trobador
trobador
Occitan
“The Occitan word for 'one who composes' named a class of aristocratic poet-musicians in twelfth-century southern France who invented the concept of romantic love as we know it.”
Trobador is Occitan, from trobar, meaning to find, compose, or invent. The word may ultimately derive from Latin tropare (to compose tropes, or melodic embellishments) or from a Vulgar Latin *tropare related to Greek tropos (turn, manner). The trobador was a finder of forms — a poet who composed verses in the Occitan language, set them to melodies, and often performed them at the courts of southern France. The earliest known troubadour was William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, who composed around 1100 CE.
The troubadours did not merely write love poetry. They invented fin'amor — refined love — a code of courtship in which the lover devoted himself to a lady who was usually married, usually of higher status, and usually unattainable. The lady's distance was the point. The troubadour's longing was the fuel. This poetic convention — love as yearning, as service, as sweet suffering — had no precedent in European literature. Classical poets wrote about desire. The troubadours wrote about desire that could not be fulfilled.
The tradition flourished from roughly 1100 to 1300. About 2,600 troubadour poems survive, by approximately 450 named poets, including at least twenty women (the trobairitz). The Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229), which devastated southern France, scattered the troubadour culture. Poets fled to Spain, Italy, and northern France, carrying the tradition with them. Dante acknowledged the troubadours as his predecessors. Petrarch's love poetry — the model for all European love poetry after him — was built on troubadour foundations.
The troubadour tradition invented the Western concept of romantic love as a literary subject. Before the troubadours, love in European literature was either comic (Ovid) or tragic (the myths). The troubadours made love itself the subject of serious, sustained artistic exploration. Every love song on the radio, every romantic comedy, every Valentine's Day card descends — through Petrarch, through Shakespeare, through the Romantics — from the Occitan trobadors and their code of impossible longing.
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Today
Troubadour is now used casually for any singer-songwriter who performs their own compositions, especially one who travels. Bob Dylan has been called a troubadour. Joni Mitchell has been called one. The word carries a romantic association — the troubadour is the artist who wanders, who sings because they must, who refuses to be tied to a single court or label.
The troubadours' real legacy is invisible because it is everywhere. The idea that love is the supreme subject of art, that longing is more poetically interesting than satisfaction, that the beloved's inaccessibility makes the love more pure — these are troubadour ideas, now so deeply embedded in Western culture that they seem natural. They are not natural. They were invented, in Occitan, in southern France, around the year 1100. Everything after is a variation.
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