August 10, 2014

Lancelot by Chrétien de Troyes (Review)

Title: Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart
Author: Chrétien de Troyes
First published written: 1170
Add it: Goodreads, Book Depository
Rating: ★★★☆☆

I was more excited about reading Lancelot than about any other of Chrétien's romances. I mean, Lancelot's story is so popular and here it appears for the first time, at least according to Wikipedia. But unfortunately the romance was not very exciting. Well, there is love between Lancelot and the queen, all right, and some horrifying details about their night together, like Lancelot bleeding all the time because he's lost his finger while trying to get to the queen's rooms... Imagine that. But overall it's just another story about some guy painfully trying to prove to everyone around that he's the best by challenging everybody else he sees without much consideration. This whole cart business was also not very clear from the text, and I was wondering why he needed taking it except for symbolic reasons.

There are some things I liked though. One is the depiction of father/son relationships. There are two such pairs in the story, and a son is usually a hothead, while his dad tries to stop him, reason with him and protect him. Needless to say, this makes the son ashamed of his parent, although in the end the dad is always right. This is so true to life I had to smile :)

Another scene I liked is when a lady offers Lancelot lounging in exchange for spending a night with her. Smart move, right? And it is so funnily described how very unpleasant it was to Lancelot and how he suffered from it, but he was still going to do this out of honour because he gave his word. I laughed out loud at this! :)

In my book:
Yet another typical Chrétien romance... I'm getting a bit tired of them.

7 comments:

  1. Oh dear. I still want to read them but I can appreciate how tedious these stories might become. Still, love the reviews. :)

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    1. Thanks, Satia! I'd recommend starting with Cliges, it is the most engaging one, to my mind :)

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  2. The reason for taking the cart might have been symbolic or just one of those things that made more sense when the book was written. I haven't read this book, but I read The Knight with the Lion at school and I remember that there were some things that made much more sense with a teacher's explanation. I wanted to read this one too, but never got around to do it.

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    1. Well, I had to read some Wikipedia to get the meaning of it... I wish I had a teacher to go explain everything! :)

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  3. It's too bad the cart part (ha) wasn't very clear. I've only read the prose translation, but IIRC there's a dwarf driving the cart who knows where the Queen is, and he says he'll only take Lance if he hops into the cart. Perhaps he wanted to humiliate Lancelot, or test his resolve, or something...

    I do like the father/son relationships in this story too. :)

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    1. Well, I also read a prose translation, and an English one, as this was the only one I could find... So maybe we read the same one :) aaaand it's not clear that the dwarf actually knows something. He just tells him to sit on a cart and Lancelot does so... Maybe it's a convention that dwarves are supposed to know everything? :)

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  4. I used to love this book, but that was decades ago

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