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71-748: In Chrétien de Troyes ' Perceval, the Story of the Grail (c. 1190), one of the first works to mention the Grail , it is given no name other than being known as the castle of the Fisher King . As in the later works, the castle is given qualities of Celtic Otherworld (including its invisibility from the outside and seemingly changing locations), as the story's original Grail hero Perceval visits it only when invited and then cannot find it again despite searching for years. In Wolfram von Eschenbach 's Parzival , based on Chrétien,

142-578: A pen name moniker of a Jewish convert from Judaism to Christianity, also known as Crestien li Gois . Chrétien's works include five major poems in rhyming eight-syllable couplets. Four of these are complete: Erec and Enide ( c.  1170 ); Cligès ( c.  1176 ); Yvain, the Knight of the Lion ; and Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart , the latter two written simultaneously between 1177 and 1181. Yvain

213-810: A Gaulish substrate, although there is some debate. One of these is considered certain, because this fact is clearly attested in the Gaulish-language epigraphy on the pottery found at la Graufesenque ( A.D. 1st century). There, the Greek word paropsid-es (written in Latin) appears as paraxsid-i . The consonant clusters /ps/ and /pt/ shifted to /xs/ and /xt/, e.g. Lat capsa > *kaxsa > caisse ( ≠ Italian cassa ) or captīvus > *kaxtivus > OF chaitif (mod. chétif ; cf. Irish cacht 'servant'; ≠ Italian cattiv-ità , Portuguese cativo , Spanish cautivo ). This phonetic evolution

284-421: A definitive influence on the development of Old French, which partly explains why the earliest attested Old French documents are older than the earliest attestations in other Romance languages (e.g. Strasbourg Oaths , Sequence of Saint Eulalia ). It is the result of an earlier gap created between Classical Latin and its evolved forms, which slowly reduced and eventually severed the mutual intelligibility between

355-420: A fraindre, Fors Sarragoce qu'est en une montaigne; Li reis Marsilies la tient, ki Deu nen aimet, Mahomet sert ed Apolin reclaimet: Ne·s poet guarder que mals ne l'i ataignet! ˈt͡ʃarləs li ˈre͜is, ˈnɔstr‿empəˈræðrə ˈmaɲəs ˈsɛt ˈant͡s ˈtot͡s ˈple͜ins ˈað esˈtæθ en esˈpaɲə ˈtræs k‿en la ˈmɛr konˈkist la ˈtɛr alˈta͜iɲə t͡ʃasˈtɛl ni ˈaθ ki dəˈvant ˈly͜i rəˈma͜iɲəθ ˈmyrs nə t͡siˈtæθ n‿i ˈɛst rəˈmæs

426-1220: A new orthography for the latter; among the earliest examples are parts of the Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of Saint Eulalia . Some Gaulish words influenced Vulgar Latin and, through this, other Romance languages. For example, classical Latin equus was uniformly replaced in Vulgar Latin by caballus 'nag, work horse', derived from Gaulish caballos (cf. Welsh ceffyl , Breton kefel ), yielding ModF cheval , Occitan caval ( chaval ), Catalan cavall , Spanish caballo , Portuguese cavalo , Italian cavallo , Romanian cal , and, by extension, English cavalry and chivalry (both via different forms of [Old] French: Old Norman and Francien ). An estimated 200 words of Gaulish etymology survive in Modern French, for example chêne , 'oak tree', and charrue , 'plough'. Within historical phonology and studies of language contact , various phonological changes have been posited as caused by

497-639: A radical change had the effect of rendering Latin sermons completely unintelligible to the general Romance-speaking public, which prompted officials a few years later, at the Third Council of Tours , to instruct priests to read sermons aloud in the old way, in rusticam romanam linguam or 'plain Roman[ce] speech'. As there was now no unambiguous way to indicate whether a given text was to be read aloud as Latin or Romance, various attempts were made in France to devise

568-421: A single battle scene, to a prologue, to a minimally cohesive tale with little to no chronological layout. Uitti argues that Yvain is Chrétien's "most carefully contrived romance… It has a beginning, a middle, and an end: we are in no doubt that Yvain's story is over." This very method of having three definite parts, including the build in the middle leading to the climax of the story, is in large part why Chrétien

639-553: A very distinctive identity compared to the other future Romance languages. The first noticeable influence is the substitution of the Latin melodic accent with a Germanic stress and its result was diphthongization , differentiation between long and short vowels, the fall of the unaccented syllable and of the final vowels: Additionally, two phonemes that had long since died out in Vulgar Latin were reintroduced: [h] and [w] (> OF g(u)- , ONF w- cf. Picard w- ): In contrast,

710-501: A ˈfra͜indrə ˈfɔrs saraˈgot͡sə k‿ˈɛst en ˈynə monˈtaɲə li ˈre͜is marˈsiʎəs la ˈti͜ɛnt, ki ˈdɛ͜u nən ˈa͜iməθ mahoˈmɛt ˈsɛrt eð apoˈlin rəˈkla͜iməθ nə‿s ˈpu͜ɛt gwarˈdær kə ˈmals nə l‿i aˈta͜iɲəθ Charles the king, our great emperor, Has been in Spain for seven full years: He has conquered the lofty land up to the sea. No castle remains standing before him; No wall or city is left to destroy Other than Saragossa, which lies atop

781-481: Is called Vulgar Latin , the common spoken language of the Western Roman Empire . Vulgar Latin differed from Classical Latin in phonology and morphology as well as exhibiting lexical differences; however, they were mutually intelligible until the 7th century when Classical Latin 'died' as a daily spoken language, and had to be learned as a second language (though it was long thought of as the formal version of

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852-603: Is common in its later stages with the shift of the Latin cluster /kt/ in Old French ( Lat factum > fait , ≠ Italian fatto , Portuguese feito , Spanish hecho ; or lactem * > lait , ≠ Italian latte , Portuguese leite , Spanish leche ). This means that both /pt/ and /kt/ must have first merged into /kt/ in the history of Old French, after which this /kt/ shifted to /xt/. In parallel, /ps/ and /ks/ merged into /ks/ before shifting to /xs/, apparently under Gaulish influence. The Celtic Gaulish language

923-440: Is generally considered Chrétien's most masterful work. The last romance commonly attributed to Chrétien, Perceval, the Story of the Grail , was written between 1181 and 1190, but left unfinished. It is dedicated to Philip, Count of Flanders , to whom Chrétien may have been attached in his last years. He finished only 9,000 lines of the work, but four successors of varying talents added 54,000 additional lines in what are known as

994-552: Is known of his life, but he seems to have been from Troyes or at least intimately connected with it. Between 1160 and 1172 he served (perhaps as herald-at-arms, as Gaston Paris speculated) at the court of his patroness Marie of France, Countess of Champagne , daughter of King Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine , who married Count Henry I of Champagne in 1164. Later, he served the court of Philippe d'Alsace, Count of Flanders . As proposed by Urban T. Holmes III , Chrétien's name, meaning literally "Christian from Troyes", might be

1065-445: Is left to guess about Latin or French literary originals which are now lost, or upon continental lore that goes back to a Celtic source in the case of Béroul , an Anglo-Norman who wrote around 1150. For his Perceval, the Story of the Grail , the influence of the story is clearly tied to the story of Saint Galgano ( Galgano Guidotti ) who died in 1180–1181 and was canonized in 1185: a knight struck by god's vision, planted his sword in

1136-513: Is marked by traits of the regional Champenois dialect (which is still fairly similar to the "standard" French of Paris). The immediate and specific sources for his romances are uncertain, as Chrétien speaks in the vaguest way of the materials he used. Geoffrey of Monmouth or Wace might have supplied some of the names, but neither author mentioned Erec , Lancelot , Gornemant and many others who play an important role in Chrétien's narratives. One

1207-401: Is seen to be a writer of novels five centuries before novels, as we know them, existed. This article incorporates material from an essay by W. W. Comfort, published in 1914. [REDACTED] Category Old French Old French ( franceis , françois , romanz ; French : ancien français ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between

1278-499: Is the only one of his four poems based on Ovid 's Metamorphoses that has survived. Two short-lyric chansons on the subject of love are also very likely his, but the attribution of the pious romance Guillaume d'Angleterre to him is now widely doubted. It has also been suggested that Chrétien might be the author of two short verse romances titled Le Chevalier à l'épée and La Mule sans frein , but this theory has not found much support. Chrétien names his treatments of Ovid in

1349-454: Is the relatively mundane dwelling-place of King Pelles, while Carbonek is the mystical castle where the climax of the Grail Quest takes place.) Corbenic has a town, and a bridge which Bromell la Pleche swears to defend against all comers for a year, for love of Pelles' daughter Elaine ( Morte , Caxton XI–XII). It is on the coast, or at least is mystically moved there for the purposes of

1420-536: Is thought to have survived into the 6th century in France, despite considerable cultural Romanization. Coexisting with Latin, Gaulish helped shape the Vulgar Latin dialects that developed into French, with effects including loanwords and calques (including oui , the word for "yes"), sound changes shaped by Gaulish influence, and influences in conjugation and word order. A computational study from 2003 suggests that early gender shifts may have been motivated by

1491-594: The langue d'oïl as early as the 9th century and is attested as a distinct Gallo-Romance variety by the 12th century. Dialects or variants of Old French include: Some modern languages are derived from Old French dialects other than Classical French, which is based on the Île-de-France dialect. They include Angevin , Berrichon , Bourguignon-Morvandiau , Champenois , Franc-Comtois , Gallo, Lorrain, Norman , Picard, Poitevin , Saintongeais , and Walloon. Beginning with Plautus ' time (254–184 b.c. ), one can see phonological changes between Classical Latin and what

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1562-521: The Bibliothèque bleue – that a standardized Classical French spread throughout France alongside the regional dialects. The material and cultural conditions in France and associated territories around the year 1100 triggered what Charles Homer Haskins termed the " Renaissance of the 12th century ", resulting in a profusion of creative works in a variety of genres. Old French gave way to Middle French in

1633-505: The Roman de Fauvel in 1310 and 1314, a satire on abuses in the medieval church, filled with medieval motets , lais , rondeaux and other new secular forms of poetry and music (mostly anonymous, but with several pieces by Philippe de Vitry , who would coin the expression ars nova to distinguish the new musical practice from the music of the immediately preceding age). The best-known poet and composer of ars nova secular music and chansons of

1704-835: The Castle of the Blessed Body (of Christ). The origins of the maimed Fisher King, master of the Grail Castle of Corbenic may be found in the maimed King Brân the Blessed, whose story is told in Branwen ferch Llŷr , second of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi . Chr%C3%A9tien de Troyes Chrétien de Troyes ( Modern French: [kʁetjɛ̃ də tʁwa] ; Old French : Crestien de Troies [kresˈtjẽn də ˈtrojəs] ; fl. c. 1160–1191)

1775-652: The Dolorous Stroke upon King Pellam in the Post-Vulgate Merlin ( Morte , Caxton II); if so, then Corbenic is in Listeneise (and is presumably rebuilt at some point). The Lancelot-Grail gives the name of its kingdom only as the Land Beyond. Helaine Newstead and Roger Sherman Loomis have presented a convincing case for the origins of the name Corbenic in a myth concerning a type of Welsh cornucopia – to wit,

1846-636: The Four Continuations . Similarly, the last thousand lines of Lancelot were written by Godefroi de Leigni , apparently by arrangement with Chrétien. In the case of Perceval , one continuer says the poet's death prevented him from completing the work; in the case of Lancelot , no reason is given. This has not stopped speculation that Chrétien did not approve of Lancelot ' s adulterous subject (in which case he seems unlikely to have invented Lancelot). There are also several lesser works, not all of which can be securely ascribed to Chrétien. Philomela

1917-589: The Kingdom of France and its vassals (including parts of the Angevin Empire ), and the duchies of Upper and Lower Lorraine to the east (corresponding to modern north-eastern France and Belgian Wallonia ), but the influence of Old French was much wider, as it was carried to England and the Crusader states as the language of a feudal elite and commerce. The area of Old French in contemporary terms corresponded to

1988-526: The Latin races between the close of the Empire and the arrival of Dante ." Chrétien's writing was very popular, as evidenced by the high number of surviving copies of his romances and their many adaptations into other languages. Three of Middle High German literature's finest examples, Wolfram von Eschenbach 's Parzival and Hartmann von Aue 's Erec and Iwein , were based on Perceval , Erec , and Yvain ;

2059-580: The Levant . As part of the emerging Gallo-Romance dialect continuum, the langues d'oïl were contrasted with the langues d'oc , at the time also called "Provençal", adjacent to the Old French area in the southwest, and with the Gallo-Italic group to the southeast. The Franco-Provençal group developed in Upper Burgundy, sharing features with both French and Provençal; it may have begun to diverge from

2130-517: The chansons de geste is The Song of Roland (earliest version composed in the late 11th century). Bertrand de Bar-sur-Aube in his Girart de Vienne set out a grouping of the chansons de geste into three cycles : the Geste du roi centering on Charlemagne, the Geste de Garin de Monglane (whose central character was William of Orange ), and the Geste de Doon de Mayence or the "rebel vassal cycle",

2201-453: The 1150s". Foster Guyer argues that specifically Yvain, the Knight of the Lion contains definite Ovidian influence: "Yvain was filled with grief and showed the Ovidian love symptoms of weeping and sighing so bitterly that he could scarcely speak. He declared that he would never stay away a full year. Using words like those of Leander in the seventeenth of Ovid's Epistles he said: 'If only I had

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2272-580: The Gallo-Romance that prefigures French – after the Reichenau and Kassel glosses (8th and 9th centuries) – are the Oaths of Strasbourg (treaties and charters into which King Charles the Bald entered in 842): Pro Deo amur et pro Christian poblo et nostro commun salvament, d'ist di en avant, in quant Deus savir et podir me dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo, et in aiudha et in cadhuna cosa ... (For

2343-519: The Grail Quest: Lancelot arrives at Corbenic by sea at the climax of his personal quest. Corbenic's seaward gate is guarded by two lions, aided by either a dwarf ( Morte , Caxton XVII) or a flaming hand (Lancelot-Grail). Lancelot's arrival results in his and Elaine's conception of Galahad , the new Grail hero of the prose cycles. It is unclear whether Corbenic is to be identified with the castle inadvertently levelled by Balin when he delivers

2414-553: The Grail castle's name is Munsalväsche (rendering of Monsalvat , in medieval tradition associated with the name of the mountain Montserrat in Catalonia ). There, the castle is the home of a secret society of temple knights who guard the Grail (here a precious stone) from the outside world. In the Perlesvaus continuation of Perceval , it is called the Castle of Souls but originally

2485-738: The Italian, Portuguese and Spanish words of Germanic origin borrowed from French or directly from Germanic retain /gw/ ~ /g/ , e.g. Italian, Spanish guerra 'war', alongside /g/ in French guerre ). These examples show a clear consequence of bilingualism, that sometimes even changed the first syllable of the Latin words. One example of a Latin word influencing an OLF loan is framboise 'raspberry', from OF frambeise , from OLF *brāmbesi 'blackberry' (cf. Dutch braambes , braambezie ; akin to German Brombeere , English dial. bramberry ) blended with LL fraga or OF fraie 'strawberry', which explains

2556-554: The Old French dialects diverged into a number of distinct langues d'oïl , among which Middle French proper was the dialect of the Île-de-France region. During the Early Modern period , French was established as the official language of the Kingdom of France throughout the realm, including the langue d'oc -speaking territories in the south. It was only in the 17th to 18th centuries – with the development especially of popular literature of

2627-491: The Renaissance short story ( conte or nouvelle ). Among the earliest works of rhetoric and logic to appear in Old French were the translations of Rhetorica ad Herennium and Boethius ' De topicis differentiis by John of Antioch in 1282. In northern Italy, authors developed Franco-Italian , a mixed language of Old French and Venetian or Lombard used in literary works in the 13th and 14th centuries. Old French

2698-665: The Three Welsh Romances associated with the Mabinogion ( Peredur, son of Efrawg , Geraint and Enid , and Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain ) are derived from the same trio. Especially in the case of Peredur , however, the connection between the Welsh romances and their source is probably not direct and has never been satisfactorily delineated. Chrétien also has the distinction of being

2769-569: The development of northern French culture in and around Île-de-France , which slowly but firmly asserted its ascendency over the more southerly areas of Aquitaine and Tolosa ( Toulouse ); however, the Capetians ' langue d'oïl , the forerunner of modern standard French, did not begin to become the common speech of all of France until after the French Revolution . In the Late Middle Ages,

2840-750: The first such text. At the beginning of the 13th century, Jean Bodel , in his Chanson de Saisnes , divided medieval French narrative literature into three subject areas: the Matter of France or Matter of Charlemagne ; the Matter of Rome ( romances in an ancient setting); and the Matter of Britain ( Arthurian romances and Breton lais ). The first of these is the subject area of the chansons de geste ("songs of exploits" or "songs of (heroic) deeds"), epic poems typically composed in ten-syllable assonanced (occasionally rhymed ) laisses . More than one hundred chansons de geste have survived in around three hundred manuscripts. The oldest and most celebrated of

2911-598: The first writer to mention the Holy Grail ( Perceval ), Camelot ( Lancelot ), and the love affair between Queen Guinevere and Lancelot ( Lancelot ), subjects of household recognition even today. There is a specific Classical influence in Chrétien's romances, the likes of which (the Iliad , the Aeneid , the Metamorphoses ) were "translated into the Old French vernacular during

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2982-728: The gender of the corresponding word in Gaulish. The pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax of the Vulgar Latin spoken in Roman Gaul in late antiquity were modified by the Old Frankish language , spoken by the Franks who settled in Gaul from the 5th century and conquered the future Old French-speaking area by the 530s. The name français itself is derived from the name of the Franks. The Old Frankish language had

3053-535: The ground that immediately solidified (kept in Abbey San Galgano ). However, Chrétien found his sources immediately at hand, without much understanding of its primitive spirit, but appreciating it as a setting for the ideal society dreamed of, although not realized, in his own day. And Chrétien's five romances together form the most complete expression from a single author of the ideals of French chivalry . Though so far there has been little critical attention paid to

3124-457: The horn (of plenty) of Brân the Blessed , a magical, food-providing talisman . The argument hinges on confusion resulting from two possible meanings for the Old French li cors (a nominative case form) which can mean both 'the body' (Modern French le corps ) and 'the horn' (Modern French la corne ), leading to the mistranslation, by Christian authors, of li cors beneit as the blessed body -

3195-533: The incipient Middle French period was Guillaume de Machaut . Discussions about the origins of non-religious theater ( théâtre profane )—both drama and farce—in the Middle Ages remain controversial, but the idea of a continuous popular tradition stemming from Latin comedy and tragedy to the 9th century seems unlikely. Most historians place the origin of medieval drama in the church's liturgical dialogues and "tropes". Mystery plays were eventually transferred from

3266-468: The introduction to Cligès , where he also mentions his work about King Mark and Iseult . The latter is presumably related to the legend of Tristan and Iseult , though Tristan is not named. Chrétien's take on Tristan has not survived, though in the introduction of Cligès, Chrétien himself says that his treatment of Tristan was not well received, possibly explaining why it does not survive. Chrétien's works are written in vernacular Old French , although it

3337-459: The language of the French Renaissance in the Île-de-France region; this dialect was a predecessor to Modern French . Other dialects of Old French evolved themselves into modern forms ( Poitevin-Saintongeais , Gallo , Norman , Picard , Walloon , etc.), each with its linguistic features and history. The region where Old French was spoken natively roughly extended to the northern half of

3408-426: The late 8th and the mid-14th century. Rather than a unified language , Old French was a group of Romance dialects , mutually intelligible yet diverse . These dialects came to be collectively known as the langues d'oïl , contrasting with the langues d'oc , the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania , now the south of France. The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French ,

3479-458: The latter readily construed as a reference either to the body of Christ or to the body of a saint preserved as a holy relic. The common scribal error of misreading the letter 't' as a 'c' yielded the second element -ben(e)ic . The original name of Castle Corbenic can thus be reconstructed as Chastiaus del Cor Beneit - the Castle of the Blessed Horn (of Brân) – subsequently misunderstood to mean

3550-499: The lineages of Jesus ' followers Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus , whose history is told in the cycle's prologue, the Vulgate Joseph . The ruler of Corbenic is King Pelles . As befits the castle of the Grail , Corbenic is a place of marvels, including, at various times, a maiden trapped in a magically boiling cauldron, a dragon, and a room where (depending on text) either an angelic knight or arrows assail any who try to spend

3621-629: The loss of an intervening consonant. Manuscripts generally do not distinguish hiatus from true diphthongs, but modern scholarly transcription indicates it with a diaeresis , as in Modern French: Presented below is the first laisse of The Song of Roland along with a broad transcription reflecting reconstructed pronunciation c.  1050 . Charles li reis, nostre emperedre magnes, Set anz toz pleins at estét en Espaigne. Tres qu'en la mer conquist la tere altaigne, Chastel n'i at ki devant lui remaignet. Murs ne citét n'i est remés

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3692-560: The love of God and for the Christian people, and our common salvation, from this day forward, as God will give me the knowledge and the power, I will defend my brother Karlo with my help in everything ...) The second-oldest document in Old French is the Eulalia sequence , which is important for linguistic reconstruction of Old French pronunciation due to its consistent spelling. The royal House of Capet , founded by Hugh Capet in 987, inaugurated

3763-406: The mid-14th century, paving the way for early French Renaissance literature of the 15th century. The earliest extant French literary texts date from the ninth century, but very few texts before the 11th century have survived. The first literary works written in Old French were saints' lives . The Canticle of Saint Eulalie , written in the second half of the 9th century, is generally accepted as

3834-528: The monastery church to the chapter house or refectory hall and finally to the open air, and the vernacular was substituted for Latin. In the 12th century one finds the earliest extant passages in French appearing as refrains inserted into liturgical dramas in Latin, such as a Saint Nicholas (patron saint of the student clercs) play and a Saint Stephen play. An early French dramatic play is Le Jeu d'Adam ( c.  1150 ) written in octosyllabic rhymed couplets with Latin stage directions (implying that it

3905-543: The most famous characters of which were Renaud de Montauban and Girart de Roussillon . A fourth grouping, not listed by Bertrand, is the Crusade cycle , dealing with the First Crusade and its immediate aftermath. Jean Bodel 's other two categories—the "Matter of Rome" and the "Matter of Britain"—concern the French romance or roman . Around a hundred verse romances survive from the period 1150–1220. From around 1200 on,

3976-667: The night there. As told in Le Morte d'Arthur , witnessing some of these wonders cause Bors to name it the Castle Adventurous , "for here be many strange adventures" ( Morte , Caxton XI). Yet it can also appear quite ordinary: on an earlier occasion, according to the Lancelot-Grail , the same Bors visited without noticing anything unusual. (Perhaps conscious of this apparent contradiction, T.H. White in his modern The Once and Future King treats Corbenic as two separate places: Corbin

4047-625: The northern parts of the Kingdom of France (including Anjou and Normandy , which in the 12th century were ruled by the Plantagenet kings of England ), Upper Burgundy and the Duchy of Lorraine . The Norman dialect was also spread to England and Ireland , and during the Crusades , Old French was also spoken in the Kingdom of Sicily , and in the Principality of Antioch and the Kingdom of Jerusalem in

4118-504: The replacement [b] > [f] and in turn the final -se of framboise added to OF fraie to make freise , modern fraise (≠ Wallon frève , Occitan fraga , Romanian fragă , Italian fragola , fravola 'strawberry'). Mildred Pope estimated that perhaps still 15% of the vocabulary of Modern French derives from Germanic sources. This proportion was larger in Old French, because Middle French borrowed heavily from Latin and Italian. The earliest documents said to be written in

4189-532: The spoken language). Vulgar Latin was the ancestor of the Romance languages , including Old French. By the late 8th century, when the Carolingian Renaissance began, native speakers of Romance idioms continued to use Romance orthoepy rules while speaking and reading Latin. When the most prominent scholar of Western Europe at the time, English deacon Alcuin , was tasked by Charlemagne with improving

4260-404: The standards of Latin writing in France, not being a native Romance speaker himself, he prescribed a pronunciation based on a fairly literal interpretation of Latin spelling. For example, in a radical break from the traditional system, a word such as ⟨viridiarium⟩ ' orchard ' now had to be read aloud precisely as it was spelled rather than */verdʒjær/ (later spelled as OF 'vergier' ). Such

4331-473: The subject, it is not inaccurate to say that Chrétien was influenced by the changing face of secular and canonical law in the 12th century. This is particularly relevant for his Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart , which makes repeated use of the customary law prevalent in Chrétien's day. William Wistar Comfort praised de Troyes' "significance as a literary artist and as the founder of a precious literary tradition [which] distinguishes him from all other poets of

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4402-410: The tendency was increasingly to write the romances in prose (many of the earlier verse romances were adapted into prose versions), although new verse romances continued to be written to the end of the 14th century. The most important romance of the 13th century is the Romance of the Rose , which breaks considerably from the conventions of the chivalric adventure story. Medieval French lyric poetry

4473-434: The two. The Old Low Franconian influence is also believed to be responsible for the differences between the langue d'oïl and the langue d'oc (Occitan), being that various parts of Northern France remained bilingual between Latin and Germanic for some time, and these areas correspond precisely to where the first documents in Old French were written. This Germanic language shaped the popular Latin spoken here and gave it

4544-412: The verb trobar "to find, to invent"). By the late 13th century, the poetic tradition in France had begun to develop in ways that differed significantly from the troubadour poets, both in content and in the use of certain fixed forms. The new poetic (as well as musical: some of the earliest medieval music has lyrics composed in Old French by the earliest composers known by name) tendencies are apparent in

4615-409: The wings of a dove/to fly back to you at will/Many and many a time I would come'." Chrétien has been termed "the inventor of the modern novel ". Karl Uitti argues: "With [Chrétien's work] a new era opens in the history of European story telling… this poem reinvents the genre we call narrative romance; in some important respects it also initiates the vernacular novel." A "story" could be anything from

4686-422: Was a French poet and trouvère known for his writing on Arthurian subjects such as Gawain , Lancelot , Perceval and the Holy Grail . Chrétien's chivalric romances , including Erec and Enide , Lancelot , Perceval and Yvain , represent some of the best-regarded works of medieval literature . His use of structure, particularly in Yvain , has been seen as a step towards the modern novel . Little

4757-408: Was called Eden . The Grail is kept with other holy relics at the castle's Grail Chapel, from which they vanish during the time when the castle is conquered by Perceval's evil uncle. In the 13th-century Lancelot-Grail (Vulgate) prose cycle, the castle is named as Corbenic for the first time. In the highly Christian mystical Vulgate Quest for the Holy Grail , it is the home of the Grail family from

4828-414: Was constantly changing and evolving; however, the form in the late 12th century, as attested in a great deal of mostly poetic writings, can be considered standard. The writing system at this time was more phonetic than that used in most subsequent centuries. In particular, all written consonants (including final ones) were pronounced, except for s preceding non- stop consonants and t in et , and final e

4899-443: Was indebted to the poetic and cultural traditions in Southern France and Provence —including Toulouse and the Aquitaine region—where langue d'oc was spoken ( Occitan language ); in their turn, the Provençal poets were greatly influenced by poetic traditions from the Hispano-Arab world . Lyric poets in Old French are called trouvères – etymologically the same word as the troubadours of Provençal or langue d'oc (from

4970-590: Was pronounced [ ə ] . The phonological system can be summarised as follows: Notes: In Old French, the nasal vowels were not separate phonemes but only allophones of the oral vowels before a nasal consonant. The nasal consonant was fully pronounced; bon was pronounced [bõn] ( ModF [bɔ̃] ). Nasal vowels were present even in open syllables before nasals where Modern French has oral vowels, as in bone [bõnə] ( ModF bonne [bɔn] ). Notes: Notes: In addition to diphthongs, Old French had many instances of hiatus between adjacent vowels because of

5041-518: Was written by Latin-speaking clerics for a lay public). A large body of fables survive in Old French; these include (mostly anonymous) literature dealing with the recurring trickster character of Reynard the Fox . Marie de France was also active in this genre, producing the Ysopet (Little Aesop ) series of fables in verse. Related to the fable was the more bawdy fabliau , which covered topics such as cuckolding and corrupt clergy. These fabliaux would be an important source for Chaucer and for

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