The Rôle of the Lion in Chretien de Troyes' Yvain

Although the lion plays a considerable rôle in Chrétien de Troyes' Chevalier au Lion, his function in the poem has traditionally attracted relatively little attention on the part of Arthurian scholars. Gaston Paris, in one of his notable articles on Chrétien, relegated the story of the noble beast to a footnote in which he said: “cette historiette … ne sert à rien dans le récit où Chrétien a jugé bon de l'insérer.”1Naturally enough, scholars who regard Yvain as a Celtic otherworld tale dressed up in French clothing, finding no close analog to the lion in Celtic lore, have paid little attention to him. And those who have con-cerned themselves with demonstrating that the source of the lion story was Latin or Greek have been interested more in the relation between Yvain's lion and that of Androcles (or some other one) than in his function in the poem. Those who have studied particularly the structure of the poem have attached more importance to the lion,2 but so far as I know no one has pointed out what seems to me to be his symbolic significance. Since Chrétien repeatedly said that he was concerned both with the “matière” and the “sens” of his romances,3 and as he called Yvain the roman du Chevalier au Lion,4 it seems reasonable to examine the poem in some detail and try to see if he attached more significance to the lion than modern scholarship has pointed out.