Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1959, Blaðsíða 26

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everybody, the chansons de geste belonged to the repertoire of the countless
jongleurs who wandered from place to place, reciting their poems to the
pilgrims along the roads, and the peasants and townspeople of the market-
places. Every jongleur could make his own copy of a chanson, shortening
it or adding incidents, and changing it at will:
Il se produisit alors un mélange de traditions diverses, que les jongleurs s’ap-
pliquérent a accorder: ils les reliérent entre elles, en comblérent les lacunes, les
ornérent, les remaniérent. Et c’est une tåche immense qu’ils exécutérent ainsi, refai-
sant et déformant, combinant et amplifiant30.
The form of the chansons de geste lent itself to all these changes: They
are written in assonanced laisses, of unequal length, consisting of deca-
syllabic verses (occasionally verses of twelve syllables occur). Later, rhyme
instead of assonance became fashionable, but of both the rhymed and the
assonanced form it can be said that it is a very simple metre, and very
little professional skili was needed to change a verse or add new verses.
About the middle of the 12th century, a more refined courtly literature
began to grow up, written by minstrels for the aristocratic society of the
feudal courts, a society where women played a more important part, and
which had the wealth and leisure to be able to indulge its taste for litera-
ture and art. The subject of this aristocratic literature is first and foremost
the matiere de Bretagne, romantic tales of King Arthur and his knights.
The scene of their exploits is a sort of enchanted fairyland, where anything
can happen, and the stress is no longer on action, but on psychology; the
authors are interested in human character and human relationships, not in
wars and fighting for their own sake. The heroes try to live up to an ideal
code of chivalry, and their relations with women are of great importance
to the plot. The great names of this kind of literature were Chrétien de
Troyes and Thomas, the author of Tristan. Poems based on the matiere
de Rome, the stories of Aeneas, of Troy, and of Thebes, derived from the
classical sources available in the Middle Ages, Vergil, Statius, Dåres and
Dietys, were written for the same public, and so were the romans d’aven-
ture, a genre which mixes the fairly realistic geography of the matiere de
Rome with the supernatural incidents of the matiere de Bretagne. Exam-
ples of such romans d’aventure are Floire et Blancheflor and Partenopeu
de Biois. This literature was aristocratic in temperament, and was never
meant to become “popular”. Some of the themes might be taken up by
30 Edmond Faral: Les jongleurs en France au moyen åge, p. 197.