The term trobar ric describes a style of TROUBADOUR
poetry that made use of elaborate technical
contrivances and ornate language, but whose sense
was clear to the audience. The phrase combines the
Provençal trobar (the composition of verse) and ric
(“precious,” “noble,” “valuable”). Some scholars
have seen the style as a deliberate sort of middle
ground between the TROBAR CLUS and the TROBAR
LEU, but it seems likely that the troubadours themselves
used the term more loosely, and seem to
have used it interchangeably with the terms trobar
car or trobar prim.
Peire VIDAL was one of the first troubadours to
use the term trobar ric. In one of his songs he says:
I can put together and interlace
words and music with such skill
in the noble art of song
no man comes near my heel,
when I have a good subject.
(Goldin 1973, 255, ll. 1–5)
Here the term is translated as “noble art of song.”
Peire claims to be the premier practitioner of the
style. But here it seems simply a general way of describing
what he sees as a high style.
ARNAUT DANIEL writes probably the best examples
of what are loosely called trobar ric lyrics. Arnaut
is sometimes considered a writer in the
trobar clus style, but generally he seems to separate
the technical aspects of trobar clus, including
elaborate rhyme and stanza structure, from the
deliberately obscure meaning of the trobar clus,
thereby combining ease of understanding with
complexity of form.Arnaut invented the complex
verse form, the sestina, in which the same six
words appear in an alternating pattern at the ends
of the lines of six six-line stanzas, and a three-line
concluding stanza repeats all six words, two per
line. The complexity of this stanza form owes
something to the trobar clus style, but the clear
sense of Arnaut’s poems put them into the category
of trobar ric.
But the category remains vague.As Linda Paterson
notes, it is convenient to call trobar ric all
poems, like Arnaut’s, that search for complex or
ornate forms without the obscure sense of the clus
style, “but it is doubtful whether the troubadours
themselves ever did so” (Paterson 1975, 184). Still
trobar ric remains a convenient category in considering
the variety of troubadour styles.
Bibliography
Goldin, Frederick, ed. and trans. Lyrics of the Troubadours
and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973.
Paterson, Linda M. Troubadours and Eloquence. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975.