Premium
Bayard and Troilus: Chaucerian Non‐paradox in the Reader
Author(s) -
Renoir Alain
Publication year - 1981
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1981.tb00487.x
Subject(s) - allusion , narrative , scholarship , poetry , literature , context (archaeology) , criticism , history , action (physics) , art , philosophy , law , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics , political science
When considered within the context of the information provided by Chaucer in the opening lines of Troilus and Criseyde , the first three images of the poem assume what recent criticism would call an affective function and thus enable us to interpret the narrative from a point of view hitherto ignored by modern audiences. As in the case of other mediaeval masterpieces– notably the Gunnlaugssaga Ormstungu and the Nibelungenlied – the beginning of the poem cues us in to the subsequent action, but the three images in question prompt us to draw upon a folkloristic and literary background which, though different today from what it would have been in the fourteenth century, affects our reaction to Troilus' behavior and helps us reconcile some bothersome discrepancies between the opening and the conclusion. The affective element seems particularly strong when one reads a well‐known allusion to the horse Bayard in the light of the French story of the four sons of Aymon as it must have been known in mediaeval England rather than as a substantial body of scholarship has accounted for it. The arguments presented here bear out a view of Chaucer's narrative technique which E. Talbot Donaldson has advanced over the years.