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Graelent
''Graelent'' is an Old French -4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ... Breton lai, named after its protagonist. It is one of the so-called anonymous lais . Synopsis The plot is similar to that of Marie de France's lai of '' :Anonymous lais">anonymous lais . Synopsis The plot is similar to that of Marie de France's lai of '' Graelent, a knight of Brittany">Lanval''. Guiomar (Arthurian legend)">Graelent, a knight of Brittany, rebuffs amorous advances from the queen, who retaliates by manipulating the king against him. Graelent's wages are suspended, reducing him to poverty. Graelent dejectedly rides into the forest, and while tracking a white hind (''bisse blance'' v. 201; Modern French, Mod. Fr.: '), he stumbles upon a beautiful lady bathing in the fountain, attended by two maidens. Graelent sneaks up and clutches the articles of clothing she has disrobed upon a bush. The lady cries out hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guingamor
''Guingamor'' is an anonymous medieval lai about a knight who leaves the court of his uncle, a king, because the queen has sent him off to hunt for a white boar. By offering a reward for the boar's head, she hopes to get rid of the protagonist Guingamor, who has refused her sexual advances. Guingamor crosses a river and passes into a mystical kingdom. Returning with the boar's head after what seems to him like three days, he encounters a common charcoal-maker, who tells him that many years have passed since the king's faithful nephew never returned from a hunt for the white boar. Guingamor's return is triumphant and he is immortalized in a lai. The story was once presumed to have been written by Marie de France, but is now considered anonymous. However, it draws on Marie's ''Lanval'', and the anonymous ''Graelent'': ::The definitive view of these three lays, chronologically and thematically, is that of R. N. Illingworth, who concluded that they were composed in the order ''Lanva ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guiomar (Arthurian Legend)
Guiomar is the best known name of a character appearing in many medieval texts relating to the Arthurian legend, often in relationship with Morgan le Fay or a similar fairy queen type character. In medieval literature His earliest known appearances are as Graelent, Guingamor and Guigemar, the titular character of three 12th-century Breton lai "fairy lais" (''lais féeriques''): '' Graelent'', '' Guingamor'' and '' Guigemar'', each telling a similar story. There, he is a king's relative or vassal who, after rejecting the advances of the unnamed queen (the king's adulterous and jealous wife), becomes a lover of a fairy queen known only as the Fairy Mistress (a figure considered to represent Morgan) and is taken to an Otherworld (Avalon). All of these texts are related to Marie de France's '' Lanval'', where the human queen character is Guinevere. His name may have been derived from that of Gwyn ap Nudd, who in the Welsh Arthurian tales appears as the ruler of the Celtic Otherwo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lanval
''Lanval'' is one of the Lais of Marie de France. Written in Anglo-Norman, it tells the story of Lanval, a knight at King Arthur's court, who is overlooked by the king, wooed by a fairy lady, given all manner of gifts by her, and subsequently refuses the advances of Queen Guinevere. The plot is complicated by Lanval's promise not to reveal the identity of his mistress, which he breaks when Guinevere accuses him of having "no desire for women". Before Arthur, Guinevere accuses Lanval of shaming her, and Arthur, in an extended judicial scene, demands that he reveal his mistress. Despite the broken promise, the fairy lover eventually appears to justify Lanval, and to take him with her to Avalon. The tale was popular, and was adapted into English as ''Sir Landevale'', '' Sir Launfal'', and ''Sir Lambewell''. Plot Lanval, a knight in King Arthur's court, envied for "his valor, his generosity, his beauty, his prowess", was forgotten to be invited to a banquet where the King distribute ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chivalric Sagas
The ''riddarasögur'' (literally 'sagas of knights', also known in English as 'chivalric sagas', 'romance-sagas', 'knights' sagas', 'sagas of chivalry') are Norse prose Norse saga, sagas of the romance (heroic literature), romance genre. Starting in the thirteenth century with Norse translations of French ''chansons de geste'' and Latin romances and histories, the genre expanded in Iceland to indigenous creations in a similar style. While the ''riddarasögur'' were widely read in Iceland for many centuries they have traditionally been regarded as popular literature inferior in artistic quality to the Icelanders' sagas and other indigenous genres. Receiving little attention from scholars of Old Norse literature, many remain untranslated. The production of chivalric sagas in Scandinavia was focused on Norway in the thirteenth century and then Iceland in the fourteenth. Vernacular Danish and Swedish romances came to prominence rather later and were generally in verse; the most famou ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Henry Schofield
William Henry Schofield (1870–1920) was a Canadian-American academic, founder of the ''Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature''. He was professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, and president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation (1916–1919). He taught Old Norse at Harvard from 1900 and from 1906 was director of the new Comparative Literature department. Education and academic career He received his B.A. from Victoria College in 1889 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1895. He was Professor of Comparative Literature Harvard University, 1906–20; Harvard Exchange Professor at University of Berlin, 1907; Lecturer at the Sorbonne and University of Copenhagen, 1910. He was Harvard Exchange Professor at Western Colleges, 1918.Information taken from a bookplate from Victoria University Library (Toronto, Ontario, Canada); book purchased from The Schofield Fund in memory of William Henry Schofield. Accession date: Jan. 27, 1937. itle : The Blic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Swan Maiden
The "swan maiden" () is a tale classified as Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, ATU 400, "The Swan Maiden" or "The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife," in which a man makes a pact with, or marries, a supernatural female being who later departs. The wife Shapeshifting, shapeshifts from human to bird form with the use of a feathered cloak (or otherwise turns into a beast by donning animal skin). The discussion is sometimes limited to cases in which the wife is specifically a swan, a goose, or at least some other kind of bird, as in ''Enzyklopädie des Märchens''. The key to the transformation is usually a swan skin, or a garment with swan feathers attached. In the typical story a maiden is (usually bathing) in some body of water, a man furtively steals, hides, or burns her feather garment (Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, motif K 1335, D 361.1), which prevents her from flying away (or swimming away, etc.), forcing her to become his wife. She is often one of several maidens present (of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Strengleikar
''Strengleikar'' (English: ''Stringed Instruments'') is a collection of twenty-one Old Norse prose tales based on the Old French '' Lais'' of Marie de France">The Lais of Marie de France">Lais'' of Marie de France. It is one of the literary works commissioned by King Haakon IV of Norway (r. 1217-1263) for the Norway, Norwegian court, and is counted among the Old Norse Chivalric sagas. The collection is anonymous. It has been attributed to Brother Robert, a cleric who adapted several French works into Norse under Haakon, the best known of which is ''Tristrams saga ok Ísöndar'' (a Norse version of the Tristan and Iseult legend), but there is also reason to think that the collection may be a gathering of the work of several different translators. Unlike many medieval translations, the ''Strengleikar'' are generally extremely close in sense to the Old French originals; the text which differs most is '' Milun'', which is abridged to half its original length. Lais and their sources T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Chestre
Thomas Chestre was the author of a 14th-century Middle English romance ''Sir Launfal'', a verse romance of 1045 lines based ultimately on Marie de France's Breton lay ''Lanval''. He was possibly also the author of the 2200-line '' Libeaus Desconus'', a story of Sir Gawain's son Gingalain based upon similar traditions to those that inspired Renaut de Beaujeu's late-12th-century or early-13th-century Old French romance ''-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it wa ... romance ''Le Bel Inconnu'', and also possibly of a Middle English retelling of the mid-13th-century Old French romance ''Octavian (Middle English verse romance)">Octavian''. Geoffrey Chaucer parodied ''Libeaus Desconus'', among other Middle English romances, in his Canterbury Tales, Canterbury Tale of ''Sir Thopas''. Sir Launfal The name Thomas Chestre occurs only once in medieval writings, in the single manuscript copy that remains of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rímur
In Icelandic literature, a ''ríma'' (, literally "a rhyme", pl. ''rímur'', ) is an epic poetry, epic poem written in any of the so-called ''rímnahættir'' (, "rímur meters"). They are rhymed, they alliterative verse, alliterate and consist of two to four lines per stanza. The plural, ''rímur'', is either used as an ordinary plural, denoting any two or more rímur, but is also used for more expansive works, containing more than one ríma as a whole. Thus ''Ólafs ríma Haraldssonar'' denotes an epic about Olav II of Norway, Ólafr Haraldsson in one ríma, while ''Núma rímur'' are a multi-part epic on Numa Pompilius. Form ''Rímur'', as the name suggests, rhyme, but like older Germanic alliterative verse, they also contain structural alliteration. ''Rímur'' are stanzaic, and stanzas normally have four lines. There are hundreds of ''ríma'' meters: Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson counts 450 variations in his ''Háttatal''. But they can be grouped in approximately ten ''families''. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Skíðaríma
''Skíðaríma'' () is a humorous Icelandic ríma, of unknown authorship, dated to around 1450–1500. Summary The hero is the audacious and inventive beggar Skíði, who was apparently a historic figure from the 12th century. It was also a real event that he had a dream in 1195, and it is this dream that is the matter of ''Skíðaríma''. Skíði dreams that Óðinn sends Þórr to fetch Skíði in order to broker peace between Heðinn and Högni as their incessant war about Hildr threatens to destroy Valhalla. Skíði manages to make peace by asking to marry Hildr and finding her willing. However, as Skíði could not stop mentioning the word ''God'' in front of the Æsir, and finally makes the sign of the cross, Heimdallr struck him in the mouth with the Gjallarhorn. However, some of the Einherjar side with Skíði, whereas others are against him. A great battle ensued with a great many heroic deeds, some of them done by the pathetic beggar himself, until finally Sigurðr the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Middle English
Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High Middle Ages, High and Late Middle Ages. Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography. Writing conventions during the Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English literary variety broke down and writing in English became fragmented and localized and was, for the most part, being improvised. By the end of the period (about 1470), and aided by the movabl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Old French
Old French (, , ; ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France approximately between the late 8th [2-4; we might wonder whether there's a point at which it's appropriate to talk of the beginnings of French, that is, when it was deemed no longer make to think of the varieties spoken in Gaul as Latin. Although a precise date can't be given, there is a general consensus (see Wright 1982, 1991, Lodge 1993) that an awareness of a vernacular, distinct from Latin, emerged at the end of the eighth century.] and mid-14th centuries. Rather than a unified Dialect#Dialect or language, language, Old French was a Dialect cluster, group of Romance languages, Romance dialects, Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible yet Dialect continuum, diverse. These dialects came to be collectively known as the , contrasting with the , the emerging Occitano-Romance languages of Occitania, now the south of France. The mid-14th century witnessed the emergence of Middle French, the lang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
