Why is King Arthur Emotional?
Those looking for just the facts about the story of young Sir Perceval-to-be back when he was just a goofy teen asking dumb questions and mistaking knights for devils have hit paydirt. Chretien de Troyes is an author decried because his verse lack poetic pageantry. He is also an author beloved because his verse lacks poetic pageantry. He is basically all the pageantry without the poetry: a story told in verse that is like a story told in prose. For instance, a simple query is put forth by one character to another: Why is King Arthur both happy and sad?
"I'll tell you the whole story.
King Arthur and all his men
Have been fighting with King Ryan.
That king of the Islands was defeated,
And that's why Arthur is happy.
Then all his barons went home,
Back to their own castles,
Where they live a better life,
And he doesn't know what they're up to,
And that's why the king is sad."
Holey Imagery
The story is the first to mention the grail within the construction of the Arthurian myth. But being the poet lacking in "poetry" that he is, he never actually terms it a “holy” grail. He does come close, however, when holiness is metaphorically implied as part of the imagery:
But don't imagine it holds
Salmon and pike and eels!
A single sacred wafer
Is all it contains, and it keeps him
Alive and gives him comfort,
So holy a thing is that grail
The Storyteller
Imagery is used early on to situate the author himself as a kind of character within the overall tale. The author is self-referential in the third person as he insinuates himself into the imagery is initiated as a kind of story-within-a-story:
Chretien's labors, the pains
He's taken, at the count's express
Command, to properly tell
This story (the best ever told
At the king's great court), will be worth
His struggles. It's the story of the Grail
The Loathly Lady
Even within the imagery of the story within the story being told by a storyteller consciously aware he is telling a story, there is a further engagement with imagery to indicate that this is not the first telling of the tale. A pretty significant subplot involves a particularly hideous woman and when the author mentions that he is not her creator, he is not being self-deprecating. She is a particular sort of literary trope commonly known as a loathly lady:
A girl came riding up
On a tawny mule, her right hand
Holding a whip. She wore
Her hair in two black,
Immense, and ugly braids,
And if the book that tells us
About her are truthfully written
No creature has ever seemed
So awful, not even at the bottom
Of Hell.
