The Prevalence of Verse in Medieval Dutch and English Arthurian Fiction

Abstract

Chretien de Troyes produced a highly original corpus of works that proved to be immensely influential.1 Apart from providing later authors with a stock of Arthurian characters, themes, motifs, and narrative structures, he showed them the attractiveness and flexibility of the octosyllabic couplet. This is demonstrated by the impressive number of later Arthurian verse romances. With regard to this medium, however, we should remark that his successors, both French and non-French, explored other forms as well. Whereas many of his continuators stuck to couplets, others preferred to write in prose. In addition, in Britain there were authors composing, for instance, alliterative texts, as well as poets who produced the tail-rhyme stanza, characterized by Rosalind Field as “this jog-trot metric with its tendency to collapse in banality.”2 In the past, scholars have studied all these different forms, their origins, and their reception, mainly focusing on one particular linguistic area. In this article, I would like to broaden the scope of our research somewhat by looking at the use of the different media in medieval Dutch and English Arthurian literature in comparison to French literature. What catches the eye when we look at these forms from this comparative perspective? I will show that authors of both Dutch and English Arthurian narrative fiction had a strong preference for writing verse, and I will offer a speculative explanation of this common feature by incorporating the audiences of their narratives in my argument.