ABSTRACT
The simpleton-hero blunders his way into the literary world of Arthurian romance in the comic first episodes of Chretien’s Conte del Graal,1 which present the adventures, and misadventures, of a country bumpkin’s first encounter with chivalry. In Chretien’s poem, as in the other continental versions that succeed it, the rusticity of the hero is a characteristic limited to the enfances section and gradually discarded as he is initiated into and absorbed by the courtly society which is his proper milieu. The English poet ignores, or softens, the crueler aspects of his hero’s personality, so that the growing awareness of serious fault so important in Chrétien is absent. A brighter, if rougher, comedy results, without undertones of moral tension. The English Perceval is, of course, an enthusiastic killer of his adversaries in battle, and his speeches show that he is fond of words such as “slay,” as Michael Dallapiazza has demonstrated.
