Granson, Oton de

(Othe de Grandson)

(ca. 1345–1397)

   Oton de Granson was a French soldier, courtier, an occasional poet, and a contemporary and friend of Geoffrey CHAUCER. Granson, a landed knight of Savoy, fought on the English side in the Hundred Years’War, and kept up a long friendly relationship with Chaucer, with whom he traded poetic correspondence and whose poetry was a major influence on his own, along with that of the dominant French poet of his time, GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT. Granson became attached to the English court around 1369, when he probably met Chaucer. By that time he was probably already quite familiar with Machaut’s poetry, and was practiced in the various conventional genres of French lyric poetry (the so-called fixed forms): BALLADES, RONDEAUX, VIRELAIS, and the like.He was with the earl of Pembroke in 1372, fighting at La Rochelle. Between 1372 and 1374, he was held as a prisoner in Spain, and is believed to have written a good deal of his early poetry there. In 1374, Granson entered the service of JOHN OF GAUNT. He returned to his native Savoy in 1376, but by 1379 was back serving with the English garrison at Cherbourg. He is known to have been in Portugal on a diplomatic mission for King RICHARD II in 1382, and was taking part in peace negotiations between the English and French in 1384.Upon the death of his father in 1386, Granson returned to Savoy to deal with his inheritance, but he was in England again in 1392, and was on campaign with Gaunt’s son, the future Henry IV, shortly after his return. In the early 1390s he was again part of negotiations to end the war with France, and Richard II considered him valuable enough to grant him a 100-mark annuity. Granson returned to Savoy again in 1396, and it was there that he died in August 1397, defending himself in a judicial duel against the charge of having been complicit in the murder of the count of Savoy.

   The bare facts of his life tell us little about the man, but those who knew Granson all testify to his personal charm. FROISSART speaks well of him in describing the battle at la Rochelle.CHRISTINE DE PIZAN speaks of his chivalric and courtly qualities in two of her poems. Eustache DESCHAMPS writes a humorous ballade about a joke Granson played on him in the 1384 peace negotiations. But Chaucer’s praise is the most effusive: In the envoi to his Complaint of Venus, he calls Granson “the flour of hem that make in France.”

   Indeed if it were not for Chaucer’s Complaint of Venus, many current readers would not have heard of Granson. Chaucer’s poem is a triple ballade that translates three of the five poems in Granson’s sequence called Les Cinq balades ensievans. Chaucer follows Granson’s original verses very closely, but changes the speaker of the poems to a woman, which obliges him to make some changes in the English version. It seems clear that one of Chaucer’s motives in the translation is to flatter his friend. That flattery may in part be the returning of a compliment. A number of Granson’s poems, in particular his two longest works (likely composed when he was in Savoy between 1386 and 1392), show a strong influence of Chaucer’s poetry. In the Songe Saint Valentin, Granson presents a DREAM VISION in which the dreamer visits a garden in search of a lost gem, but finds a group of birds choosing their mates on Valentine’s Day. A lone falcon refuses to choose, saying he has lost the best of all mates. In the end he flies off alone, and the narrator spends 130 lines in a meditation on love and lovers, presenting himself, in the meantime, as an inept lover. The poem shows the influence of Chaucer’s PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS in particular, but also The BOOK OF THE DUCHESS and TROILUS AND CRISEYDE.

   Granson’s longest extant work (at 2,495 lines) is another dream vision, Livre Messire Ode. The poem is influenced largely by Machaut’s Voir-Dit, and, like all Machaut’s dits, it contains an episodic narrative interspersed with love lyrics. In the text a narrator, dressed in black as an emblem of his sorrow in love, meets a stranger who also feels love’s pains, and promises to help him. After a long interview with the stranger, the poem moves into an allegorical debate between the narrator’s heart and body, then ends with some 800 lines of the lover’s complaint, including a more general meditation of the nature of love itself. Throughout, the lover’s lady, called the best lady in all of France, is identified with “Isabel,” almost certainly Isabel of Bavaria, the queen of France. Thus the poem, in some sense, is intended as a compliment to the queen. But it also owes something to Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess (whose lover dresses in black) as well as Troilus and Criseyde.

   One other aspect of Granson’s career worth noting is his involvement in the literary invention of St. Valentine’s Day. Seven of Granson’s 122 extant poems are on the occasion of Valentine’s Day, the earliest being the Balade de Saint Valentin double, probably written before 1374. In this and in subsequent poems, he develops the notion of St. Valentine as an appropriate saint for lovers to pray to. It was Chaucer that seems to have invented the idea of birds choosing their mates on St. Valentine’s Day, and that motif became a part of the tradition as developed by Granson and Chaucer and continued by later medieval writers. Indeed Granson’s complicity with Chaucer in inventing the myth that connected St.Valentine’s Day with romantic love is probably Granson’s most lasting legacy.

   Bibliography

   ■ Braddy,Haldeen. Chaucer and the French Poet Graunson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1947.

   ■ Kelly, Henry A. Chaucer and the Cult of St. Valentine. Davis Medieval Texts and Studies, 5. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1986.

   ■ Piaget,Arthur, ed. Oton de Grandson: sa vie et ses poesies. Mémories et documents publiés par la Société de la Suisse Romande, 3rd series,Vol. 1. Lausanne, Switzerland: Payot, 1941.

   ■ Wimsatt, James I. Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.