Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (French: Yvain ou le Chevalier au Lion) is one of Chrétien de Troyes's five Chivalric Romances and part of the Arthurian Legends. It's the third or fourth of Chrétien's poems, written simultaneously with Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart between 1177 and 1181. It was written in Old French.
Around 1200, Hartmann von Aue adapted it into German under the title Iwein.
As a Public Domain Story, Yvain, the Knight of the Lion can be found on Project Gutenberg here
and LibriVox here.
Yvain, the Knight of the Lion provides examples of:
- Androcles' Lion: Yvain helps a lion fight a giant serpent. The grateful feline then follows Yvain, saving his butt quite a few times.
- A Boy and His X: The eponymous Yvain and his lion.
- Canon Welding: The Knight of the Lion contains a few references to Guinevere's abduction, suggesting it's going on during the same time as Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart. It's believed Chrétien was writing the two stories at the same time.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Opens with the eponymous Yvain rescuing a lion from a large, fire-breathing serpent. No wings or legs or intelligence, just good old-fashioned Satanic imagery.
- Scary Black Man: Showing that even the subversion of this trope is as old as feudalism. Yvain is traveling in search of adventure and comes across a very large and scary-looking Moor. The man is so large and frightening that Yvain outright asks if he's some kind of ogre. Mildly insulted, the Moor instead says he's a man just like Yvain, and politely explains that he is a humble cow-herd tending his flocks. Yvain asks if there are any good adventures worth having for a knight to have in the region. The Moor doesn't know what he means by "adventure", so Yvain explains that knights ride around looking for great fights to get into with strangers (an inaccurate description, because knights are also supposed to defend the weak). The Moor says that sounds like a pretty silly way to live, but does helpfully suggest that he could probably find some good challenges in the forest of Brocéliande up ahead, and sends Yvain on his way.
