Bertran de Born lo Filhs
Who was Bertran de Born lo Filhs?
French poet
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Bertran de Born lo Filhs (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Bertran de Born lo Filhs (about 1179–1233), known as 'the Son' in Occitan, was a Limousin knight and troubadour in the early 1200s. He was the oldest son of the famous troubadour Bertran de Born and his first wife, Raimonda, born soon after their marriage in 1179. His full brother was Itier, while he had two half-brothers, Bertran and Constantin, from his father's second marriage to Felipa in 1192. Bertran and Itier both became knights sometime before 1192, stepping into the life of martial and courtly pursuits that marked Limousin aristocracy at the time.
Before Fame
Bertran de Born lo Filhs was born into a well-known troubadour family in the Limousin region of southern France. His father, Bertran de Born, was a famous and politically provocative poet of the twelfth century, known for his martial sirventes and his impact on the turbulent politics of the Angevin empire. Growing up in this environment, the younger Bertran was surrounded by the culture of courtly song, aristocratic warfare, and Occitan literary tradition from birth. He was knighted before 1192, entering adulthood when the Plantagenet and Capetian crowns were fiercely competing over French territories.
Key Achievements
- Composed the politically charged sirventes 'Quan voi lo temps renovelar' (c. 1206), condemning King John Lackland in the tradition of his father's martial poetry.
- Authored the personal love sirventes 'Un sirventes voil obrar d'alegratge,' demonstrating lyric range beyond political invective.
- Maintained the troubadour legacy of the Bertran de Born family name after his father's entry into monastic life in 1197.
- Participated actively in the wars of John Lackland in France, combining the roles of knight and poet in the Limousin courtly tradition.
- Had a body of five works attributed to him in the medieval chansonniers, contributing to the Occitan lyric corpus of the early thirteenth century.
Did You Know?
- 01.His epithet 'lo Filhs' was necessary to distinguish him from his enormously famous father, and the chansonniers sometimes fail to make the distinction, creating attribution problems that persist for modern scholars.
- 02.His sirventes 'Quan voi lo temps renovelar' contains a reference to the chanson de geste the Siège d'Orange, making it a rare instance of a troubadour lyric citing an epic narrative tradition.
- 03.The lady addressed in his love sirventes is known only by the pseudonym Flor de Lis, a common troubadour practice of disguising a patron or beloved's identity through a senhal.
- 04.His father retired to the Cistercian monastery of Dalon in 1197, meaning Bertran lo Filhs carried the family's poetic identity for at least a decade after the elder Bertran's withdrawal from secular life.
- 05.One poem once attributed to him, 'A tornar m'er enquer al premier us,' has been firmly reassigned to another troubadour, Guilhem Rainol d'At, demonstrating the ongoing scholarly effort to untangle overlapping attributions in the manuscript tradition.