Matière de Bretagne

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Matière de Bretagne , also Matter of Britain or Arthurian romance , is a name for the medieval sagas that refer to the Celtic history of Britain and Brittany . After the English name Arthurian legend (" Arthurian legend "), the legends about Arthur are the main part of this system of sagas. They cover up historical legends of the British Isles that are also part of the subject (including Brutus of Britain , Coel , King Lear and Gogmagog ). The legends were codified in the Middle Ages; an example of this is the Historia regum Britanniae of the Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth .

etymology

The term is derived from a classification that the 12th century poet Jean Bodel mentions in his old French epic Chanson de Saisnes :

Ne sont que 3 matières à nul homme atandant,
De France et de Bretaigne, et de Rome la grant.

There are only three stories that everyone should know: that
of France, that of Britain, and that of Rome, the venerable (city).

The name derived from this verse expresses the connection of the legendary world of Britain with other mythological subjects, such as the legendary world of Rome (old French Matière de Rome ) and that of stories about the knights of Charlemagne and their wars with the Moors and Saracen based legends of France ( Matière de France ).

Emergence

The legendary history of Britain came in part to provide a basis for a patriotic myth for the British Isles. The Matière de Bretagne draws its inspiration from old oral traditions and Celtic legends. Whereby these were supplemented by elements of the Christian faith, such as the Holy Grail. The Historia Brittonum , the earliest source of the history of the Brutus of Britain, appears to have been designed to provide a noble ancestral history for the Welsh princes . There are several versions of this story, attributed to Nennius or Gildas , the actual author is unknown.

Just as Virgil linked the mythological founding of Rome with the Trojan War in his Aeneid , the author of this story also linked his hero Brutus with the diaspora after the Trojan War. He thus provided the literary raw material that later writers such as Geoffrey von Monmouth, Michael Drayton and John Milton took up, combining the settlement of the British Isles with the heroic epoch of Greek literature, which served their diverse literary projects.

Geoffrey von Monmouth interpreted the term “ Trinovanten ” (from the report of Tacitus , when he lived in the London area ) as Troi-novant (“New Troy ”).

More theoretical claims connect Celtic mythology with some rulers and events as recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia regum Britanniae . It is believed that, for example, Leir of Britain, which later became Shakespeare's King Lear , was originally the Irish sea ​​god Lir . Various Celtic deities have been identified as the characters in Arthurian literature, so Arthur's half-sister Morgan le Fay was often seen as the originally Irish goddess Morrígan .

Many of these identifications come from the late 19th century theory of "comparative religion" and have been studied recently.

content

The Arthurian legend refers to the legendary King Arthur, who is the central figure in many medieval romances. These stories are also known as the Matter of Britain . The authors of the Middle Ages wrote various works on this, from the birth of Arthur to the adventures of his knights and the forbidden love between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere to the search for the Holy Grail, Arthur's death and the dissolution of the knightly community and destruction report of his kingdom. Even before the 11th century, the legends about Arthur and his court were popular in Wales, which were widely circulated through the records in the Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The heroic king who defeated the Roman army in eastern France and was mortally wounded in battle. The concept of Arthur as conqueror of the world was inspired by legends about glorious leaders like Alexander or Karl. Later authors such as Wace of Jersey or Lawamon embellished these narratives with further details.

Reception and literary editing

Merlin in a French manuscript from the 13th century: An example of the expansion of the "Matière de Bretagne"

The legends described have not only inspired the authors who were the first to write them down (possibly modified), but also inspired newer writers to write their own works. These include numerous medieval and some modern authors who published their own version of the Arthurian legend . Works on the personalities eclipsed by Arthur, who also appear in the saga, are probably rarer.

Chrétien de Troyes used Celtic sources in the late 12th century to depict Arthur in five romances as ruler of a realm of miracles. It was he who brought the Grail, or the love between Lancelot and Guinevere, into the story. The Vulgate cycle also tells of the magician Merlin , about whom Robert de Boron reports in an epic verse that also tells of the magic sword Excalibur in the stone, the birth and childhood of Arthur and the attainment of royal dignity. Finally, in the prose Tristan, the Arthurian legend was combined with the romance around Tristan and Isolde .

In the 15th century, Thomas Malory combined French and English parts of the story to create the English-language Le Morte Darthur . The legend survived the centuries and came back to life in the 19th century in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King . In the 20th century, Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote his own Arthurian trilogy and the writer Thomas Berger wrote the novel Arthur Rex in 1978 . Terence Hanbury White also took up the subject and retold it in his 1958 series of novels The Once and Future King . This served as the basis for the musical Camelot by Alan Lerner and Frederick Loewe in 1960 and the film of the same name Camelot from 1967. Numerous other film adaptations of the material followed, such as the 1975 satirical film Monty Python and the Holy Grail or John Boormans Excalibur in 1981.

William Shakespeare, however, was evidently very interested in the history of Britain and knew its obscure side-ways. His plays contain several narratives related to legendary kings such as King Lear and Cymbeline . It can be assumed that Shakespeare's Welsh teacher Thomas Jenkins introduced him to this matter and possibly instructed him to read Monmouth.

Even in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England Scotland and Ireland ( The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland ), which in turn Shakespeare's sources for Macbeth belong to dive to these stories. In Shakespeare's play The Merry Wives of Windsor , a Welsh teacher appears as the character Sir Hugh Evans.

Other early authors also made use of the Arthurian Legends and pseudo-historical sources from the Matter of Britain . The Scots, for example, created a mystical story in their genealogies of the kings of the Picts and Dalriadas .

While these eventually became factual ancestry, unlike Geoffrey, their origins were vague, and often combined aspects of mythical British and Irish history. Gabhran's story in particular combines elements from both stories.

The Center de l'Imaginaire Arthurien, founded in Rennes in 1988, deals with the subject .

literature

  • Marianne E. Kalinke: King Arthur, north-by-northwest. The matière de Bretagne in Old Norse-Icelandic romances. (= Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana. Volume 37). CA Reitzels Boghandel, Copenhagen 1981, ISBN 87-7421-316-4 .
  • Ralf Simon: Introduction to the structuralist poetics of the medieval novel. Analysis of German novels by the matière de Bretagne. (= Epistemata ; literary studies series ). Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1990, ISBN 3-88479-522-8 .
  • Karin Lichtblau, Christa Tuczay : Matière de Bretagne. 2 volumes. (= Motif-index of German secular narratives from the beginning to 1400. Volume 1–2). W. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-017598-3 .
  • Stephanie Wodianka: Matière de Bretagne. In: Between Myth and History. Aesthetics, mediality and cultural specifics of the medieval economy. (= Spectrum literary studies. 17). W. de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2009, ISBN 978-3-11-020352-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Arthurian legend. In: britannica.com. Encyclopædia Britannica , accessed May 9, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Tristan and Tristan Reception. ( Memento of the original from May 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on staff.uni-giessen.de (PDF, p. 4). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.staff.uni-giessen.de