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Updated: June 3, 2025
In comparing the Breton cycle as the French trouveres knew it, and the same cycle as it is to be found in the text of the Mabinogion, one might be tempted to believe that the European imagination, enthralled by these brilliant fables, added to them some poetical themes unknown to the Welsh.
It is a part of the great treasure preserved from remotest antiquity by itinerant singers and story-tellers, and committed to writing by poets of the Middle Ages. The first of these, so far as unquestioned evidence goes, were French trouveres. From them the tale passed into the hands of the German minnesinger. In English the romance has an equally honorable literary record.
A treasury of a later date, from which the Trouveres drew their fabliaux in the thirteenth century, was a collection of Indian tales that had been translated into Latin in the tenth century. These fabliaux show that inventiveness, gaiety, and simple, yet delightful esprit, which is found nowhere but among the French.
I worship him, as the trouveres say, with all my heart, and wad lay down my life if I could win one kind blush of his eye; and yet and yet such a creature am I that I am ever wittingly or unwittingly transgressing these weary laws, and garring him think me a fool, or others report me such, clenching her hands again. 'Madame de Ste. Petronelle? asked Jean. 'She! Oh no!
Whether Tannhäuser himself was real is an open question; but there can be no doubt about Walther von der Vogelweide, who was one of Germany's greatest masters in the shorter forms. Examples of still another style in the work of the Minnesingers are almost surely a direct imitation of the work of the Trouvères of Northern France.
A spark from the Saracenic schools and poets of Spain may have flitted into Provence to kindle the elements of modern literature into its first development, the songs of the Troubadours. Almost contemporary were the lays of the Minnesingers in Germany and the romances of the Trouvères in Northern France.
They furnished, also, the romances of chivalry for the English Court, and have had an effect on English poetry that can be seen even in the present day. Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century borrowed freely from French, Latin and Italian works. The comic Fabliaux and the allegorical poetry of the Trouveres and Troubadours furnished him with many of his incidents and characters.
The Trouveres and Troubadours, singing of love and war in strains pleasing to every class of society, helped to root out the gloomy superstitions which, at the first Crusade, filled the minds of all those who were able to think. Men became in consequence less exclusively under the mental thraldom of the priesthood, and lost much of the credulity which formerly distinguished them.
In the south of France, Provence early became an independent kingdom, and consolidating its language, laws, and manners, at the close of the eleventh century it gave birth to the literature of the Troubadours; while in the north, the language and literature of the Trouveres, which were the germs of the national literature of France, were not developed until a century later.
Courts of Love and troubadours and trouvères, kings who were kings indeed, with the splendour and courtesy and beneficence of their courts Louis the Saint and Frederic II, Edward III and King Charles above all the simple rank and high honour of the "gentleman," the representative of a long line of honourable tradition, no casual and purse-proud upstart, but of proud race and unquestioned status, proud because it stood for certain high ideals of honour and chivalry and loyalty, of courtesy and breeding and compassion.
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