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as in Walewein 337 Guingamor 338 Walewein, a popular tale disguised as a chivalrous romance 340 The different versions of Libeaux Desconus—one of them is sophisticated 343 Tristram—the Anglo-Norman poems comparatively simple and ingenuous 344 French Romance and Provençal Lyric 345 Ovid in the Middle Ages—the Art of Love 346 The Heroines 347 Benoit's Medea again 348 Chrestien of Troyes, his place at the beginning of modern literature 349 'Enlightenment' in the Romantic School 350 The sophists of Romance—the rhetoric of sentiment and passion 351 The progress of Romance from medieval to modern literature 352 Chrestien of Troyes, his inconsistencies—nature and convention 352 Departure from conventional romance; Chrestien's Enid 355 Chrestien's Cliges—"sensibility" 357 Flamenca, a Provençal story of the thirteenth century—the author a follower of Chrestien 359 His acquaintance with romantic literature and rejection of the "machinery" of adventures 360 360 Flamenca, an appropriation of Ovid—disappearance of romantic mythology 361 The Lady of Vergi, a short tragic story without false rhetoric 362 Use of medieval themes by the great poets of the fourteenth century 363 Boccaccio and Chaucer—the Teseide and the Knight's Tale 364 Variety of Chaucer's methods 364 Want of art in the Man of Law's Tale 365 The abstract point of honour (Clerk's Tale, Franklin's Tale) 366 Pathos in the Legend of Good Women 366 Romantic method perfect in the Knight's Tale 366 Anelida, the abstract form of romance 367 In Troilus and Criseyde the form of medieval romance is filled out with strong dramatic imagination 367 Romance obtains the freedom of Epic, without the old local and national limitations of Epic 368 Conclusion 370

APPENDIX

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Note A—Rhetoric of the Alliterative Poetry	373
Note B—Kjartan and Olaf Tryggvason	375
Note C—Eyjolf Karsson	381
Note D—Two Catalogues of Romances	384
INDEX	391

CHAPTER I

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INTRODUCTION

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I

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THE HEROIC AGE

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      The title of Epic, or of "heroic poem," is claimed by historians for a number of works belonging to the earlier Middle Ages, and to the medieval origins of modern literature. "Epic" is a term freely applied to the old school