ABSTRACT
In the second half of the twelfth century, when Chrétien de Troyes composed his Erec et Enide, two traditions concerning King Arthur were regnant. Tom Artin summarizes: “In one, he is the great dux bellorum, the once and future king who is Britain’s savior; in the other, he is a fool. In a mosaic dated 1165 in the Cathedral of Otranto, for instance, he is shown riding a goat, the animal of Venus, symbol of lechery, and hardly a dignified mount for a king.” 1 Artin emphasizes the second of these traditions, King Arthur as essentially negative exemplum, but does not speak of the first, the ruler as military leader. It is derived to a great extent from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1138), in which King Arthur functions as warrior, restorer, and arbiter. Artin believes, however, that the Arthur in Chrétien’s Erec is a largely negative figure, a foil “meant to serve as contrast to the ideal of holy kingship … which the young knight [Erec], in the course of his adventures, attains. Arthur is the model of what a king should not be” (p. 65). W.T.H. Jackson offers the following description of King Arthur in twelfth-century romance: “Never do we see him carrying out any significant public action. He never fights himself but sometimes arranges opportunities for others to engage in adventure. His function is basically that of an arbitrator of individual prowess. In other words, he is a literary king.” 2
