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Yvain, the Knight of the Lion

Name: Yvain, the Knight of the Lion
Author: Chrétien de Troyes

Chrétien de TroyesOriginal title Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion (French, 1170)

Yvain, the Knight of the Lion is an Arthurian romance by French poet Chrétien de Troyes. It was written c. 1180 simultaneously with Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, and includes several references to the narrative of that poem. It is a story of knight-errantry, in which the protagonist Yvain is first rejected by his lady for breaking a promise, and subsequently performs a number of heroic deeds in order to regain her favor. The poem has been adapted into several other medieval works, including Iwein and Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain.

“Chrétien is nothing if not versatile: popular, recherché, allusive, insistent, arch, naïve, racy and demure…He has a dramatist's flair for the handling of dialogue, a deft and economic way with characterization, the sharp confidence of the logician in his handling of rhetorical figures and the self-assurance of the entertainer in the deployment of humour (he is master of the verbal nudge). It is his essential vivacity that one misses most in his imitators.”

Chrétien de Troyes book Yvain, the Knight of the Lion

Tony Hunt "Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romance, Yvain", in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 128.
Criticism