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This essay compares the stock situations in Torec with those found in earlier romances of Chrétien de Troyes and German romanciers in order to demonstrate that the author(s) of Torec was familiar with the topoi of the 'classical' Arthurian romances and exploited them. (TK)
Even the reader unfamiliar with Dutch literary tradition soon finds himself on familiar ground in Torec, one of the five Middle Dutch Arthurian romances that survive as interpolations between the Queeste vanden Grale [The quest for the Grail] and Arturs doet [The death of Arthur] in the Lancelot Compilation.1 This cycle, preserved in The Hague, Koninklijke Bibliotheek MS 129 A 10, was compiled in Brabant between 1320 and 1325, and is the surviving second volume of a verse rendition of the French Lancelot-Grail prose cycle (1215-1235).2 J.D. Janssens speaks for many others when he summarizes, 'Middle Dutch Arthurian romance is strongly influenced by the work of Chrétien de Troyes and his immediate imitators,'3 for in addition to the 'new' knights and damsels, whose deeds form the plots of these episodic romances, one meets again the familiar characters associated with King Arthur's court in the earlier French and German romances: Artur himself, Genevre, Walewein (=Gawain), Ywain, Lanceloet, Percheval, Keye.4 There are, however, differences, innovations in these Dutch romances. Walewein, for example, is not the womanizer and object of female desire, as he is often portrayed in the other literary traditions,5 but instead, the epitome of chivalry, der aventuren vader [father of adventures]. Keye, if anything, is even more curmudgeonly and more treacherous than elsewhere, and Artur is a king who can be unjust and arbitrary, but is nevertheless admired and respected as a powerful warrior who can defeat all the knights of the Round Table in single combat.
While it goes without saying that the medieval poet was not obsessed with the concept of originality, all epigonal poets writing in the Arthurian tradition were (and are) faced with a dilemma: how to add new knights to the Arthurian pantheon or to tell new adventures about established knights without either being too imitative of the established tradition by simply recombining their elements or too innovative, thereby violating the conventions of the genre altogether. Bart Besamusca has written that Torec is 'highly exceptional...