly tried to
answer the question, ‘What is the Grail?’, Chretien’s narrative does not ask nor
does it seem to favor a search for definitions, since it formulates otherwise the
questions that must be asked and routes elsewhere the answers to be received. In
some sense, the reticence of the manuscript tradition in representing the Grail, as
well as the iconographical ambiguities in the illustrations, corresponds to the
Conte du Graals own elusive treatment of what is admittedly a powerfully
 Introduction 31

fascinating object in the midst of a scene that we inevitably characterize as

marvelous in both the strong and weak sense of the term.51 In order to renew
our understanding of Chretien’s unfinished romance through an approach that
focuses on his dialogue with the continuations, I have tended to avoid the well-
worn trail that leads to explaining the Grail, but like so many others, I finally
found the pull irresistible despite my resistance. And so in the Conclusion,
I broach the subject of the Grail more directly by picking up the threads linking
Perceval’s mother and the Grail, mothers and sons, sons and lovers and mothers,
left dangling in the space between Chapters 2 and 3. In that itinerary of moving
forward by returning back, I bring together analyses from all the previous
chapters and see how they may take us farther, or rather, push us into the middle
of mysteries that Chretien has set before us, as before his medieval readers and
continuators, -by leaving unresolved so many contradictions and continuities in
the human experience of paradox.

51 See in vol. 1 of Manuscripts (1993), Rieger (398), Harf-Lancner (465), and Baumgartner
(489-90, 497-8), who emphasizes that the iconography of the Grail as chalice reflects the influence
of the prose romances and the Holy Grail.
 Authorial Relays

Que por l’estoire consomer

Fait Fan lou conte durer tant.
Assez i avroit plus que tant,
Qui tot vorroit an rime metre;
Mais li miaudres est an la letre,
Et miaudres vient ades avant,
Que li contes vet amandant.
Second Continuation, IV 29202-8

(One makes the story last so long to bring it to an end. For one who wanted
to put all into rhyme, there would be much more; but the best part is written
[lit. in the letter], and better yet lies ahead as the story improves.)

Authorship in the context of medieval vernacular literature appears to be a concept

in search of a name, a practice taking shape before a definition, or even a series of
shifting definitions, can catch the freewheeling spirit of medieval literary produc¬
tion. If L’ecrivain—the writer as metaphor of origin rather than the literally writing
scribe—does not yet exist in twelfth-century vocabulary and still poses methodo¬
logical problems in thirteenth-century usage (Berthelot 1991: 19, 28—31), we have
to discover what and who occupies that conceptual ground in the context of the
notoriously unfinished and repeatedly continued romance of the Grail launched by
Chretien de Troyes. The ‘authorial relays’ of my title conjure up an image of
successive figures—having some yet to be determined relation to the author—
who, like runners, pass along the baton of the text. The shared text is thereby
enabled to complete a trajectory from start to finish, beginning to end. A satisfying
metaphor for medieval authorship perhaps, but the image becomes richly prob¬
lematic when that relay race connects Chretien’s Conte du Graal to the twists and
turns of four continuations, two prequels, and multiple combinations across twelve
manuscripts, the Middle High German translation and a sixteenth-century French
prose translation. Who authorizes this ever changing textual edifice? Who and what
is an author in such a context and how does authorship operate?
M.-D. Chenu’s well-known article on the relation between auctor, actor, and
autor traces the links, switches, and slips in medieval Latin usage between notions
of general performance and specific acts of textual production.1 In a kind of

1 See Chenu (1927, and 1976: 353-60), Dragonetti (1987: 43-4), Minnis (1979: 385-98), and
essays included in Auctor et auctor it as. I would like to thank Michelle Bolduc for the last two
references, included in her discussion of auctoritas and the troubadours (2007).
 Authorial Relays 33

chasse-croise, the actor (from ago), one who does something, changes places with
the auctor (from augeo), one who more specifically produces a book, while auctor
in turn moves in the direction of auctoritas (the authority of origin, the one who
initiates), and in the new form autor links up with authenticity as well. All these
notions of production, authority, and authenticity will be useful here, if not
immediately applicable, as they require some adjustment to the medieval ver¬
nacular context. However nominally challenged by their lack of a specific term,
French writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and more specifically
romancers, recognize and locate their role, with alternating pride and humility',
within a set of multiple, authorizing functions: sources, storymatter, patrons,
maxims, proverbs, parables, and, on occasion, their own proper names. Writing
occurs along a continuum which includes authors, translators, continuators,
redactors, interpolators, scribes, editors, and compilers, whose collective work,
like the collection of authorizing elements claimed, are not always so easily
disentangled for modern readers who name and care about the differences in
ways that differ from their medieval counterparts.
The paradox of authorship that characterizes the entire structure formed by
Perceval and its verse continuations suggests that Chretien is and is not the
author of those continuations; their authors are and are not individual continu¬
ators. In modern terms, we limit Chretien’s authorship to the originating and
unfinished romance. But in terms of medieval practice, the complex set of
connections author(iz)ed by Chretien in the Conte du Graal initiate patterns
through which his authority remains in play throughout the cycle, in the
multiple ways to be examined across the chapters of this book. As a series of
named and unnamed romancers write freely after Chretien, they nevertheless
compose ‘sor Crestien’, as did Godefroi de Leigni in completing Le Chevalier de
la Charrette (7105). Remaining under his tutelage, the continuators are tied
individually and collectively to their common model, its narrative material, as
well as its puzzles and problems. An inquiry into the specific role played by
authors’ names in the elaborate textual edifice built by Chretien de Troyes and
the four continuations offers a useful starting point to grasp how their dialogue
develops. As the overall structure of this chapter will demonstrate, successive
authors and continuations lead back repeatedly to the original author and his
text: the fundamental movement of the cycle is as much backward as forward, as
the linear acts of writing and reading give way to the roundabout acts of
rereading and interpretation.

AUTHORS’ NAMES

It is generally accepted that anonymous constitutes the degree zero of vernacular

writers in the Middle Ages, though in certain generic contexts, this may be
debatable: consider the hundreds of troubadours and trouveres named in lyric
34 Authorial Relays

manuscripts.2 But if we admit the general premise of anonymity, we must never¬

theless recognize in the case of romance a dynamic play operating between named
and unnamed authors. Douglas Kelly’s comprehensive list of medieval romances
includes approximately 120 items for the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; 59 names
account for 76 works (1993: xiii-xxi). No simple shift across the linear chronology
appears; the play between named and unnamed romancers goes back and forth
across the time span, depending on a variety of factors known and unknown,
intentional, incidental, or accidental. While it is true that in many cases we have
nothing more than a name with no etat civil attached to it, the impetus to name
authors is remarkable in its persistence.
Given this pattern, the use of their proper names by writers like Chretien, Gautier
d’Arras, Thomas d’Angleterre, Marie de France et alia, is precisely what fills the
terminology gap for the ‘author’ writing in French in twelfth- and thirteenth-
century usage, at least in the context of romance.3 In this sense, when the vernacular
author signs his or her proper name in the text, when that name is cited by another
writer or recopied by scribe-editors and compilers, the act of naming makes a claim
for authority that rivals that of the Latin auctores, the officially recognized authors in
contemporary usage, in schools and in courts where clerical culture informs an
aristocratic lay public.4 As we shall see, across the Perceval cycle, Chretien’s author¬
ship gains in authority as it passes from production to authorization, from an act of
self-naming that establishes his role as author to repeated invocations by continu-
ators and scribes who name him as a way to authenticate their own acts of
composition and writing. For his contemporaries at the courts of Champagne
and Flanders, the name Crestien carries the weight of an historical person along
with the function of vernacular author; for later readers and writers (including in all
probability the continuators), Chretien is what he wrote: the writing practices he
inscribed under his proper name and the image of him that we formulate based on
our knowledge, perception, and understanding of his works as they are embedded
in the process of manuscript transmission.5

2 On anonymity and the medieval author, see e.g. Dragonetti (1987: 9, 18), Baumgartner
(1985a). In the context of troubadour poetry, chansonniers are frequendy arranged by poets, and
proper names abound in rubrics, as well as in the tornados (envois) which name patrons, fellow
poets, jongleurs, etc.
3 Gautier d’Arras names himself in the epilogue to his romance, Ille et Galeron (1170—84), as
does Thomas in the closing remarks to his Tristan (c.l 170-75). Marie de France names herself in the
prologue to the Lais (c. 1170—80) and the epilogue to her Fables (c.l 189-1208). As we shall see, these
are the most likely, though not the only places to find author’s names.
4 On the links between proper names and signatures, the character of proper names, as well as use
of the signature (often with riddles, anagrams, etc.) to confer authentification, see Fraenkel’s study of
the signature, based on documents from the 7th to the 16th cent. (1992). Her discussion of the
philosophical problems surrounding the proper name and its referent, the ease with which a proper
name can make fictional beings appear to be real (108-21), is particularly interesting in light of
named medieval authors for whom we have no biographical information to verify their historical
existence. I would like to thank Peter Haidu for bringing Fraenkel’s book to my attention.
5 See my discussion of medieval authorship in the context of Chretien’s unusually large, varied,
and somewhat indeterminate corpus (2008).
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 Several large white warships lay at anchor in the harbour, and
lent a touch of gay colour by being decked with strings of bunting
from stem to stern in honour of our Queen Alexandra’s birthday. A
German liner got in just before us and we saw the coal lighters
being rowed up to her. “La Nera” coaled here also, but it was a less
grimy proceeding than at Port Said, as the coal was in sacks. The
type of coolies, too, was very different, and there were many African
negroes (Soumalis) among them, whose skins could hardly be made
blacker than they were by nature. In addition to its cluster of coaling
lighters, our vessel, now at anchor, was soon surrounded by boats
filled with natives who swarmed round the gangways, and soon
invaded the ship—a crowd of Soumali traders offering ostrich
feathers and feather fans (of a European look), ostrich eggs, wicker
bottle-shaped baskets, shell necklaces, and amber beads, who drove
their trade amongst the passengers on deck, whilst others
endeavoured to catch their eyes from the boats. Thin, lithe young
natives with fuzzy hair were very numerous, and some had dyed
their hair red, which had a grotesque effect with the black skin. I
noted a strange contrast in the same boat, too, which contained two
natives, one of whom wore a sort of large-checked suit of pyjamas
with his mop of red-dyed hair, while his companion had his head
clean shaved with “nodings on”! Some natives seemed to have used
face powder—at any rate had smeared some kind of whitening over
their countenances with ghastly effect.
 IN THE SAME BOAT—A CONTRAST AT ADEN

The scene was a strange one altogether. The crowd of

Europeans on deck, in which nearly every nationality was
represented, mostly clad in topis and white garments, the black
traders moving about them; the swarm of boats at the sides of the
vessel full of bright spots of colour—scarlet turbans, white, orange,
yellow, and purple in the costumes—swaying on the turquoise-
coloured sea; brown-backed gulls flapping over the water and kites
hovering over the harbour; and all steeped in the bright sunshine of
the East. Many of the passengers went ashore in the native boats,
but the scene seemed more amusing from the ship and we remained
on deck.
Aden itself looked more interesting at night, with bright lights
here and there on the shore and on the ships, and the rising moon
translated everything into terms of mystery and romance.
I watched an Arab dhow set sail. It is one of the most beautiful
of sailing vessels, and has a high old-fashioned poop—the line of the
gunwale making a fine curve from stem to stern—a mainmast with a
big lateen sail, two jibs on a short bowsprit, and a secondary smaller
mast astern. The sun set behind the Arabian coast, the jagged peaks
of which we had previously passed. The coaling did not finish till
nightfall. The coolies seemed to undertake all the mechanical
arrangements for the work, fixing the hauling gear and the
necessary ropes and planks, and often in the process seeming to
hang on to the ship with little more than their eyelids. When they
pulled a rope together the cry to keep time sounded like “Leesah!”
or “Leeshah!” with emphasis on the first syllable.
The coaling finished, and the curious swarm of native life that
had surrounded us departed, “La Nera” weighed anchor and pursued
her course eastwards, skirting the rocky coast bathed in the
moonlight as she made for the open Arabian Sea.
The next day in the early morning we had sight of some flying-
fish. They have almost the appearance of swallows at a distance,
especially when seen against the light, but, glancing, as they leap
out of the water, to disappear into it again very quickly, they flash in
the sun like silver.
The Arabian coast was still faintly visible towards the north, but
gradually faded from view. The pleasant light breeze continued and
it was not nearly so hot as in the Red Sea, in fact quite pleasant
either on deck or below—especially with a “windle” fixed to the cabin
port.
We had made an interesting acquaintance on board, a French
gentleman who knew India well and who was on his way to revisit
that country, intending to join an English friend there on a shooting
expedition. He was an old sportsman and had shot big game in
Tibet. He united the keenness and experience of a sportsman with
literary tastes and a love of history and archæology. This gentleman
introduced us to “the green ray,” a phenomenon peculiar to the
Eastern seas, I believe. Just at the moment when the sun disappears
beneath the horizon there is the appearance of a vivid green spark
flashing like a gem which seems to detach itself from the glowing
orb and fly upward, instantly disappearing in the reddening haze. We
witnessed this on several occasions, but in order to see it a clear
sunset is absolutely necessary—that is to say that one must be able
to see the sun sink below the horizon clear of cloud. The lovely
moonlight nights continued, the moon being now ahead, and the
apparent goal of the vessel’s course. One night, however, was
disturbed by the steamer stopping in mid-ocean. One gets so
accustomed to the throb of the engines on board a steamer that its
sudden cessation is quite startling. Passengers clustered near the
engine-room to learn the cause, which turned out to be something
wrong with “a washer” which affected the movement of the shaft.
After about three hours this was repaired and the “Nera” continued
her course. She generally made about 300 miles in the twenty-four
hours.
Incidents in the Indian Ocean were few and far between. Flying-
fish were to be seen, but only in the early morning as a rule; a
whale was noticed spouting, and two sharks were sighted. I saw,
too, a large turtle turn over close to the ship’s side, but such sights
very occasionally varied the wide seascape, and many were glad to
turn to deck games or bridge for diversion, if they could not find it in
books, or in observing their fellow passengers.

SOME TYPES AMONG OUR FELLOW PASSENGERS

Certainly amongst these latter there was no want of interest or

variety; they were quite an international group, and included English
and Anglo-Indians returning after leave of absence in Europe to take
up their official duties, civil or military, on new appointments with
their wives and families; a large proportion of French (it being a
French steamer); then there were Portuguese and Dutch (going out
to Australia), Germans and Canadians, Armenians from Rangoon,
and Indians from Bombay; several Armenian priests also, probably
missionaries; there were negroes and Arabs in the fo’castle, and
among the second-class passengers a characteristic group of English
workmen—foremen engineers and navvies. They were bound for
Bombay, having been engaged to direct coolie labour on new and
extensive docks at that port, their contract being for three years,
and their passage paid. I think they got very tired of doing nothing
and did not feel quite happy with the French dinners, although the
heaviest man of the party made it a rule to devour everything that
was set before him, taking Saint Paul’s advice, and “asking no
questions.” I think all the ages of man—and woman—were
represented on board, including more than one infant “mewling and
puling in its nurse’s arms.” A little sample of the big world chipped
off and sent adrift on the ocean—a ship of life, not without its
enigmas, its little ironies and uncertainties, tossed upon the very
type of uncertainty—the sea.
A ship, however, is a castle of indolence as far as the passengers
are concerned, though the crew, I suspect, would tell a very
different story, as, apart from the severe work of the engineers and
stokers, their work never seems at an end, and it is only by constant
washing, scrubbing, and sweeping that a steamer can be kept
decently clean and habitable.
To break the monotony of the five days’ voyage on the Indian
Ocean a concert was got up by an energetic young lady and her
friends. They went round the ship to discover what hidden musical
or histrionic talent might be concealed under the more or less
disguised personalities of the passengers, and they succeeded in
drawing out enough for an evening’s entertainment on the saloon
deck, which was picturesquely draped with bunting for the occasion,
and a piano was wheeled into position. Various songs were given,
and a French princess, who was among the passengers, recited. The
young lady who had been the leading spirit in organising the concert
herself gave some charming songs which she accompanied on a
guitar, and a pretty song in Japanese costume and umbrella from
“The Geisha,” I think, with much spirit. The proceeds went to the
benefit of the orphans of the Messageries Maritimes sailors.
After this violent excitement the days passed as days do at sea,
the fine weather continuing with delightful monotony. The fresh
easterly breeze was strong enough to fleck the blue plain with
“white horses,” yet not cause any trying movement of the vessel,
which ploughed steadily through the waves, driving the spray from
its bows, and causing dancing rainbows on the foamy crests as they
rebounded from the ship’s side. The sun rising in clear glory from
the sea, disappeared each evening in tranquil splendour, showing
the green ray, and the deep red along the horizon in the west
afterwards, over the dark blue sea. The dark blue above and the
illuminated sky between, recalled the favourite effect in Japanese
prints by Hiroshigi, and at the same time testified to its truth.
But all things have an end, even ocean voyages, and about four
o’clock on the morning of Friday, December the 7th, our steamer
slowed down and took on board the pilot, and we, cautiously
steering past mysterious islands under the dawn, finally cast anchor
in Bombay harbour.
 CHAPTER II

BOMBAY AND THE CAVES OF ELLORA

T he first impression of Bombay from the sea is perhaps a little

disappointing from the pictorial point of view. The town
spreads along the low flat coast, lined with long quays without any
great domes or conspicuous noble buildings. One is aware of
wharves and factory chimneys, and even the palms and gardens of
Malabar Hill, and blue mountains inland do not altogether mitigate
the commercial and industrial aspects of the place; but the light and
colour of the East fuse all sorts of incongruities, and the feeling of
touching a strange land and of setting foot for the first time in India
is sufficiently exciting to throw a sort of glamour over everything.

The steamers cannot disembark their passengers at the quays,

so they have to be landed in boats which cluster about the sides of
the big liner. The official tug comes alongside first, and the official
visit is paid. We were due the evening before, and inquiries as to the
why and wherefore of the delay had to be satisfied. Busy agents and
eager hotel touts come on board, and all is bustle and preparation
for landing.
 LANDING AT BOMBAY

Our Indian friend had been unexpectedly called away and was
unable to meet us, but he committed us to the care of other friends
at Bombay. We landed, however, with our friend the French explorer,
with all our baggage, in a native boat, and by dint of a ragged lateen
sail and oars plied by a swarthy, wild-looking crew, soon reached the
quay, where a crowd of coolies waited to spring upon our
belongings.
 AWAITING THE CUSTOMS—BOMBAY

Our French friend spoke Hindustanee fluently, fortunately for us;

and amid the clamour of tongues which surrounded us, was able to
arrange for an ox-cart to take our united baggage to the Custom-
House, where, after an interview with some languid English officials
clad in white drill and topis, having nothing contraband, we were
duly passed, though our friend, possessing firearms, was delayed
longer, and of course had to pay. The Bombay ox-carts are two-
wheeled with high sides of timber, forming a square open lattice,
and drawn by a pair of oxen. Committing our worldly goods to this
delightful prehistoric vehicle, we took a carriage—a little, one-horse,
open victoria, which is the street cab of Bombay, and similar to those
in use in the towns of Italy—and drove to the Taj Mahal Hotel, a
vast, new, modern caravanserai—which, however, was quite full, so
we went on to the old-established “Watson’s” on the Esplanade,
where we got a good room with a balcony and a view. There was
also a pleasant covered terrace, or verandah, extending the whole
length of the building, which on the north side, always in shade,
faced a garden green with well-watered lawns and thickly planted
with umbrageous mango and banyan trees, amid which the
ubiquitous crows of India (resembling our hooded crow) kept up a
continual cawing chorus as they flitted about, now swooping down
on some ill-considered trifle in the street, or perching expectantly
about the hotel precincts, on the lookout for scattered crumbs. Great
brown kites hovered in the air, forming a second line of watchful but
silent scavengers. The terrace also commanded a view of the street
with all its varied types in costume, race, and colour and character.
The prosperous, sleek Parsee merchant in his curious shiny, sloping
high hat, long black alpaca or white tunic, and loose white nether
garments and umbrella; Europeans in white drill and grey or white
pith helmets, which gave a superficial family likeness to all who wore
them; native servants, Hindu, Portuguese, and half-caste, in every
variety of turban and costume, sitting or standing about in groups,
waiting to be hired; wandering minstrels, dancing women, and
jugglers and tumblers trying to catch the eye—and the small change
—of the traveller; men with tom-toms and performing monkeys,
water-carriers with their dripping goat-skin slung at their side,
coolies and coolie women constantly passing to and fro from the
quays, bearing their burdens on their heads; the bearer and the
ayah in charge of faired-haired English children, passing in and out
of the gardens; the British soldier in khaki, and the native policeman
in blue with a flat yellow cap. These and such as these were the
prevailing types in the scene from the hotel balcony, from whence,
also, we could see the tram-cars, drawn by horses in big white topis,
trailing up and down the Esplanade, while motors flashed by, and
smart European ladies drove in their dog-carts. Beyond the trees of
the garden rose a modern clock tower which told the burning hours
in the familiar Westminster chimes.
 STREET PERFORMERS—BOMBAY

The modern British buildings of Bombay would probably in

newspaper language be described as “handsome.” There were many
showy and pretentious structures in a sort of Italian Gothic style, but
they looked imported, and were decidedly out of place in a country
which possesses such magnificent specimens of architecture of its
own growth—as one might say. The many balconied and shuttered
fronts, with projecting stories, the ridge-tiled roofs and plastered
walls that we saw in the older quarters of the town seemed, as types
of dwelling-houses at least, much more suitable and characteristic,
and such types would surely be capable of adaptation to modern
requirements. The Crawford Market is one of the sights of Bombay.
Outside, with its steep roofs, belfry, and projecting eaves it has a
rather English Gothic look, but inside the scene is entirely oriental,
crowded with natives in all sorts of colours, moving among fish, fruit,
grain, and provisions of all kinds, buying and selling amid a clamour
of tongues—a busy scene of colour and variety, in a symphony of
smells, dominated by that of the smoke of joss-sticks kept burning at
some of the stalls as well as a suspicion of opium, which pervades all
the native quarters in Indian cities. There is a sort of court or garden
enclosed by the buildings, and here the live stock is kept—all sorts of
birds and animals.
A drive through the native bazaar of Bombay is a revelation. The
carriage works its way with difficulty through the narrow, irregular
street, crowded with natives in every variety of costume (or next to
no costume), forming a wonderful moving pattern of brilliant colour,
punctuated by swarthy faces, gleaming eyes, and white teeth. Shops
of every kind line each side of the way, and these are rather dark
and cavernous openings, shaded by awnings and divided by posts or
carved pillars on the lowest story, but raised from the level of the
streets by low platforms which serve the purposes of counter and
working bench to the native merchant or craftsman who squats
upon it, and often unites the two functions in his own person. He
generally carries on his work in the presence of his whole family,
apparently. All ages and sexes crowd in and about the shops,
carrying on a perpetual conversazione, and the bazaar literally
swarms with dusky, turbaned faces, varied by the deep red sari of
the Hindu women, with their glittering armlets and anklets, or the
veiled Mohammedan in her—well, pyjamas!
The older house fronts above the shops were often rich with
carving and colour, the upper stories being generally supported over
the open shop by four columns. It reminded one of the arrangement
of a mediæval street, as also in its general aspect, the shops being
mostly workshops; and, as in the old days in Europe, could be seen
different crafts in full operation, while the finished products of each
were displayed for sale. There were tailors stitching away at
garments, coppersmiths hammering their metal into shape, leather
workers, jewellers, cook-shops, and many more, the little dark shops
in most cases being crowded with other figures besides those of the
workers—each like a miniature stage of life with an abundance of
drama going on in all. The whole bazaar, too, was gay with colour—
white, green, red, orange, yellow, and purple, of all sorts of shades
and tones, in turban or robe—a perfect feast for the eye.
In the course of our drive through the bazaar we met no less
than three wedding processions, though rather broken and
interrupted by the traffic. In one the bridegroom (who, with the
Hindus and Mohammedans, is considered the most important
personage in the ceremony as well as the spectacle) was in a
carriage, on his way to fetch the bride, in gorgeous raiment and with
a crown upon his head. He was followed by people bearing floral
trophies, perhaps intended for decoration afterwards. These
consisted of gilt vases with artificial flowers in them, arranged in
rows close together, and carried in convenient lengths on a plank or
shelf by young men bearers.
Another of the bridegrooms was mounted on a horse, crowned
and robed like a Byzantine emperor with glittering caparisons and
housings, a tiny little dusky girl sitting behind him and holding on,
who was said to be his little sister.
The third bridegroom we saw was veiled, in addition to the
bravery of his glittering attire. Flowers were strewn by boys
accompanying him, and a little bunch fell into our carriage as we
waited for the procession to go by, in which, of course, the
musicians went before. We afterwards passed the house where the
wedding was being celebrated, the guests assembling in great
numbers to the feast, a tremendous noise going on, drums beating
and trumpets blowing. In one of the processions very antique-
looking trumpets or horns were carried of a large size, much
resembling the military horns of ancient Roman times. These were
Hindu weddings.
We also had a glimpse of a Parsee wedding. This was in the
open court of a large house arcaded from the street, brilliantly
illuminated, where sat a great crowd of guests all attired in white.
Working right through the native bazaar we reached the Victoria
Gardens, a sort of Kew and Zoological rolled into one, being well
stocked with fine palms and many varieties of tropical trees, as well
as birds and animals, and all looking in good condition and well kept.
Many Eurasians were here walking about, looking very weird in
European dress. In these gardens are situated the Victoria and
Albert Museum of Bombay.
Sir George Birdwood had given me an introduction to H.H. the
Aga Khan and we drove out to his abode, only to find, however, that
His Highness had gone to Calcutta on his way to Japan. I was not
much more fortunate with my other introductions to the eminent
Parsee Sir Jamsetji Jijibhai, and Sir Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney.
Although the son of the latter magnate did call upon us and brought
us an invitation from Lady Jehangir, we were unable to accept it
owing to the shortness of our stay in Bombay. I understood that the
Calcutta Races in December attracted a great many of the rich
Bombay residents, and this accounted for the absence from their
homes of many at that time.
We had a glimpse of some of the palaces on Malabar Hill, seeing
the latter first against a glowing sunset. Fringed with palms and
plantains, with its fantastic buildings silhouetted on the sky, it
recalled the banks of storm cloud I had seen on the voyage, with
their vaporous trees and aerial hanging gardens.
A closer acquaintance did not impress us with any conviction of
the healthiness of Malabar Hill, though of the sumptuousness of its
houses, and often their fantastic character, and the luxuriance of its
palms and gardens, there could be no doubt. We passed the grey
wall of the Tower of Silence, the burial (?) place of the Parsees,
where the crows, the kites, and the vultures were gathered together,
but did not linger there. From the hill there is certainly a magnificent
view of the city of Bombay: especially if seen just before sundown,
when a golden glow seems to transfigure the scene; and later,
looking down on the vast plain, the white houses partly hid in trees
scattered along the shore, the quays, and the ships at anchor in the
bay, all seem to sink like a dream into the roseate atmosphere of
sunset. But even that lovely light is darkened by a heavy smoke
cloud drifting on the city from the forest of gaunt factory chimneys
rising in the East like the shadow of poverty which is always cast by
the riches of the West.
One rather wondered that Bombay was content to allow its best
drive to be disfigured by a continuous succession of hideous
commercial posters painted along the walls of one of its sides, the
other being lined with palms and open towards the sea. This is,
however, not worse indifference—in fact not so bad—as ours at
home in allowing the posters along the railway lines to disfigure the
charming and varied landscape of our own country.
 INTERVIEW WITH CANDIDATES FOR THE POST OF BEARER—MOSTLY
UNBEARABLE!

One of the first necessities to the traveller in India, especially if

he be ignorant of Hindustanee, is the engaging of a native bearer or
servant. There is always a large class of these seeking engagements.
They may be seen hanging about Messrs Cook’s Tourist Offices in
groups. They usually wear white clothes and turbans, but the half-
caste Portuguese are dressed in semi-European fashion with their
cloth suits and small, flat, round caps of the sort which used to be
termed “pork pie” in England, only lower. These are embroidered
round the rim, and a similar sort of head covering is also worn by
superior caste Hindus. For the post of bearer the traveller will find
plenty of applicants when he makes his requirements known, in fact
their number is rather embarrassing, and they all produce “chits” or
letters of recommendation from former employers. These, indeed,
are the only references to go upon, unless one happens to come
with the personal testimony of a friend. The bearers mostly register
their names at Cook’s offices, but they do not take any responsibility
there for them in any way. These native servants expect 35 rupees
(and upwards) a month, with an allowance for clothes, but out of
this pay they find their own food. If, however, their food is provided,
they take less pay—about 25 rupees—but prices generally have an
upward tendency. The engagement may probably be for three or
four months, which gives the ordinary European tourist time to get
round India, visiting the principal places of interest en route. A rupee
in India is now only worth one shilling and four-pence, and fifteen
rupees are the equivalent of a sovereign, it should be remembered.
Of course the bearer’s travelling expenses and washing are paid
as long as he is with his master, and his fare home when his
engagement comes to an end, and then, too, probably he would get
a present if his conduct has been satisfactory. One does not
generally expect mirrors of virtue and trustiness on such terms. No
doubt native bearers vary considerably in capacity and experience as
well as in appearance, to say nothing of honesty and fidelity, and
some are better as couriers than as body or camp servants, or vice
versa. Some claim to be efficient valets des places in addition to
ordinary services, but it should be remembered that the bearer caste
are not allowed to enter the sacred precincts of the great temples in
India. Our choice, influenced mainly by a personal recommendation,
fell on one Moonsawmy—a not unusual Hindu name. He had been in
the service of Sir Samuel Baker and had had some experience in
tiger-shooting, or at any rate had been out on such expeditions and
in camp with the famous traveller and sportsman, but he had also
acted as courier to English parties travelling in India, and professed
to know the country well. We had planned an excursion to the caves
of Ellora from Bombay with our friend M. Dauvergne, who had never
seen them and was anxious to do so. Having mapped out our route
we started on our expedition on December the 10th. Leaving Victoria
Station, Bombay, at noon, we travelled by the G. I. P. (Great Indian
Peninsular Railway), making our first train journey in India. The line
crossed a cultivated plain at first, getting clear of Bombay; groups of
date palms here and there were suggestive of Egypt. We passed
native villages of different types, some with thatched roofs and some
with tile—brown ridge tiles not unlike what one sees in Italy, and
even corrugated iron was visible (alas!) here and there. The low huts
built of sun-dried bricks or mud with flat roofs were the strangest
and most eastern-looking. One could get glimpses, too, of the
inhabitants, the Hindu women in saris, often of red or purple or blue,
bearing on their heads water jars or bright brass or copper vessels,
with much natural grace, some also carrying little brown babies
supported by one arm on their hip.
 A BED AT THE DAK BUNGALOW! MUNMAD (KEEP IT DA(R)K)

Leaving the plains we entered a very interesting hill country

covered with jungle and forests where we saw many teak trees and
banyans, besides many varieties of acacia. Mountains of striking
form came into view, suggestive of castled crags. We soon
afterwards passed the Thull Ghat, where the line rises as much as
1050 feet in a distance of about ten miles—which means a steep
gradient. We passed rice fields, also sugar canes, and a kind of
Indian corn, but not maize, and castor-oil plants which are cultivated
extensively. There were interesting and picturesque groups of
natives at all the stations. Finally Munmad was reached towards six
o’clock in the evening. This was our first stage, and the junction for
Daulatabad our next, in the territory of the Nizam of Hyderabad. We,
however, decided to stay the night at Munmad and go on the next
morning—in fact, if I remember right, it was a case of necessity, as
there was no train on that evening. So we were conducted to the
Dak Bungalow, some little walk from the station, through a native
village, with our baggage carried on the heads of women coolies. We
found the bungalow a most inhospitable place of incredible
bareness, and nothing to sleep on but narrow wooden framed
couches, having a sort of stringy webbing full of holes. The gaunt
draughty rooms were almost destitute of other furniture and had no
conveniences of any kind. The native keeper of the place seemed
helpless. There was no food to be had, and he could not have
cooked it if there had been, so we had to make shift as best we
could with what we had in our tea baskets. I should not advise any
one to travel in India, at least at all off the track of hotels, without
provisions and bedding. There was not much sleep to be had that
night. The beds were frightfully uncomfortable and the room was
cold. An Anglo-Indian official on the forest service occupied the best
room, we afterwards discovered, but he, as is usual, travelled with
his horses and several servants, including a cook, and a supply of
necessaries of all sorts. We left the inhospitable bungalow early the
next morning, processing through the village in the same way as
that in which we had come, with our baggage on the heads of the
coolie women. We made the acquaintance at Munmad of the
charming, frisky little palm squirrels which abound everywhere in
India—delightful little greenish-grey creatures with dark longitudinal
stripes extending from their noses to their tails. They play about the
dwellings quite familiarly, but are off like a shot up a tree and out of
sight at the smallest alarm. Scaling the trunk of a tree spirally, they
have almost the appearance of lizards, and they are certainly as
nimble.
The buffalo cow, too, is seen in every Indian village, a strange,
dusky, rough-coated beast, with a weird, half-human, but rather
sinister expression in its dark eyes, with long horns turned back
upon their necks. They walk scornfully along to be milked, with an
air which seems to say they thought the world but a poor place.
We took train to Daulatabad and entered the Nizam’s territory. A
police officer in his service was in the train, and was very intelligent
and gave us much useful information. We now passed through a
more arid-looking country than before, where cactuses and low trees
grew sparsely on burnt yellow slopes and rocky hills, often of
strange form, the country showing signs of a great upheaval from
the sea.
At Daulatabad, a small road station, a tonga was waiting for us,
drawn by two poor broken-down ponies and a rather ragged red-
turbaned driver. Our destination was the town of Rozah, a drive of
some ten miles and mostly uphill, on a loose, rough road.
A conspicuous object in the landscape at Daulatabad is the
ancient fortress upon a steep hill rising abruptly from the plain. It
was a famous stronghold, but was conquered by the Mohammedans
in the thirteenth century. There are the ruins of the ancient city
which it once protected, and within the citadel are remains of Hindu
temples, one transformed into a mosque by the Moslems. Our road
lay through the shattered gates which still marked the extent of the
city with fragments of the outer walls, the whole area overgrown
with trees and herbage, and clusters of native huts here and there.
The road to Rozah is an almost continuous ascent, and in some
places very steep, which made it very hard work for the wretched
ponies which dragged our tonga, though, of course, we relieved it of
our weight by walking up the worst hills. The sun was blazing, but
there was a little shade to be had occasionally under the fine banyan
trees which skirted the roadside.
Towards evening we saw the domes of Rozah on a high plateau
in front of us, and presently entered the town through a
battlemented gate. It was a Mohammedan town with many
important domed tombs, but it had a neglected and sparsely
peopled aspect and a look of departed splendour. We made our way
along a straggling street, and, passing through another gate, came
out upon the other end of the plateau, from which we saw, opening
before us as far as the eye could reach towards the west, the vast,
green, fruitful plains of the Deccan. In command of this view we
found our quarters for the night—the Travellers’ Bungalow—but this,
the Nizam’s bungalow, was a great contrast to the one at Munmad,
being clean and comfortable, with good beds and sufficient furniture
and rugs, and a bath-room. The native in charge was able to provide
food, too, and to cook a dinner, which, if not exactly Parisian, was, at
all events, a vast improvement upon our last one. The sun set
without a cloud, the last golden light lingering upon the white and
black domes of the tombs around us. Then followed the afterglow,
and then the darkness fell like a curtain, but the stars were intensely
bright in the clear sky. The air was very pure and the silence of the
place was profound. We were glad to rest after our long, hot, dusty
journey, but I managed to get a sketch done before the light went.
After breakfast the next morning (December 12) we started to
walk to the caves at Ellora, which we found were only a short
distance down the hill. A winding road led us past another of the
Nizam’s bungalows to a sort of terrace in front of the first great
cave, or, more properly, rock-cut temple, the Kylas, which, coming
down the hill from above, one does not see until close upon it, and it
is only on entering the court through the great gateway that one
slowly realises the wonder of it. A huge temple of symmetric ground
plan cut clean out of the great cliff, the straight sides of which are
seen rising like a vast wall above it. A mass of intricate and richly
carved detail, a veritable incrustation of carving of extraordinary
richness rises before one. Standing clear in a spacious court,
enclosed on three sides by a deep arcade cut in the sheer sides of
the cliff (which shows the tool marks), having an outer row of
massive detached columns and an inner row of engaged columns,
and deep recessed chambers.
 THE KYLAS, CAVES OF ELLORA

On each side of the entrance to the temple in the court stand

two isolated columns or pylons, and near these two great stone
elephants. These columns and elephants really flank a big pedestal
of stone with steps cut in it which lead up to a huge image of a
Sacred Bull within a square chamber, from which a bridge is crossed
and the portico of the temple is reached. Through this the great
central hall, or nave, of the temple is entered, divided into four parts
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