Yvain and the lion
A knight wins a wife by killing her husband, loses her by forgetting a date, goes mad, and is rebuilt by a lion.
Yvain is Chrétien's best-constructed poem and the clearest example of what romance does that chronicle cannot: it audits one conscience.
Yvain kills the defender of a magic fountain, pursues the dying man into his castle, and falls in love with his widow, Laudine — who, after some persuasion by her maid Lunete, marries him, largely because she needs a champion and he has just proved he is one.
Then Gawain persuades him to go tourneying. Laudine gives him leave for one year exactly, and warns him that if he overstays it her love ends. He overstays it. He simply loses track.
When her messenger denounces him in front of the whole court and takes back her ring, he goes out of his mind — literally: he strips, runs into the forest, and lives as a naked madman until a lady finds him and cures him with an ointment.
What rebuilds him is not a quest for a relic. It is a series of jobs. He sees a lion fighting a serpent and helps the lion, which attaches itself to him permanently and fights beside him. He rescues Lunete from burning. He defends a family against a giant. He frees three hundred women held as forced labour in a textile workshop, and the poem lets them describe their conditions at length.
He becomes the Knight with the Lion, and the point of the second half is that his reputation is being rebuilt out of usefulness rather than glory.
The Welsh Owain tells the same story, and nobody has settled whether it is Chrétien's source or his descendant.
He wins a wife by killing her husband and loses her by forgetting a date — and the poem's answer is that a reputation can be rebuilt, but only by becoming useful to strangers.
In the sources
- ChrétienFrench romance · c. 1135–1190
the code audited from inside one conscience
The test is not whether he breaks an oath but what keeping and losing one does to a man — and the repair is unglamorous work, not a relic.
“Reason, which dares thus speak to him, reaches only his lips, but not his heart; but love is enclosed within his heart, bidding him and urging him to mount at once upon the cart”
Four Arthurian Romances, Lancelot (the Cart) · read in place - The MabinogionWelsh · collected 12th–14th c., from older matter
the same tale in Welsh
Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain, tells this story in Welsh, and the direction of borrowing has never been settled.
“two youths enter the hall, and proceed up to the chamber, bearing a spear of mighty size, with three streams of blood flowing from the point to the ground. And when all the company saw this, they began wailing and lamenting”
The Mabinogion — the Arthurian tales, Peredur · read in place - MaloryEnglish · c. 1415–1471
absent
Malory's Uwaine is Morgan le Fay's son and a minor knight of the Round Table. The lion, the fountain and the madness do not survive into the English tradition at all.
No validated quotationAn absence rather than a position: Malory simply does not tell this story.