La mort le roi Artu : Fin des aventures ou fin d'un genre
La mort le roi Artu : Fin des aventures ou fin d'un genre

Summary/Abstract: The Death of King Arthur, final part and denouement of Lancelot's novel in prose is certainly a novel of endings as E.Baumgartner recalled in his bilingual edition: end of the kingdom of Logres in the catastrophe of Salesbieres (Salisbury) which brings a climax to this war of succession to Arthur, end of the Arthurian world, heroes of the Round Table and perhaps «twilight of chivalry” announced in 1994 by the collection of studies on this novel, brought together by Jean Dufournet. However, chivalry, this prestigious order that Gornemant de Gohort, initiator and godfather, introduced to the young ingenue Perceval in the Tale of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, continues after the death of Arthur and is structured over the following centuries into social caste around its warrior and courtly values, the great vassals supporting the kings of the great powers. If the tournaments disappear, relegated by the rise of new armies, soon to be permanent, the joust, the qualifying duel, survive and will be until the 20th century the reserved parades of nobility as so many witnesses of the aristocratic distinction of a dominant class. What King Arthur announces in the prologue of La Mort Artu is "the end of the adventures" : The analysis leads to a distinction between the adventures that are told in the prose novel of the "Lancelot-Grail" and which are only phantasmagorical entertainments without any close link to the heroic quest, and the adventures of the Breton novel which narrated the exploits, the trials, of the heroes of the novel, in these courtly novels initiated by Chrétien de Troyes, and whose Breton material enchanted the seigneurial courts of the half-century which ended, around 1230, in the disaster of Salesbieres and the end of a marvelous myth.

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