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Arthur Q6: Narration, style
The narrator is very present in these tales, with the text being close to a transcription of what an oral story-teller would say. Did that style work for you? Did you mind the various inclusions of the narrator into the stories?
And how about the various changes of tense in the telling?
Comments
That all worked fine for me. No problems there!
Yes, it gave the feel of a commentary on events as related by a sidekick close to the action
I thought it was fine. The clerk at the end of the Lancelot tale just ending the story with a bit of a "Big gulps eh? Well, see ya later!" ending was funny to me. He also explicitly calls the reader Gentlemen. Does this give any insight into who the expected reader was of these stories?
I think the reference to "gentlemen" is a reminder that these are stories for the elite.
Yes, the sudden ending was sudden! The story of Lancelot is continued by another author, in a tale about as long as this one.
Were any women considered part of the elite at this time? Would any of them have been allowed to read this?
I assure you there were! This was the age of Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example.
His patroness, Marie of Champagne, was a daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine...
Interesting.
So it was addressed to gentlemen, but with the idea that it wouldn't only be gentlemen who would read it, but the majority perhaps?
Lancelot was written specifically for - and at the request of - Marie of Champagne, so most definitely!
I wonder whether this was intended purely as a written fiction, or whether there were sung/recited/declaimed variations at the same time. Can we imagine multiple slightly-divergent versions of the tales, with de Troyes selecting the material he particularly wanted for his own version. Accidents of preservation mean that this is all we have, but it may well be not all that there was. See by analogy Albert Lord's The Singer of Tales, based on a study of the Balkan oral poetry tradition, and applied both to Homeric Greece and the early Hebrew Bible.
Did you read the Singer of Tales? It's available here https://chs.harvard.edu/book/lord-albert-bates-the-singer-of-tales/, but I haven't read it. When I looked at it I thought that is sample size was quite small, and it's impossible to conceive of the singers as illiterate. The premise that personal variation is ubiquitous is an example of Eurocentrism - I would cite the Veda as a counterexample showing that people can maintain text orally. This is an example of the kind of discipline I was talking about in my earlier response.
The work was definitely there as a written piece, but I expect that performance or recital was the most common way it was experienced.
Yes, I read it while exploring new Kingdom Egyptian and archaic Hebrew poetry a few years ago. I don't think the key point is whether the singers were literate or not, but how they chose to narrate and pass on their traditions. Just like ancient near eastern poetry, there were particular tropes and turns of phrase that were used to establish a framework for the particular song in question, and as a device for expanding or contracting the song depending on the time and audience available.
A particularly interesting feature (to me, at least) is that the singers typically maintained that they preserved the song exactly as received, yet actual experience of performances showed that they felt entirely free to insert or omit sections depending on circumstance. Hence my comment that de Troyes "version" of say Yvain may well simply be one of numerous near-duplicates that were in circulation at the time. Presuming that both the Balkan singers (and many others) meant something concrete when they said that they passed it on unchanged, then I think we should explore the idea that they felt they were keeping something fixed - maybe the moral core of the tale, or the character of the protagonist, or some such - but not necessarily the specific wording.
I also think that literacy is not a binary thing but one which has many gradations, and that literacy at any level is only loosely related to the ability to be a good performer of songs and epics.