United States or Central African Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Whether the present civilization of Spain is an advance upon that of the Moors might in many respects become a matter of much doubt. Long lethargy and intellectual inanition brooded over Christian Europe. The darkness of the Middle Ages reached its midnight, and slowly the dawn arose, musical with the chirping of innumerable trouvères and minnesingers.
The trouveres chose Charlemagne and his paladins as the heroes of their poems and romances, and these, composed for the most part in French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were early circulated in Italy.
Is this strange myth, differing as it does from the simple narrative presented in the Welsh legend of Peredur, really Cymric, or ought we rather to see in it an original creation of the trouveres, based upon a Breton foundation?
In the history of the world there is no event that fired the poetry and imagination of the people like these holy wars, and religious enthusiasm began to influence the poetry of the time. Chaucer, the father of English literature, found in the Provencal literature all his first models. With the decline of the Troubadours occurred the rise of the Trouveres in northern France.
A collection of Indian tales, translated into Latin in the tenth or eleventh century, was the first storehouse of the trouveres. The Arabian tales, transmitted by the Moors to the Castilians, and by the latter to the French, were in turn versified.
We need not belittle the glory of the first trouveres who put into a language, then read and understood from one end of Europe to the other, fictions which, but for them, would have doubtless remained for ever unknown. It is however difficult to attribute to them an inventive faculty, such as would permit them to merit the title of creators.
Even these May-morning exordia, in which he was but following a fashion faithfully observed both by the French trouveres and by the English romances translated from their productions, and not forgotten by the author of the earlier part of the "Roman de la Rose" always come from his hands with the freshness of natural truth.
It appears that he composed many verses in the vulgar tongue: already the young men sang them on the quay below the house. Those songs, says M. de Remusat, were probably in the taste of the Trouveres, of whom he was one of the first in date, or, so to speak, the predecessor. It is the same spirit which has moulded the famous "letters," written in the quaint Latin of the middle age.
Mediæval love is first revealed in the sudden and almost simultaneous burst of song which, like the twitter and trill so dear to trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers, fills the woods that yesterday were silent and dead, and greeted the earliest sunshine, the earliest faint green after the long winter numbness of the dark ages, after the boisterous gales of the earliest Crusade.
"Quoique la celebre Marie eut, au XIIIe siecle, donne une assez ample histoire du Purgatoire de St.-Patrice, puisqu'elle est de plus de trois mille vers, deux autres Trouveres anglo-normands qui probablement ne connaissaient pas son poeme, volurent dans le siecle suivant traiter le meme sujet." Caen, 1834. t. iii., p. 245.