East Meets West Along a Fault Line: Love in Shota Rustiveli's "The Man in the Panther's Skin" and Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances

Abstract

Given the proximity in time of Chrétien de Troyes and Shota Rustaveli and some similarity in their writing, this paper examines the portrayal of love in Rustaveli's The Man in the Panther's Skin and the romances of Chrétien de Troyes. Close reading of the texts supports the position that for both poets, marriage, not adultery, was the proper fulfillment of love. Looking more closely at the development of love within the text, however, differences emerge. In Chrétien's romances, the married couples strengthen their love by finding the proper balance between their private love and their public lives, and adulterous couples are viewed negatively. In Avtandil, Rustaveli shows us a hero who already thinks and acts rationally from the beginning and whose love is not questioned. He is able to maintain emotional control by self-correcting his moments of grief and despair when he is parted from Tinatin. His role in the poem is not merely to find Nestan, but to restore the nobility and virtue which is inherent in Tariel. Rustaveli also develops the friendship-love between male characters far more than Chrétien does in his romances. An analysis of the love between Avtandil and Tariel shows some similarities to the Neoplatonic concepts of friendship between noble men which developed in the Western Middle Ages. There are striking similarities between the two poets, but the differences indicate that they developed independently of each other.