University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

'Guingamor,' 'Guigemar,' 'Graelentmor,' 'Lanval,' And 'Desire': A Comparative Study Of Five Breton Lays

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'Guingamor,' 'Guigemar,' 'Graelentmor,' 'Lanval,' And 'Desire': A Comparative Study Of Five Breton Lays

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Content This dissertation has been
microfilmed exactly as received 6 9* 1536
MORITZ, W illiam E arl, 1941-
QUING4MQR, GUIGKMAR. GRAELENTMOR.
LANVAL. AND DESIRE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF
FIVE BRETON LAYS.
U n iversity o f Southern C alifornia, P h .D ., 1968
Language and L iterature, general
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
GUINGAMOR, GUIGEMAR, GRAELENTMOR, LANVAL, AND DESIRE
A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FIVE BRETON LAYS
by
William Earl Moritz
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
June 1968
UNIVERSITY O F SO U T H E R N CALIFORNIA
TH E GRADUATE SCHOO L
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALI FORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
....................... W illiam E a rl M o ritz..... .................
under the direction of his. Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
Date... June,. . . . 1 . ' 9 . 6 . 8 . ..........
*
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Dean
Chairman
PREFACE
This study began with an attempt to analyze a single
Breton Lay, Le Lay de Guinqamor, but it soon became clear
that no treatment of this particular lay would be complete
without discussions of two other topics which have been the i
source of almost all the critical interest Guinqamor has
received; the nature of the Breton Lay as a genre, and the
relationship between Guinqamor and four other lays—
Guigemar, Graelentmor, Lanval and Desire— which share with
it certain names, incidents, and phrases.
The focus of critical attention on both of these issues
has been the question of originality. A twelfth-century
Anglo-Norman poet usually called Marie de France is univer
sally accepted as the author of, among other works, a col
lection of twelve Breton Lays which appear together in one
manuscript with a prologue dedicating these lays to an
1 !
unnamed king. Of the group of lays analogous to Guinqamor , i
i
■'"Complete information about Guinqamor, the anonymous
lays, and Marie and her lays will be found in the Introduc- |
tion. |
two— Lanval and Guigemar— appear in Marie's collection* and
jthe other three— Guinqamor, Graelentmor, and Desire— are
anonymous. in view of the fact that the artistry of Marie'
lays is highly respected* various scholars have tried to
prove either that Marie also wrote Guinqamor, or that all
the anonymous lays* including Guinqamor, are merely pale
imitations of Marie's lays.
These issues have been widely treated* and the present
study has no new evidence to offer* but it does offer a new
approach to the material— an approach suggested by Eugene
Vinaver in his address Form and Meaning in Medieval
2
Romance. Vinaver observes that critics have been prone to
handle medieval literature either as historical documents
useful as evidence of social* political* and linguistic
phenomena* or as literary works which fail to comply with
the standards established by the "New Criticism." To
remedy this* Vinaver calls for a new awareness that* though
the particulars of taste may change* men of all ages have
been intelligent and sensitive; therefore* Vinaver
2
Cambridge* 1966.
I
jconcludes, it behooves us to find the ways in which a given
work may have been meaningful in its day, regardless of our
currently favored fashions in literary styles. j
This study, attempting to use a method compatible with j
j
Vinaver's principles, will survey the criticism on j
Guingamor, finding that no previous work has adequately
treated this poem as literature in its own right rather than
as an analogue or derivative of other works. Then, in the
second chapter, the very idea of attempting to discriminate
between various Breton Lays on the mere basis of resem
blances in plot and phraseology will be attacked by investi
gating the nature of the Breton Lay as a genre. Finally, in
the third and fourth chapters, the five lays of the
Guinqamor group will be analyzed, and on the basis of this
literary appreciation, the study will try to determine
whether any of these three anonymous lays might be by Marie
de France.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
‘ PREFACE ii
INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1
Chapter
I. A SURVEY OF CRITICISM....................... 17
II. THE NATURE OF THE BRETON LAY .............. 38
III. A PLOT ANALYSIS.................... 81
IV. A THEMATIC ANALYSIS........................... 139
V. CONCLUSION ....................................195
APPENDIX . . . ................ 205
BIBLIOGRAPHY...........................................207
i
v
INTRODUCTION
Le Lav de Guinqamor is preserved in only one manu
script, which is presently in the Bibliotheque Nationale at
Paris where it is catalogued Nouvelles Acquisitions
francaises 1104.1 This manuscript, comprising seventy-nine
vellum folios written in two columns of about forty lines
each, begins with a title in red letters reading "Ci
commencement les lays de Bretaigne" and ends with a similar
rubric reading "explicit les lays de Bretaigne." Each of
the twenty-four poems in this collection is headed by a
title in red reading "Cest le lay de . . ." and the first
. 2
letter of each poem xs enlarged and paxnted blue and gold.
■*"The earliest description of the manuscript, that by
iGaston Paris in Romania, VIII (1879), 29-33, shows it to
ihave been in the same condition then as when I examined it
|during the summer of 1966.
2
At some time before 1878 when Gaston Parxs discovered
jthe manuscript, two folios had been cut out following fol.
|35 and preceding fol. 36, as Paris numbered them. Thus
jLe Lay des II Amanz is interrupted after 157 lines, and the
The only illumination in this manuscript appears on the
jfirst page and is unfortunately somewhat damaged. It shows
i
a standing man playing a vielle; to his left is a seated
figure wearing a crown, and to his right are two other
seated figures. The paint has been scraped in such a way
i Lay de Bisclavret begins on fol. 36 with the line which, in
jthe other manuscript of that poem (British Museum, Harley
i978), is line 233. Since the other manuscript of II Amanz
contains the equivalent of 244 lines, about 320 lines, or
exactly two leaves, are missing. Curiously, E. Margaret
Grimes, an otherwise admirably precise and scrupulous
editor, in describing this manuscript for her The Lavs of
Desire, Graelent and Melion (New York, 1928), p. 40, says
that the manuscript contains "Twenty-five" lays and lists
"Aelis" between Deux Amants [sic] and Bisclaret [sic] as if
the missing pages contained a lay of that name, and yet the
fact that she notes "(from verse 233)" behind Bisclaret
[sic] seems to indicate that she was aware of the missing
pages and was not trying to fill them conjecturally. The
possibility that Aelis might be merely a typographical or
other mechanical error (a misreading of "(v. 157)"?) seems
to be precluded by the mention of twenty-five lays. I was
not able to find any evidence— indexes, records of the manu
scripts at the Bibliotheque Nationale, or separate leaves
containing anything which might be construed as "Aelis" and
jmight be considered the missing pages— to suggest either
that there were more than two pages missing or that the
jpages contained anything except the ending of II Amanz and
jthe beginning of Bisclavret. The matter seems worthy of
notice since Grimes was usually so accurate and conscien
tious, and since "Aelis," whether it be the musical "Lay of j
jAlice" or some lyrico-narrative poem such as is described by
jthe author of Lay de L'Espine (1. 176), or some short love
jtreatise like Raoul de Houdenc's Roman des Ailes— which does
jappear in one other manuscript of what are, for the most
jpart, Breton Lays— would be of vital importance to the
jwhole matter of the nature of the Breton Lay as a genre (see!
below) .
I
[that the faces of all the seated figures are obscured, and
hence the sex of the figures cannot be accurately judged,
nor the possibility be excluded that other listeners might
have been pictured merely as faces peering over the
shoulders of the three discernible figures.
The poem entitled "Cest le lay de Guingamor" begins in
the right-hand column of folio 23 recto and extends for 678
lines to the left-hand column of folio 27 verso. This manu
script also contains the other four lays of the Guinqamor
group: Guigemar, Lanval and Desire stand together as the
first three lays in the collection (folios 1 recto to 15
verso), and Graelentmor is the next to last lay (72 recto to
77 recto). A complete listing of the contents of this manu
script will be found in the Appendix.
According to Gaston Paris, the manuscript was copied
3
around the end of the thirteenth century. It is in good
condition, and its text, taken by itself, seems quite
regular, but a comparison of its version of the text of any I
i - ■
piece with the version of the text of that same piece from
another manuscript reveals several distinct flaws, all
^Paris, pp. 29-33.
[resulting from the scribe's free treatment of his source-
I ;
i ' [
copy:
j j
1. The scribe has normalized all the texts into his
own dialectj that of the lie de France, and his own
age by changing the morphological endings, and when
such changes modify the verse count of a line, he
will usually add a monosyllabic word or substitute
several alternate words which carry roughly the
4
same meaning, e.g. Lanval, 1. 76.
2. The scribe often bowdlerizes his texts by the
omission or softening of even the most vaguely
erotic details, e.g. Lanval, 11. 561-562, Guigemar,
11. 257-258.
3. The scribe often enlarges and modifies descrip
tions to make them seem even greater and more
sumptuous, e.g. Lanval, 11. 212 a and b.
4. The scribe seems to be fond of cliche phrases and
descriptions, and he will frequently substitute a
standard formula for words or whole lines that
4
As many of the examples as possible are drawn from
Lanval because of the availability of an excellent critical ;
I edition of that poem with four texts in parallel columns:
[Marie de France, Le Lai de Lanval, ed. Jean Rychner (Geneva,
11958).
other manuscripts show to be somewhat more distinc-
| tive or individual phrases. As an extension of
this practice, he introduces whole passages which
seem to be borrowed from other lays, e.g. Graelent-
mor, 11. 8 a-f appear to be Guigemar, 11. 35-46
rendered into trite and standard diction.
5. in addition to these changes, the scribe seems to
omit a couplet about once every hundred lines.
Sometimes the results are negligible, but in
several cases the sense of a passage is signifi
cantly altered, e.g. Lanval, 11. 161-162, 181-182,
511-512, and 561-562 in addition to the major
omission of lines 305-312 which leaves out any
identification of the person whom the queen is
begging for justice.
These flaws in the manuscript quality should have
Caused critics to use special caution before relying heavily
bn a textual reading in Guinqamor. and should allow editors
ja special latitude in suggesting revisions, but none of the
ieditors has ever commented on the distinctly inferior
(quality of the manuscript.
I :
Guinqamor has been edited four times. Gaston Paris
first published it, along with all the other "lais inedits"
known to him, in Romania, VIII (1879), 50-59. Paris pre-
I
i
jsents the text essentially as it appears in the manuscript,
with a minimum of modern punctuation and emendation. In
1922 Erhard Lommatzsch published a similarly conservative
5
edition with an exhaustive glossary. Meanwhile, Peter
Kusel, working under professors Lommatzsch and Zenker, pre
pared for his 1914 doctoral dissertation an edition of
Guingamor in which the text was transposed from the Parisian
dialect of the manuscript into the Anglo-Norman dialect that
Kusel proved it had been originally written in; this disser
tation, entitled "Guingamor, ein Lai der Marie de France,"
remained unpublished until 1925 when Karl warnke included it
as a special supplement to the third edition of his Die Lais
6
der Marie de France, which at that time was the definitive
scholarly edition of Marie's lays. in 1954, Erich von
Richthofen's vier altfranzosische Lais der Marie de France,
jprepared for a series of student texts, again presented an
edition of Guinqamor which conserves the readings of
t 5
| ’ i
5
Le Lai de Guingamor— Le Lai de Tydorel, Romanische
jTexte 6 (Berlin, 1922). ;
| ;
’ 6 i
Bibliotheca Normannxca ill (Halle, 1925), pp. 225-256.;
known to him, in Romania, VIII (1879), 50-59. Paris pre-
.
jsents the text essentially as it appears in the manuscript,
i
I
with a minimum of modern punctuation and emendation, in
11922 Erhard Lommatzsch published a similarly conservative
5
edition with an exhaustive glossary. Meanwhile, Peter
Kusel, working under professors Lommatzsch and Zenker, pre
pared for his 1914 doctoral dissertation an edition of
Guingamor in which the text was transposed from the Parisian
dialect of the manuscript into the Anglo-Norman dialect that
Kusel proved it had been originally written in; this disser
tation, entitled "Guingamor, ein Lai der Marie de France,"
remained unpublished until 1925 when Karl Warnke included it
as a special supplement to the third edition of his Die Lais
6
der Marie de France, which at that time was the definitive
scholarly edition of Marie's lays, in 1954, Erich von
Richthofen's vier altfranzosische Lais der Marie de France,
prepared for a series of student texts, again presented an
^edition of Guingamor which conserves the readings of
i
5
Le Lai de Guingamor— Le Lai de Tydorel, Romanische
’ Texte 6 (Berlin, 1922) .
i
6
Bibliotheca Normannica ill (Halle, 1925), pp. 225-256.
7
the manuscript with only a few emendations.
i
j
Marie de France is the name traditionally given to the
poet who wrote her name into three works; a collection of
j
lays, a collection of beast fables, and a translation of a
Latin tract on the Purgatory of Saint Patrick. In one manu
script, British Museum, Harley 978, twelve lays appear to
gether with two prologues; the first dedicates the lays to a
king, and the second, shorter one contains a couplet men
tioning the name Marie:
OSz, seignurs, ke dit Marie
Ki en sun tens pas ne s'oblie.
(Prologue B, 11. 3-4)
In that same manuscript, a collection of 102 short fables
contains an epilogue in which the author says;
Me numerai pur remembrance:
Marie ai nun, si sui de France.
(11. 3-4)
The epilogue also dedicates the fables to a "Cunte Willame."
And at the end of the Espurgatoire Seint Patrice, she says; |
Jo, Marie, ai mis, en memoire,
Le livre de 1'Espurgatoire
En Romanz, qu'il seit entendables
A laie gent e convenables.
(11. 2297-2300)
i !
;
^ 7
Romanische Ubungstexte IXL" (Tubingen, 1954). j
in addition to these statements, there are three pieces
of evidence bearing on the question of Marie's identity: a ;
contemporary reference to her, textual indications of her
habitat, and the scope of her experience and attitudes as
revealed in her writings.
In the preface to his vie Seint Edmund, the twelfth-
century Anglo-Norman author Denis Piramus refers to a "Dame
Marie" who composes popular lays which she falsely claims to
8
be true histories. There is no conclusive way of dating
Denis' work— although the editors of his poem suggest that
it was written in the 1170's— but nonetheless, this refer
ence proves that Marie was famous before the end of the
twelfth century, and that she was the object of respect,
since the term "Dame" could be applied to any superior, from
9
an abbess to a royal woman.
Clearly Marie lived in England and was familiar with
English things. She uses half a dozen English words in her i
iworks; she refers to King Stephen's reign, and bothers to I
! • [
mention that King Alfred made an English translation of
i ;
8
La Vie Seint Edmund le Rei, ed. H. Kjellman
(Goteborg, 1935), p. 58, 11. 35-36.
i 9
John Fox, "Marie de France," English Historical
I Review. XXV (1910), 305. |
fables; and she once refers to the continent as "Terres de
jla" (Milun, 1. 332). This internal evidence added to the
facts that her source for Saint Patrick was written by an
English monk, that Denis Piramus was English, and that the
best manuscripts of her works are English, definitively
establishes that the location of her literary activity was
England.
Only one other piece of evidence is at all conclusive
in establishing Marie's dates or identity: in the
Espurgatoire, 1. 2074, she refers to Saint Malachias who was
canonized July 6, 1189, which means that work must have been
written some time after that date, probably shortly after
the time when the new canonization would be fresh in every
one 's mind.
Other criteria for judging Marie’s identity or date are
completely questionable. Edith Rickert has argued that the
description of pistre in Les Deus Amanz is accurate enough
to be considered as a possible birthplace or childhood home
of Marie; this, however, is a matter of pure guesswork,
since Marie might also have been trying to flatter some
local noble who derived from pistre, as well as
10
nostalgically recalling her old home. The romance of Ilie!
let Galeron by Gautier d 'Arras refers to a lay which could be;
Eliduc, but there can be no certainty that Gautier refers to
Marie's particular version; furthermore, the date of
Gautier's work is variously placed from 1167 to 1185, yet on
the basis of this "evidence" one still sees 1167 mentioned
as the date by which the lays must have been completed.^
There are three prominent theories as to Marie's iden
tity, each of them admittedly almost totally conjectural,
and none of them widely approved or considerably favored
above the others.
The suggestion least favored by scholars writing on the
Breton Lays is Ezio Levi's contention that Marie was abbess
at Reading, where the Harley manuscript of her works was
probably copied, and that the king and count to whom she
dedicated her works were Henry III and Guillaume le
12
Marechal. The unpopularity of this theory derives as much
10 !
Edith Rickert, Marie de France: Seven of Her Lays
Done into English by Edith Rickert (London, 1901), pp. 137- j
148.
■^Ed. Frederick A. G. Cowper (Paris, 1956), p. xlv.
12
I "Studie sulle opere di Maria di Francia: II, Maria j
di Francia e le Abbazie d'lnghilterra," Archivum Romanicum, ;
V, iv (1921), 472. |
from the fact that Levi linked it with attribution of the
jRoman d'Eneas to Marie and insistence that Henry II could
not be Marie's king, as it does from any internal inconsis
tency.
The late Sir John Fox maintained that Marie was most
likely the Abbess of Shaftesbury who was born about 1150 as
the illegitimate daughter of Godefroy d'Anjou and hence
half-sister to King Henry II; this Marie had become abbess
by 1181 and died some time during 1216 when she was last
mentioned in an extant document, and when King John— who had
earlier called her "Carissima Amita mea"— appointed the
Prior of Wareham to govern the abbey for an unspecified
13
reason which was most likely the death of the abbess.
Since Henry II is known to have been the patron of Wace and !
Benoit de Sainte-More among others, this identification of
him with the noble king would be additionally plausible.
Fox's candidate for "Cunte Willame" would be Guillaume
Longespee who was the bastard son of Henry n and the fair
Rosamond and hence the nephew of the Abbess of Shaftesbury; j
13
Fox, pp. 303-306; John Fox, "Mary, Abbess of
Shaftesbury," English Historical Review. XXVI (1911), 317-
;326. See also Laura Sydenham's Shaftesbury and Its Abbey
|(Lingfield, Surrey, 1959), pp. 16-18. j
he was the Earl of Salisbury, and a recorded patron of
Shaftesbury Abbey. Furthermore, an illegitimate aunt might
Well have a special affection for an illegitimate nephew.
The third candidate, proposed by Urban T. Holmes, is
Marie Talbot, daughter of Count Waleran de Meulan who lived
14
in the lie de France. This Marie married a Hugh Talbot
and presumably moved with him to his home in Herefordshire,
the site of some of Marie's lays and some known literary
activity in the late twelfth century. This Marie would have
been of the petty nobility, "de France," and living in
England; the king and count could be any of several choices,
since this Marie has no recorded special affinity with any
of the ruling nobility. There is no suggestion in the
records that this Marie ever wrote.
There is, in fact, no reason for believing that any of
the proposed Maries was an author, and yet no evidence
excludes any of the three. I personally favor the second
of these three proposals. Shaftesbury Abbey was a large and
important pilgrimage site whose abbesses— more than one of
14
"New Thoughts on Marie de France," Studies in
I Philology, XXIX (1932), 1-10. The most recent arguments in!
favor of this theory are those of P. N. Flum in Romance
I Notes, VII (1965), 83-86.
jwhom had noble connections— show themselves in the many
i
ilegal documents preserved, to be women who were well
acquainted with the ways of the world, even though they were
idoistered. This image, combined with the evidence cited
[
above, conforms more to the picture of Marie which I can
deduce from her works than does the image of the French
countess turned wife of country squire or the country abbess
with no special connections with the reigning royalty. Any
final identification, however, must await some new, more
positive evidence.
The standard edition of Marie de France's complete
works is that by Karl Warnke for the Bibliotheca Noirmannica
15
series, with introductions, notes and glossaries in German.
Warnke treats the texts rather freely, regularizing spell
ing, reprinting all interpolated lines as if they were
genuine, and juggling considerably to make the lines count
out in Warnke's approved system. Some of Warnke's modifica
tions and selections are monstrous, such as his emendation
iof the couplet from Chevrefoil (11. 77-78) which in the
15
Die Lais der Marie de France (Halle, 1925);
I pie Fabeln der Marie de France (Halle, 1898); Das Buch vom j
lEspurqatoire S. Patrice der Marie de France und seine Quelle
(Halle, 1938).
Harley manuscript appears as:
i
!
; Bele amie, si est de nus:
Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!
Warnke renders this:
Bele amie, si est de nus;
ne vus senz mei ne jeo senz vus!
Despite the unsatisfactory nature of the text, Warnke's
edition remains the most recent scholarly treatment of all
three of Marie's works by a single editor.
The two best editions of Marie's lays are those by
Alfred Ewert, with introduction, notes, and glossary in
16
English, and by Jean Rychner with introduction, notes, and
17
glossary in French. Both of these editors use the Harley
manuscript as the basis for their text, and both editors
make a minimum of emendations on it.
The editors of Marie's lays have adopted a system of
short-titling for the extant manuscripts of her lays which
will be used throughout this study. The manuscripts which
will concern us are the following:
16
Marie de France, Lais, Blackwell's French Texts
i(Oxford, 1963) .
I 17
Les Lais de Marie de France, Les classiques Franyais
|du Moyen Age, no. 93 (Paris, 1966).
MS. H. British Museum, Harley 978. This manuscript
I :
jcontains the long prologue and all twelve of Marie's lays.
i ‘ ;
lit represents the best text for Guiqemar and Lanval.
MS. C. British Museum, cotton Vespasian B XIV. This
manuscript contains Lanval, foil. 1-8.
MS. P. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, franqaises 2168.
This manuscript contains Guiqemar, Lanval, and Graelentmor.
MS. S. Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Nouvelles
acquisitions francaises 1104. This manuscript, described in
detail above as the Guinqamor manuscript, contains nine of
Marie's lays, including Guiqemar and Lanval. as well as
Guingamor, Graelentmor and Desire.
MS. B. Cheltenham, Sir Thomas Phillipps' library
ino. 3713. This manuscript contains Desire and several
other anonymous lays.
MS. N. Upsala University Library, Delagarde collection
:no. 4-7. This is a translation into Old Norse, done at the i
: j
[request of King Haakon (1217-1263), which contains all or
! part of twenty-one lays, including a complete Guiqemar and
Desire. most of Lanval, and fragments of Graelentmor.
The most recent edition of Desire and Graelentmor is
! ]_g
that prepared by E. Margaret Grimes. Unfortunately, she
i
juses as the basis for her text MS. S, and she preserves all
its inflations and emendations. Fortunately, Grimes gives
extensive textual notes indicating all of the variations
i
in the better manuscripts, and also indicating the typo
graphical errors in various editions based on the other
manuscripts.
In this study, quotations and line references will be
taken from the MS. H version of Marie's works, the MS. S
version of Guinqamor, the MS. P text of Graelentmor, and
the MS. B text of Desire.
18
The Lays of Desire. Graelent and Melion (New York,
11928) .
CHAPTER I
A SURVEY OF CRITICISM
The criticism of Guinqamor has centered entirely around
two problems: its authorship and its folklore analogues.
Earlier critics were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the
merits of the poem and most often ascribed it to Marie de
France; later critics have been consistently cooler toward
the poem and have most often merely dismissed it as an imi
tation of Marie's lays, critics have unanimously agreed,
and demonstrated further and further, that the episodes in
Guinqamor are based on a universal stock of folklore motifs
which are commonly represented in Celtic as well as in other
literature. No one has carefully or systematically studied
the literary merits of the poem.
The first critical statements about the poem— Gaston
iParis' notes to his 1879 edition— set the trend of most
later criticism by claiming in a single sentence that
j Guingamor was "le plus beau de ceux [lais] qui paraissent
ici pour la premiere fois" but offering no substantiation
i 1
for this judgment at all. in a paragraph, Paris points out;
| i
jthe most obvious folklore and literary analogues to the
various incidents in the poem.
In 1886 Wilhelm Hertz published a German verse trans
lation of Guingamor along with a number of other lays,
2
fabliaux, and Aucassin and Nicolette. Hertz accompanies
these admirable translations in the original rhyme and meter
schemes with a superb set of notes which, in the case of
Guingamor, primarily explore a number of contemporary refer
ences to the name "Guingamor" and a number of literary ana
logues .
Half a dozen years later, Karl Warnke, who had mean
while prepared a scholarly edition of Marie's lays, consid
ered briefly the various anonymous lays and concluded that
none of them, including Guingamor, could be by her, even
though Guingamor had been originally written in Marie's
’ dialect and thus was, on purely linguistic grounds, not to
! ' !
be excluded from her canon. Warnke's only reasons for
| i
^■"Lais inedits," Romania, VIII (1879), 50-51.
| I
I |
2
Spielmannsbuch (Stuttgart, 1886), pp. 370-375.
19
excluding it are contained in a single statement about its
i
jstyle:
In dem Stoff und der Komposition des Gedichtes, in der
Charakteristik der handelnden Personen, in der Schreib-
weise und endlich im Versbau lasst sich kaum eine Eigen-
tumlichkeit entdecken, die von Mariens Dichtungs--und
Schreibweise abwiche. . . . Aber auch in diesem Gedichte
ist die Sprache zu eigenartig gefarbt, als dass sie der
Hypothese, jene Dichterin sei die Verfasserin desselben,
die notwendige Grundlage und stutze geben konnte.3
The half dozen specific textual references which Warnke
cites as being unlike Marie's style were systematically
refuted by Rudolf Zenker in his review of Warnke's mono
graph. In addition to stressing the fact that since we have
only one manuscript of Guingamor we cannot safely assume
that any given line is not interpolated or modified by the
scribe, Zenker further maintained that Guingamor does not,
in fact, differ substantially in style from the lays of
. 4
Marie.
The apogee of Guingamor admiration was surely reached
that same year of Warnke's study in the dissertation of
Axel Ahlstrom on the Breton Lays in general. Ahlstrom
Marie de France und die anonymen Lais (Coburg, 1892) ,
pp. 16, 18.
4Literaturblatt, XIII (1892), 418-421.
20
finds Guingamor similar to Marie's lays, but vastly
superior.
f
! Att med G. Paris antaga, att Marieoskulle ha forfattat
! afven denna lai, anser jag redan pa grund af dessa, om
ock sma differenser, vara mindre radligt. Men hvad som
bestamdt talar emot ett sadant antagande ar den hbgst
f’ drtraffliga stilen, vida skild fran Marie de France'
glattpolerade men temligen ointressanta framstallnings-
satt. I stilistisky afseende betecknar Guingamor utan
tvifvel hojdpunkten inom laislitteraturen. Den ar ocksa
den enda af vara lais, som formatt hoja sig till en
varligt poetick kraft och schwung i uttryckat. Hela
skildringen af Guingamors jakt i den fortrollade skogen
ar synnerligen askadligt och praktigt gjord, och hans
mote med feen och karleksscenen dem emellan ar framstald
med ett, for tiden ovanligt naivt, nastan kyst, behag,
som varkar synnerligen angenamt vid sidan af Graelents
brutalt naturalistiska behandling af samma tilldragelse
och Marie de France' anstandigt raffinerade detaljskil-
dringar af dylika situationer.5
"To accept along with G. Paris that Marie should have
written also this lay, I myself regard as less advisable
ialready on the grounds of these [grammatical points], though
they are small differences. But that which definitely
pleads against such an attribution is the sublimest, excel
lent style, widely divorced from Marie's smooth-polished but;
pretty uninteresting expositional-style. in stylistic con
siderations, Guingamor marks, without a doubt, the highpointi
within lay-literature. it is also the only one of our lays j
which is able to raise itself to an actual poetic power and |
soaring in the phrase. All the description of Guingamor's
hunt in the enchanted forest is singularly perceptive and
splendidly done, and his meeting with the fairy and the lovei
Scene between them is presented with what is for that age an
unusually naive, almost chaste grace which seems singularly
delightful beside Graelent's brutally naturalistic handling i
jof the same event and Marie de France's properly refined
depiction of a similar situation." Studier i den forn-
franska laisliteraturen (Upsala, 1892), p. 58.
i
i
21
Ahlstrom's remarks were never translated from Swedish I
i
and no later critic mentions the scope of his admiration. j
Unfortunately Ahlstrom does not support his conclusions with!
any specific textual references beyond those quoted, and
devotes the rest of his half dozen pages on Guingamor to a
mere plot summary and a discussion of folklore analogues.
This discussion of folklore and literary analogues
was carried even further by Ferdinand Lot who pointed out
that the white boar in Guingamor was really an analogue of
the Twrch Trwyth or "hoary sow" which King Arthur hunts in
the Welsh tale of Culhwch and 01wen, as well as to the white
6
sow which is hunted by Henwen in one of the Welsh triads.
The first major study concerned entirely with
Guingamor is likewise devoted entirely to a discussion of
folklore and analogues. William Schofield's "The Lay of
7
Guingamor" in 1896 centers largely around the notion that
t
in the clothes-stealing incident, Guingamor's lover func
tions as an enchanted swan-maiden rather than as an ordinary!
; j
fairy; therefore the author (whom Schofield accepts as
6
"Le blanc pore de Guingamor," Romania, XXV (1896), |
590-591. |
7 . I
Harvard Studies and Notes, V (1896), 221-244.
Marie) must have taken this incident from another source
beside that which provided either the insulted queen or the j
ifairy mistress episodes. The importance of Schofield's
Study lies in the fact that he insists upon the integrity of
the authors of Breton lays, and sees them as taking oral
tradition and molding it into artistic products. Gaston
Paris in his review of Schofield's article supports this
idea and reiterates as well his belief in Marie's authorship
^ 8
of Guingamor.
Jessie Weston accompanies her 1900 translation of
Guingamor with notes again reaffirming that it is not only
9
by Marie but one of her best lays. Edith Rickert in a com
panion volume of Marie's lays gives one of the only compari
sons of all five Breton lays— Guingamor, Graelentmor,
Guiqemar, Lanval, and Desire— which are so obviously inter
related in terms of plot incidents and heroes' names.
Rickert does not conclude that any of the five are partic
ularly later or inferior to the others, but rather sees all j
five as a part of a folklore complex from which the authors
' 8
Romania. XXVII (1898), 323.
9
Guingamor, Lanval. Tyolet, Bisclavret— Four Lais
Rendered into English prose (London, 1900). I
23 |
lave drawn selected materials in accordance with the partic-;
i ;
hlar meaning they were trying to express.^ unfortunately
Rickert does not carefully conclude what each author wanted
to express, but remains content with describing the differ
ences between the lays and several other analogues.
Although she does not specifically deny Marie's authorship
of Guingamor, Rickert's consistent failure to mention it in
connection with Marie makes one question whether she favored
the attribution or not.
In the 1905 edition of La litterature francaise au
mo yen age, Gaston Paris reiterates his belief that Guingamor
is authentically by Marie.
Three years later, Lucien Foulet astounded the world of
medieval studies by his radical proposal that Marie had
invented not only the particular stories she tells but also
the whole idea of the Breton Lay, with no sources at all,
Celtic or otherwise; consequently all references to the
Breton Lays must be later than her works (which would then
predate Thomas and Chrestien), and all lays not by Marie
10Marie de France: Seven of Her Lavs, pp. 167-174.
11
i Paris, 1905, p. 98.
24
12
must be later imitations of her popular new form.
Luingamor fails to figure in Foulet's immediate argument or ■
i :
in most of the controversy which followed since Foulet in
cluded it tacitly among Marie's lays, and no one chose to
challenge this particular point amid so many other conten
tions.
In 1914, Peter Kusel prepared a dissertation for the
university at Rostock showing on technical grounds that
there was nothing to prevent Guingamor from being by Marie.
This study included a text of the lay "regularized" to con
form with the Anglo-Norman patois Warnke had used in his
edition of Marie's twelve lays. This dissertation was not
published until 1922 in the publications of Rostock; but
when it did appear, warnke read it and was enough convinced
to include it in his new edition of the lays, thus reversing
13
his earlier decision against Guingamor ' s "authenticity.1 1
As it appears in Warnke's volume, Kusel's rationale is quite!
icomprehensive concerning dialect and rhyme technique, but
! i
12 , I
"Marie de France et la legende de Tristan," Zeit-
schrift fur Romanische Philologie, XXXII (1908), 161-183,
257-289.
! I
13
! Warnke, Die Lais der Marie de France (Halle, 1925),
jpp. 225-256.
25 |
only one paragraph is devoted to the question of narrative ;
style. Kusel merely notes that sometimes in Marie's "echt" i
lays she uses transitions as abrupt, epithets as commonplace,
and descriptions as vague and impractical as those found in
Guingamor; while he does offer a specific comparison which
seems valid for each of these points, he presents no
thoroughgoing stylistic analysis and comparison of the
various poems by Marie with Guingamor.
In addition to Warnke, Kusel indicates that Professors
Zenker and Lommatzsch, who helped him in his studies, concur
with his conclusions. Furthermore, James Bruce in his
monumental The Evolution of the Arthurian Romance had mean
while, praising Guingamor as "this beautiful story," indi-
14
cated that he too believed the poem to be by Marie.
This seemingly definitive adoption of Guingamor as one
of Marie's lays prompted Alex Ahlstrbm to prepare a French
language statement on the anonymous lays, while his earlier,
enthusiasm for Guingamor seems to have cooled slightly, he
i
|still maintains that it could not be by Marie.
v
II y a, a notre avis, une grande difference de style
entre Guingamor et les lais de Marie. On trouve parfois
dans les expressions de Guingamor une certaine gaucherie, j
!
14
Baltimore, Gottingen, 1923, p. 184.
26 !
qui nous revele I1auteur comme un homme moins accoutume '
a manier la plume, que ne l'etait Marie. Mais par
| contre il y a dans Guingamor des passages d'une naivete
prenante et beaucoup de ce sentiment mystique qui
characterise les vrais contes de fees, mais dont les
vers bien polis de Marie ne gardent que de faibles
traces. Nous sommes certain, que Marie n'aurait pas au
ecrire de tels vers comme Guingamor 38-54 (ou il y a
peut-etre un reminiscence de Tristan), 333 et suiv. et
497 et suiv.15
Ernest Hoepffner, in his fairly unfavorable review of
Warnke's new edition, seems much less favorable to Guingamor
than Ahlstrom:
Si les raisons linguistiques et metriques ne s'opposent
en effet pas a cette attribution, il y a des raisons
d'ordre litteraire qui nous empechent de 1'admettre ou
qui nous obligent du moins a faire a ce sujet de fortes
reserves.15
Like Ahlstrom, Hoepffner fails to enumerate many of the
literary criteria on which he would refuse Marie's author
ship.
That the objections of Ahlstrom and Hoepffner were in
vain is demonstrated by the fact that the next important
I studies of the Breton Lay considered Guingamor to be
i
I ‘ ■
iMarie's. S. Foster Damon's significant "Marie de France,
Marie de France et les lais narratifs (Goteborg,
j 1925), p. 31.
I 16
| Neophilologus, XI (1926), 142.
j 27
|
Psychologist of Courtly Love" not only included Guingamor
i
among the genuine lays but also reinforced the notion of the
universality of the basic situations by citing Japanese ana-
17
logues to the clothes-stealing and other episodes. Erich
Nagel's Marie de France als dichterische Personlichkeit
demonstrated again that in purely technical terms (rhymes,
etc.) only Guingamor of the anonymous lays could be by
18
Marie, and Nagel himself favored the attribution.
Ernest Hoepffner had the last word, however. In
1931, he published an article on the anonymous lays in which
through a series of verbal parallels he attempted to show
that Guingamor (as well as all the others) were plagiarized
from the lays of Marie. Many of the parallels seem too much
like standard phrases or mere descriptions which happen to
fit in analogous situations; few if any of the parallels
contain one word, phrase or image so rare or personal that
'one could be sure of its belonging to a particular creation
rather than the stock phrasing of story-tellers. Hoepffner
jalso adopts a modification of Foulet’s attitude; that since
Marie invented the literary form of the Breton Lay (which
I
j ;
17
! PMLA. XLIV (1929), 968-996.
i
18
Erlangen, 1930, p. 28.
Hoepffner, unlike Foulet, believes originated in Celtic folk
materials), all anonymous lays must be mere imitations, with:
19
the possible exceptions of Cor and Graelent.
Four years later Hoepffner published the first and only
book length study of Marie, in which he does not mention
20
Guingamor. This book, combined with his earlier edition
21
of Marie's lays, firmly established Hoepffner as the lead
ing expert on the Breton Lay. His definitive opinion on
Guingamor apparently became accepted, since twenty years
passed before Guingamor was seriously reconsidered.
In 1953, George v. Smithers revolutionized the study
of the Breton Lay by considering without prejudice most of
the distinctly narrative lays in both Old French and Middle
English,- and determining from their basic story-patterns
that they all are drawn from a stock of tales common with
22
the sources of most of the longer courtly romances. In
19
"Marie de France et les Lais anonymes," Studi
i Medievali, IV (1931), 1-22.
20
Les Lais de Marie de France (Paris, 1935).
21
! Marie de France, Les Lais, ed. E. Hoepffner
! (Strasbourg, 1921) .
i |
I 22 i
"Story-Patterns in Some Breton Lays," Medium Aevum,
jxxil (1953), 61-92.
| 29
I
jhis consideration of Guingamor as in his treatment of most
i
I
other lays, Smithers does not make any particular value
i
judgments about the age, authorship, or artistic merits of
Guingamor as opposed to its closest analogues; rather he
►
merely notes that Guingamor, solely on the basis of its
narrative structure and the narrative structure of its
closest analogues, represents a significant reworking of the!
fairy mistress materials.
The following year, two German scholars presented what
is essentially a restatement of Hoepffner's position.
Stefan Hofer even requotes most of Hoepffner's verbal paral
lels between Guingamor and Marie's lays, but he extends his
claims for both verbal and narrative parallels to include a
considerable number of the twelfth-century courtly romances:
the nephew-uncle relationship is supposedly from Tristram,
the chess game from Ogier le danois, the white boar from
Erec's white deer, the deserted castle from Chrestien's
23
i Perceval. etc. Hofer's claims remain unsubstantiated: he;
fails to demonstrate that there is, for example, anything
unique about the uncle-nephew relationship in either
! 23
; Stefan Hofer, "Kritische Bemerkungen zum Lai de
i Guinqamor," Romanischen Forschungen, LXV (1953/4), 360-377. j
| ■ 30
|
Tristram or Guingamor which would lead us to connect these
i
I
jtwo particularly, and beyond this, Hofer never seems to con
sider that, granted his parallelisms, perhaps both stories
drew on common source materials. As a result of this,
Hofer necessarily dates Guingamor after 1190 when, as he
sees it, the author of Guingamor could first have read
Perceval.
Rita Schober re-presents Hoepffner's more literary
criteria for considering Guingamor not by Marie: Marie
seems always to be most interested in idea and motivation
rather than in incident, and in Guingamor the major stress,
Schober states, is on adventure for adventure's sake, any
moral or psychological probing of the characters being in
fact absent.^
That same year as Hofer's and Schober's articles, Erich
von Richthofen published his edition of Guingamor as one of
"Four Lays of Marie de France" (vier altfranzosische Lais
der Marie de France). The reviews of his edition were i
iunanimous in condemning his inclusion of Guingamor, in one
24
"Kompositionsfragen in den Lais der Marie de France,";
iwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-universitat.
Berlin, IV (1954/5), 45-59.
f
31 ;
i ■
j ;
|case stating that Guingamor was artistically inferior to
i 25
Lanval. and in another specifically citing Hofer's article
26
jas proof of Guingamor1s inferiority. Benkt Wennberg in
;his 1956 dissertation on "Marie de France and the Anonymous ;
Lais," dismisses Guingamor in a paragraph by again citing
27
Hofer's "proof" of its standing as a late imitation.
Cesare Segre revived the same verbal parallels in 1957
in an article designed to prove that both Guingamor and
28
Graelent were copied from Marie's Lanval. Segre really
adds no new proof to the argument: he merely reiterates that
because Guingamor seems poorly motivated and Graelent more
gauche, that the "splendido Lanval" must be the prototype.
The prejudice and illogic of Segre's argument were attacked
by Jeanne Lods and Erich von Richthofen. Lods points out
that all three of the lays are made up of "themes egalement
traditionnels" and therefore may not be necessarily
25
I M. Dominica Legge, Modern Language Review, L (1955), j
>572.
26
Karl Maurer, Romanischen Forschungen, LXVII (1955/6),
404.
27
Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
•Pennsylvania, 1956.
I ;
28
"Lanval, Graelent, Guingamor," in Studi in onore di
iAngelo Monteverdi (Modena, 1957), pp. 756-770.
29
borrowing from each other she tries to distinguish
between the authors of the three lays in terms of their pur-
i
pose:
Le vrai sujet de Lanval n'a pas ete traite par 1'auteur
de Graelent, encore moins par celui de Guingamor. ...
Ainsi chez Marie, comme chez ses imitateurs, comme chez
tous les conteurs medievaux d'ailleurs, il y a contamina
tion de motifs venus de toutes sortes de traditions,
ecrites ou orales, mais pour elle il s'agit en outre
d'utiliser les themes empruntes en vue d'une fin unique,
elle sollicite au besoin la tradition pour rendre propre
a servir son dessein. Chez les deux anonymes il y a des
themes empruntes, parfois a Marie elle-meme, common on
I1a demontre il n'y a pas un sujet. Dans Guingamor il
ne subsiste plus rien de ce qui est essentiel a
l'histoire de Lanval, dans Graelent meme, l'ordre des
episodes modifie, certaines additions injustifi^es
faussent completement la perspective du recit.
Von Richthofen questions the true meaning of the more simple
and awkward style of Graelent and Guingamor:
ici, on peut bien se demander si le fait que le style
et la psychologie de Graelent et Guingamor nous semblent
plus na’ ifs que dans Lanval prouve necessairement
1'anteriorite de celui-ci. C'etait precisement k
l'epoque de Marie et de Chretien que les formes d*expres
sion poetique etaient en plein developpement vers
1'apogee, un certain declin n1apparaissant que dans le
genre des chansons de geste. Vu de l1angle de la
stylistique historique, la "na’ ivete prenante" dont
Ahlstrom nous parlait au sujet de Guingamor n'est done
pas toujours le signe d'une oeuvre d'epigone; elle
pourrait receler une forme archa’ ique de la l^gende.
29
Romania, LXXIX (1958), 131-135.
3°Cahiers de civilisation medievale (Poitiers), III
!(1960), 370-371.
This view was echoed by A. J. Bliss in his introduction to
Ian edition of the Middle English sir Launfal. in which he
places Marie's polished, Arthurian version as perhaps later
than the rougher, anonymous versions of the story like
, ^ 31
Graelent.
In Harry Williams' article on "The Anonymous Breton
Lays" he merely cites Schober and Segre as having proven
^ 32 .
Guingamor to be anonymous.
The most recent treatment of Guingamor appeared in an
anthology entitled The Anthropologist Looks at Myth: Dell
Skeels's article, "Guingamor and Guerrehes: psychological
Symbolism in a Medieval Romance," contains a translation of
Guingamor into English, but the critical substance of the
article is concerned entirely with the Guerrehes episode in
33
The First Continuation of Chrestien1s"Perceval".
Guingamor is only presented as background material, as col- '
lateral evidence of relationships and incidents alluded to
in the Guerrehes episode.
31
Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal. ed. A. J. Bliss (London,;
1960), pp. 16-31.
32
Research Studies (Washington State University),
XXXII, ii (June 1964), 76-84.
33
Melville Jacobs and John Greenway, The Anthropologist!
Looks at Myth (Austin, Texas, 1966),pp. 52-83. j
We find, then, that no one has made a thorough and
careful literary analysis of Guingamor. Many critics have
expressed opinions on the authorship or merit of the poem,
but these ppinions— both the perceptive and the patently
fatuous— have not been substantiated by any thorough or
impressive range of examples cited from the text itself.
Furthermore, the methods of approach employed by many
of the critics seem feeble if not specious. For example,
the four major critical assumptions behind the verbal-
parallel device used by Hofer and Segre seem erroneous:
1. The use of such a device should presuppose that the
critic has a good idea of the dates or the order of
precedence of all the works to be considered, yet
none of the works in question in some of these
articles can be dated with any great accuracy—
though very tentative dates suggested by editors
have been honored as facts at times— and therefore
we cannot justly say which is more likely to have
borrowed from which on these purely factual
grounds.
2. There seems to be a latent assumption, then, that
some chronological hierarchy can be deduced from a
hierarchy of excellence, i.e., that the author who
makes the best use of a line or scene must have
made the first use of it also; this is patently
false since most great authors— Chaucer, Shakes
peare, Cervantes, and Rabelais, to name a few
obvious examples— have made liberal use of classi
cal, traditional, and currently novel materials and
have most often transformed and "bettered" their
sources.
A further assumption suggests that there is some
thing basically better about complete originality
than there is about the utilization of some liter
ary work as source material, since both Hofer and
Segre seem to be asking us to ignore as fraudulent
those works which they contend have borrowed lines
and scenes from other works. This assumption is
distorted both because it fails to deal with the
possibility of intentional allusion through quota
tion, and further because it fails to admit that
the lines or scenes in question might— and do— have
different meanings, so that two similar scenes,
whether copied or original, might be equally
36
brilliant and ingenious by virtue of the different,
i
subtle meanings they imply.
4. Even worse than this assumption that "general"
standards favor originality, is the tacit assump
tion that the Breton Lay as a genre— i.e., the
authors and milieu of the Breton Lays— prized total
originality. The refutation of this assumption
will be one of the chief objectives of the follow
ing chapter, but suffice it to say at this point
that given the unusually large amount of duplica
tion in names, motifs, incidents, and phrases among
Breton Lays in general, and even among the lays of
Marie herself, one ought to consider the possibil
ity that, regardless of more modern trends of crit
icism which may favor total originality, perhaps
the audience of the Breton Lay demanded at least a
token amount of formulaic traditionalism, or per
haps the very art of the Breton Lay consisted of
playing variations on standard and well-known
materials.
The criticism on Guingamor has been unsatisfactory,
then. The following chapters will attempt to rectify this,
ifirst by reviewing the nature of the genre in order to
decide which critical approaches might be best to use/
then by applying these methods to a comprehensive and
detailed analysis of Guingamor and its four analogues.
37
and
CHAPTER II
THE NATURE OF THE BRETON LAY
A significant difficulty in the appreciation of the
Breton Lay lies in an understanding of the nature of the
terms "Breton" and "lay." Much of the confusion and dis
agreement between critics has arisen from variant interpre
tations of these basic terms rather than from a genuine
argument about the values of the poems themselves. The dis
agreements usually seem to result from a failure to allow or
consider all of the available evidence in order to establish
the Breton Lay as a genre with some specific and some gener
al characteristics which are useful as guidelines in liter
ary analysis. As early as 1891, Bedier made this assessment
(which is still valid for our own day) of the composition of
the battlefield of Breton Lay criticism:
1 ;
Ce sont des celtisans qui reprochent aux romanistes de
ne pas savoir l'irlandais ou le cornique, des romanistes
qui blament les celtisans d'ignorer le vieux franpais,
et des folk-loristes qui remontrent aux celtisans
- > •
38
| et aux romanistes 1'ignorance ou ils vivent des prin-
| cipes de la litterature comparee.^
iln the following study we shall try to insist on an un
prejudiced review of all evidence.
It has been1 clearly established that the term "Breton"
in the twelfth century was used indiscriminately and care
lessly to refer to any inhabitants of either the British
Isles or the Brittany area of northern France, and hence no
precise or even likely inference can be made from the word
2
alone. Furthermore, the poems claiming to be Breton Lays,
made by and about Bretons, also range in locale freely from
Edinburgh to Nantes, and in fact suggest a certain homogene
ity of culture among the Celts at this time (about the
equivalent divergence in language and custom between western
United States, southern united States, and England today).
Some of the references to the performances of Breton Lays
ispecifically cite Irish, Welsh, or Armorican performers,
|again suggesting that either the Anglo-Normans could not
tell one Celt from another, or that in fact the term
'''Joseph Bedier, "Les Lais de Marie de France, " Revue
j des deux Mondes, CVII (1891), 847.
i 2
Alfred Ewert, introduction to Marie de France, Lais,
j pp. xiv-xv.
| 40 I
i '
j"Breton" refers to any Celt or Celtic thing, regardless of
i
> -
l
its country of origin. Therefore, we must adopt this
broadest assumption unless some more positive evidence
appears.
The term "lay" has been satisfactorily established as a
linguistic derivative or analogue of the medieval Irish word
laidh (also spelled laoi, laoid, etc.), which was glossed in
the eighth and ninth centuries as referring to the songs of
birds, but in twelfth-century literary texts the word is
clearly used to denote any song— natural or man-made,
3
instrumental or vocal, with or without words. An alternate
3
Rudolf Thurneysen gives the appropriate information in
his book of etymological studies Keltoromanisches (Halle,
1884), pp. 103-104. His conclusions are accepted by Warnke
and Ewert in their editions of Marie's lays, and by Ernest
Hoepffner in his chapter on "The Breton Lais" in Roger S.
Loomis' Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, a Collabo
rative History (Oxford, 1959), pp. 112-113. The objections
of the Oxford English Dictionary to this derivation seem
poor to me; they reject it because the conjectured primitive
Celtic root of Laid would not yield lay if itself introduced
into Old French, but since the term is first used in Old
French in the mid-twelfth century, it seems reasonable to
suppose it represents the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman's
pronunciation of the mid-twelfth-century spoken version
of this word in some Celtic dialect. Unfortunately, experts
on Anglo-Norman such as Mildred K. Pope do not treat the
interesting issue of the Anglo-Norman pronunciation of
borrowed words, especially not the relatively few words
borrowed from Celtic languages.
theory, proposed by Ferdinand Wolf, would derive both the
term "lay" and the thirteenth-century musical form called
lai or descort from the liturgical Latin sequence and its
4
Middle High German name leich. Although leich does serve
as the German translation of the Old French word Lai, our
notions about the etymology as well as the musical origins
have now been entirely reversed, so that the most recent
expert to study the matter in depth, Jean Maillard, con
cludes that "nous sommes en droit de nous demander si la
sequence et le lai n'ont pas une commune origine celtique."^
We have, then, as an etymological definition of the Old
French word lai, something quite as general or as particular
as the modern English word song.
This definition would seem to be substantiated by the
early usages of the French term, it is sometimes associated
4
fiber die Lais, Sequenzen und Leiche (Heidelberg,
1841) .
5
"Le lai lyrique et les legendes arthuriennes,"
Bulletin bibliographique de la Societe Internationale
Arthurienne, IX (1957), 124-127. Among others who support
Maillard's conclusions are Theodore Gerold, La musique au
Imoyen age (Paris, 1932), p. 208, and George Reaney, "Con
cerning the Origins of the Medieval Lai," Music and Letters,
XXXIX (1958), 343-346.
With the song of birds, and is used in many passages refer-
i
j
ring, literally or figuratively, to man-made music which
varies from the clearly wordless to the possibly semi-
7
narrative song. The acceptance of this definition leads us
toward two important conclusions: that references to the
performance of lays must be interpreted cautiously from con
text to determine, if possible, the nature of the song being
sung or played, and that, since the term lay would seem to
be as inclusive as the term song, we cannot assume an arbi
trary or sharp division between lyrical and narrative lays,
there being no such sharp division obvious in many songs.
Of those passages which refer to lays as some human
artistic product, there are two large categories: (1) those
descriptions in poems other than Breton Lays which mention
the performance of a lay by some character, and (2) those
6
In addition to the passages quoted by Godefroy and by
Tobler and Lommatzsch, we might add this passage from
Partonopeus de Blois (Paris, 1834), 11. 31-34.
Li rosegniols ses lais organe
Qui del canter adies s'ahane;
Li rosegnols dist sa cang:on,
Et nuis et jors en sa saisson.
7
Hoepffner cites the most important references in his
Ichapter on "The Breton Lais" in Loomis' Arthurian Litera
ture , pp. 112-113.
! i
j 43 i
1 •
I !
descriptions and explanations in Breton Lays themselves
i ;
which seek to establish the source or mode of composition
of that particular lay.
Many of the references from this first category will
prove relatively useless in establishing the nature of the
Breton Lay because they do not contain any element which
would positively exclude the possibility that the work
being performed was purely instrumental, vocal but essen
tially lyric, or vocal but essentially narrative. For
example, Chrestien de Troyes tells in Erec et Enide,
11. 6131-37
Et cil qui el vergier estoient
d'Erec desarmer s'aprestoient,
et chantoient par contanpon
tuit de la joie une chanpon,
et les dames un lai troverent
que le Lai de Joide apelerentjg
mes n'est gueres li lais sauz.
Now, since it was already mentioned that a song was sung
about Erec's triumph, what is the difference between the
8
"And those who were in the grove hurried to help Erec
take his armor off, and they sang lustily [or, 'in order to
jcelebrate his deed,' or 'in a two-part musical arrangement1]
a song all about The Joy [of the Court], and the ladies com
posed a lay which they called The Lav of Joy, but it could
hardly be the [well-]known lay." Chretien de Troyes, Erec
let Enide, ed. Mario Roques (Paris, 1955), p. 187.
| 4 4 !
chancon and the lai? Why do just the women compose the
f ' ;
i •
lai? One might assume that the lay was not a song, since
Chrestien apparently differentiates between the chan9on and
the lai, or that, like the changon de toile, the lay was a
form of ladies' poetry, but neither conclusion could be well
9
sustained by the slight evidence. Nor is there any detail
which conclusively establishes that the Lay of joy was sung,
played instrumentally, spoken in prose or verse, or, indeed,
performed at all, since Chrestien merely says that it was
composed.
Perhaps the best example of the slight value of these
references is the early thirteenth-century romance of Ansdis
de Carthage, which is preserved in three manuscripts.^ For
the passage in question, one manuscript reads:
Li rois seoit sor un bufet d'argent;
Pour oblier son desconfortement
Faisoit conter le lai de Graelent.
(11. 4975-77)
9
It is interesting in this context to consider the
passage in the pseudo-Boron Merlin which forms the frame for
the second of the Portuguese Lais de Bretanha (see below) ;
here again it is ladies composing and performing the lay,
and if the Portuguese text be accepted as a valid transla
tion of the lost French original, the lay must have been
accompanied by a dance.
^ Anseis von Karthago, ed. Johan Alton (Tubingen,
1892).
Another manuscript reads:
Li rois seoit sour .j. lit a argent;
pour oublier son desconfortement
Faisoit chanter le lai de Graelent.
The third manuscript reads:
Li rois s'assist sor .j. palie d'orient;
por oblier som desconfortament
Fasoit soner . j. de Tristam vorament
Quant se parti de isode oltre son talent.
Clearly, either the scribes or the performers (or both) felt
free to alter details, and in this case we have an opportu
nity to see that the alterations can involve an entire
reversal of meaning. Apparently The Lay of Graelent was
sometimes told as a story and sometimes sung as a song, and
the "one" (one what, the careless scribe has omitted) about
Tristam, while it was played on an instrument, had either
enough narrative words sung with it or commentary spoken
before it so that the story of Isolt's decree of banishment
against Tristam was understood.
Even if these references do not provide us with any
conclusive proof as to the exact nature of the Breton Lay,
they are still valuable in that they provide us with a
functional image of what the Breton Lay might possibly have
been. From the number of references to lays and Breton Lays
:in mid- and late twelfth-century French literature, we are
'forced to conclude that some musical compositions called
i
|lays and often associated with Celtic performers were popu
lar at that time. We must also conclude that lays were both
spoken and sung, and sometimes merely played as musical com
positions; but in almost every case, a specific narrative is
closely connected with the lay, either through its title
which recalls a well-known narrative,'*'’ * ' or through some
means of narration, spoken or sung.12
The explanatory references within narrative lays them
selves have been subjected to frequent scrutiny and much
arbitrary misinterpretation. Often, relying on very tenuous
dating or value judgments of poetic quality, the information
tendered in all of the lays except those twelve commonly
ascribed to Marie de France has been rejected as a spurious
imitation of Marie's prologues and epilogues. Because of
this, I will treat the Marie lays separately first.
The information about Marie's lays can be stated fairly
11A typical example of this is the reference to the
performance of the Lay of Orfeo by a mechanical golden
statue in Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Margaret Pelan (Paris,
1956), p. 103.
12
The classic example of this is the Lay of Guiron
which Iseult performs in Thomas' Tristan, ed. Wind (Geneva, I
11960), pp. 93-94.
simply. Each of the twelve lays has for its opening and
I - :
jclosing lines a formula explaining that now the narrator is |
going to relate a story from which a lay was made, and then,:
at the ending, that this was how the story happened and
either (1) someone made a lay about it in order to memorial
ize the incident, or (2) soon everyone found out about the
incident and they made a lay about it. There are several
important variations or additions, of course. In most of
the lays, Marie says specifically that the Bretons made the
lay, but in four cases, she does not. In Chaitivel and
Chevrefoil this is undoubtedly because she envisions the lay
as having been written by the protagonist, who in the former
case is Armorican and in the latter Welsh, so that in effect
these two lays are still of Celtic origin as far as Marie is
concerned. In the case of the other two lays, Yonec and
Milun, I see no reason to doubt that Marie knew Breton
(i.e., Celtic) Lays of these titles; both are situated in
Celtic territories and deal with motifs familiar from other
Celtic narratives. It seems likely that Marie omitted the
iword Breton simply for artistic variation, and no further
conclusion about the Celtic origins of the lays can or
should be made from these four omissions.
A further variation is in the precise terminology used |
! j
to describe the relationship between the lay and the verse
i i
i •
narrative Marie is writing. In every lay Marie identifies
her ultimate source as a lai, but she usually speaks also of
the story of the lay, 1*aventure d'un lai, which she has
heard and will now tell, e.g. Laustic, 11. 1-2; "une
13
aventure vus dirai,/ Dunt lx Bretun firent un lai." In
Fresne and Guigemar, Marie supplements the term aventure
with the term cunte, in Eliduc she specifies aventure,
cunte, and reisun, and in Milun she uses the term sermun to
describe the prose narrative connected with the lay. The
precise nature of the relationship between the narrative and
the lay is specified in several cases and implied in most
others; the story explains the circumstances surrounding
the composition of the lai or gives the true facts about the
incident on which the lai is based. For example, the open
ing lines of Chevrefoil;
Assez me plest e bien le voil
Del lai que hum nume Chevrefoil
Que la verite vus en cunt
[E] pur quei il fut fet e dunt.
(11. 1-4)
13 i
! Marie de France, Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert (Oxford,
11963). All further references to Marie's lays will be cited
Ifrom this edition by a line number in the text.
49
Nowhere does Marie make any statement which proves con-
j
elusively the nature of the lais she had heard. The con
cluding lines of Guiqemar make it plain that the lais were
musical, and were performed with a harp and rote, but simply
because Marie does not mention any singer singing words, we
cannot assume that there were none. The opening lines of
Equitan seem to say that she had heard a lay recited, "oi
cunter," but perhaps the usual aventure or cunte is under
stood; again in Chaitivel there is some suggestion or speak
ing in connection with the lai when (1. 232) it is anunciez.
but failing more precise knowledge of the performing customs
of the day and some assurance that Marie was using the terms
in their precise and proper meanings, we cannot definitely
conclude this.^
One other notion which Marie definitely does convey is
that there existed a considerable controversy about the
Breton Lays in her own day. She repeatedly assures us that
she is retelling the true version and that everything she
14
I am indebted to a note penciled in the margin of
William Nitze's copy of Marie1s Purqatoire (which is now in !
the library of the University of California at Los Angeles)
jfor the observation that Marie uses together here also words;
jimplying oral sources and words implying written sources.
i |
Isays is true. Now that in itself can easily be dismissed or
1
I ;
icategorized as a common topos; many medieval fiction writers;
I 15
claim that their works are true. But Marie seems to press
the issue somewhat beyond mere claims of historical author
ity. In the opening lines of Fresne she seems to indicate
•by the phrase "Sulunc le cunte que jo sai" that there were
several or at least one other version of the Fresne story
current. In Chaitivel and Eliduc she indicates that some
16
people still call these lays by an alternate title. This
seems to suggest that the performers of Breton Lays must
have worked competitively for court favor, each claiming (in
addition to artistic merit, one assumes) the value of
greater authority (i.e., authenticity), and that thus rival
versions appeared. There is also a possible ring of pride
15
Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin
Middle Ages (New York, 1953), pp. 80-91. In addition to the
claims made by pseudo-historical works such as Wace's
histories, the romances of Troy and Thebes, or the religious
works of someone like Hroswitha, we find also a tendency of :
romance writers to connect their works with historical
figures (e.g. Floire et Blancheflor1s assertion, 11. 8-10,
that Blancheflor was the mother of Berte, the grandmother of
Charlemagne) and of fabliaux to claim truth in order to make
their message seem more impressive.
16
It is curious to note that ironically Marie specifies
|the name Guildeluec ha Gualadun for her lay and Eliduc for
Ithe rival lay, yet all modern editions persist in calling
jher lay Eliduc.
in the particular handling and interpretation behind the
i ;
j
claim of "truth.»
Marie's role.in the Breton Lay as a genre cannot be
established with more certainty even if one wishes to accept
her own testimony as valid. in the prologue to her lays she
says (11. 23-42, 47-48):
Ki de vice se volt defendre
Estudier deit e entendre
E grevos ovre comencier;
Par [ceo] se puet plus esloignier
E de grant dolur delivrer.
Pur ceo comengai a penser
De aukune bone estoire faire
E de latin en romanz traire;
Mais ne me fust guaires de pris:
Itant s'en sunt altre entremis.
Des lais pensai k'oi aveie;
Ne dutai pas, bien le saveie,
Ke pur remambrance les firent
Des aventures k'il o’ irent
Cil ki primes les comencierent
E ki avant les enveierent.
plusurs en ai o’ i conter,
Ne[s] voil laisser ne oblifir;
Rimez en ai e fait ditie,
Soventes fiez en ai veillie. ...
M'entremis des lais assembler,
Par rime faire e reconter.l?
17
"He who wants to defend himself from vice should
|study and persist and begin difficult work; by this he can
|put himself farther off from error and deliver [himself]
ifrom great sorrow. Because of this, I began to think about ;
making some good story and translating from Latin into
jFrench, but it would hardly have been of value to me: so
jmany others have undertaken it for themselves. I thought
jabout the lays that I had heard; i doubted not, well I knew!
52 |
One should state first that this whole prologue is so
i i
i
i ;
jreplete with topoi that it might well be entirely a rhetoriH
leal exercise or invention. But even assuming that it con
tains some personal accuracy, critics do not agree on the
interpretation of the lines. The standard interpretation of
these lines is that, unless Marie is mistaken or consciously
lying, as Foulet suggested, no one before had rendered lays
into French verse, and that therefore Marie herself must
have begun writing them down, thus creating the genre as a
part of French fiction. This interpretation rests, however,
entirely on the assumption that Marie meant to imply by the
juxtaposition of lines 32 and 33 that while people were
writing romances they were not writing lays; she does not,
in fact, state in words that no one had previously written
such lays, but merely says that she knows the lays were
originally written as reminders (which stresses the moralis
tic overtones that Marie indeed inculcates in her lays) and
that they made them as reminders of the adventures that they
heard, they who first began them and who sent them forth.
Many of them I have heard told, and I do not want to neglect
jthem nor forget [them]. I have rhymed them and made a poem;!
joften times I have stayed up at night over them. . . . I
jundertook to gather some lays together, to do them into
irhyme and retell [them].
that she would not want any of these moral tales to go
i
untold. The passage seems to imply most of all that there
jwas something "unavailable" about the lays as it was (else
why would she bother to work on them?)— either that they
were not being retold with the proper didactic spirit, or
that they were not commonly heard or perhaps able to be
understood by most other people even though Marie herself
had heard (and presumably understood by one means or
another) many.
In this connection it is interesting to refer to the
Old Norse translation of this passage in the Strengleikar:
"Oc fyrir ]?ui ihugada ec at gaera nokora goda sogu oc or
volsku i bokmal snua. at ]?at mastte flassta hugga er flsestir
mego skilia. en liod ]?au er ec haevi hceyrt er gor varo i
sydra Brastlande af ]?aeim kynlegom atburdom er i ]?ui lande
gasrduzc, ]?a likade mer at snua oc odrum segia, ]?ui at ec
hafda mioc morg hceyrt ]pau er ec vil at visu fram telia. Oc
engom glceyma af ]?iu er ec ma minni minu a koma. ..."
("And for that reason I decided to compose some good tales,
and to translate from Welsh into Latin; then I might be able
to comfort most people, since most people can understand
[that, i.e. Latin]. But the lays which I have heard which
were made in Brittany concerning their wondrous adventures
iwhicfh occurred in that country, [these] it was pleasing to
jme to translate and to tell others, since I had heard very
many which I want to retell in verse. And [I want] to for- '
get none of those which I can bring to mind. . . .")
While the translator seems to be mistranslating the
only French original of this passage which is still extant
(and it seems likely that his source would not have been our
jextant manuscript since his text of several lays seems to
jhave been abridged), he clearly indicates that the originals
were in a Celtic language and then specifically cites French
This favors equally two opposed possibilities: that,
;on one hand, Marie merely gave new life to an extant genre
by stressing in her lays the moral meaning of each story
(which perhaps resulted in some improvement in quality of
her poetry or tightening of narration), or that, on the
other hand, Marie knew about some oral tradition which was
generally unknown, and in rendering it available to the
French-speaking populace she established a new fictional
19
form, unfortunately these two possibilities are left
equally alive by Denis piramus' reference to Marie as a per
petrator of untrue, secular lays, since she is mentioned
again among other writers of popular fiction; the fact, how
ever, that only Marie is mentioned as having written lays
(as distinct from "cuntes, chanceuns e fables" or a "roman"
such as Parthonope de Blois) tends to support the notion of
her as a seminal figure in the establishment of the lay as a
Brittany (sydra BraBtlande" regularly translates Marie's
"Bretagne la menur," cf. Guigemar, 1. 25) as the locale of
the origin of the lays. Of course, the Norse translator
might not have known.
19
Most critics seem to agree that, on the basis of the
mishandling of the few Celtic words Marie does use (e.g.,
iadding the French article "l,n to the Celtic "aUstic"), she
probably did not know any Celtic language well.
French narrative genre.
| The references to the Breton Lay in lays other than
i
Ithose by Marie provide no surer evidence. As Foulet, and
critics for and against his stand, have well demonstrated,
none of these other lays can be definitely shown to precede
Marie's lays, and all but a few of them contain no sugges
tions about the nature or origins of the Breton Lays, which
either adds or contradicts any significant point of Marie's
claims. Both the major exceptions to this point, Tvolet
and Lecheor, are usually impugned as late and false imita-
21
tions of Marie's lays. Tyolet claims that the adventures
of Arthur's knights were taken down by scribes at Arthur's
court in Latin, and then were translated (presumably later)
into French and then from these French versions the Bretons
made lays. This recalls Robert Biket's assertion in Cor that
the story of that lay was obtained from an abbot; it
also suggests that the Tyolet author was familiar with both
Latin and French Arthurian romances as well as with French
20
Denis piramus, La vie Seint Edmund le rei, ed.
Florence Ravenel (Philadelphia, 1906), pp. 58, 11. 35-56.
21
These two lays have been edited only by Gaston Paris
in his "Lais inedits," Romania, VIII (1879), 40-50, 64-66.
56
'speaking Bretons who were currently composing some Arthurian
lays. it is usually pointed put that Tyolet seems poorly
■put together and that the two halves are obviously two
adventures analogous to adventures in Chrestien's Perceval,
the Dutch Lancelot, Thomas' Tristan and a variety of other
long romances, and hence probably drawn from these long
romances. This assumption is false, however, since (1) many
of the supposed inconsistencies and plagiarisms might well
be the fault of the erratic scribe of MS. S, e.g. the sup
posed re-introduction of the hero at 11. 417-418, (2) the
adventures are not copied exactly, and in fact have some
distinctive characteristics not in the romances, e.g., the
transformation of the stag into the knight, and so it seems
likely that Tyolet and the romances share a common source
which might as well be a Breton Lay, and (3) the fact that
the Tyolet author or his Breton informant might have been
familiar with some of the longer romances does not neces
sarily detract from the validity of Tyolet as a genuine
I
Breton Lay, nor from any specific point of information
offered in the poem. Tyolet, then, should serve to remind
us that apparently Breton Lays were still popular and were
still being performed at the time that the Arthurian matter
|and the long romances were also becoming popular, and that
jfor a time many Breton performers might well have attempted
to gain popularity by adapting their songs and stories to
Arthurian settings, and, indeed, might even have borrowed
from the popular new romances.
The Lay dou Lecheor begins with a long introduction
which seems to imply that lays were composed and performed
22
publicly at something resembling the annual Breton pardons.
But since this lay is basically comic and bawdy, its
authenticity and reliability are usually questioned.
Again, I would object that its comic and sexual elements
should not necessarily place it either late or speciously
in the Breton Lay canon (Marie's lays are not devoid of
humor or sex, and surely the Bretons must have had some
totally comic songs), and in fact I would argue that the
description of the pardon should be seriously and carefully
considered since the main joke in Lecheor would be absolute
ly silly and pointless if the audience did not know and
22
A full description and discussion of the pardon can
be found, among other places, in Lewis Spence's Legends and
Romances of Brittany (London, 1917), pp. 378-380. Four
times a year, on certain saint's days, all the Breton people
travel to one of the four Breton capital cities for a huge j
I fair at which there are traditionally song and dance con
tests. Lecheor suggests that the lays were prepared for
jexhibition at just such a fair.
| 58 i
i i
accept the basic premise of the pardon situation on which
I
!
it depends.
Whether we accept or reject the Lecheor and Tyolet
testimonies, however, we are left with four premises which
Cannot be rejected on the basis of any of the evidence
presented so far: (1) that some musical compositions called
lais were widely popular among mid- and late twelfth-century
French-speaking audiences, (2) that these lais were often
associated with Celtic performers and origins, (3) that
while the lays seem to have been primarily musical, they
are almost always associated with some narrative, incident,
or famous person through mention in the title of the lai or
some further narrative means (words spoken or sung), and
(4) that at some time in the mid- or late twelfth century
these stories connected with the lais began to be retold in
French verse, and the Anglo-Norman poet Marie de France was
seminal in making these French verse-tales popular and
respectable literary products.
We have yet two major types of evidence to consider
before making any final conclusions about the limits of the
iBreton Lay as a genre: (1) the scope of material treated in
the known Breton Lays, and (2) the lyric lais of the late
I twelfth and thirteenth century.
5 9 1
In discussing the scope of material, we must again
divide the discussion into categories— Marie's lays, other
!
lays extant, and other lays attested to but now lost.
Among Marie's lays there exists a considerable variety
23
of scope and subject matters. s. Foster Damon divides her
lays into three categories— anecdotes, supernatural lays and
realistic lays— but this grouping does not exploit the im
portant variety of styles and materials. One of the anec
dotes is a self-sufficient story of frustrated love; the
other is a single incident dependent on the larger complex
of the Tristan legend, and it celebrates an (at least tempo
rarily) successful love. Two of the supernatural lays give
at least a token bow to genealogies of famous Breton and
Norman noble families, and Bisclavret contains the sugges
tion that the explanation of a family trait may have moti
vated this story. One of the realistic lays is clearly
connected with explaining a famous tourist site, and the
insistence upon naming "La Freisne" and "La Codre" in
Fresne might contain undertones of either a site or a family
name. The brief and anti-courtly Equitan might well be a
"Marie de France, Psychologist of Courtly Love,"
IPMLA. XLIV (1929), 968-996.
Ifabliau, while the nearly 1200-line Eliduc sustains all of
the courtly ideals. Chaitivel, which is hardly longer than
the anecdotesj barely has a plot in the traditional sense,
but falls rather in a group with "questions of love" and
other semi-lyricj semi-didactic forms.
These same variations also occur in the other commonly
accepted lays preserved in French and in the Norse transla-
24
tion of the Strenqleikar. some of the variations are
extended slightly: Strandar liod extends the associations
with famous families and sites into verifiable (and non-
Celtic) history; Haveloc and the fragmentary Tveggia
elskannde (Two Lovers, but not Marie's version) seem to
extend the scenes of action beyond purely Celtic terri
tories; Lecheor plays on more bawdy aspects of the fabliaux
than Equitan, etc.
Furthermore, if we consider for a moment the lays not
24 .
Every variation occurs except, perhaps, another lay
like chevrefoil which depends upon a larger, romance con
text; but we can notice among the "other" lays more stories
connected with Arthurian or other romance matters and we
could say, for example, on the basis of a comparison of
Lai du Cor and the so-called Livre de Caradoc that Biket was
telling only one incident in a greater context. One also
wonders how many of the so-called "short romances" like the ;
two Folie Tristans might not have Breton Lay sources.
commonly accepted as genuine, we have the possible charac-
" ^ 2
jteristics stretched again, only slightly but significantly.
Conseil and Amors extend the semi-lyric and didactic nature
of Chaitivel and Trot; Narcisse and Aristote extend the
widening theatre of action to include the classical past
(in the first case a genuine classic, in the second case a
specious or pseudo-classic).
The question should arise immediately, of course,
whether we are justified in considering lays like Strandar
liod, Conseil. or Narcisse, which are usually excluded from
the Breton Lay canon because they are too much unlike
Marie's lays in some important way. But an undeniable link
between these questionable lays and Marie 1s unquestionable
lays is provided by two sources— references to lays now
lost, and the Middle English lays. There exist at least a
One work which deserves special mention is the Lay du
Vai . palefroi by Huon Leroi which is invariably placed among
the fabliaux despite the fact that it qualifies for the most
exacting Breton Lay standards except that the author sets
the action in Champagne. Huon says he is writing under com
mission and the commission may well have included some
locale; also he seems to have the story second-hand and not
to have understood it very well: clearly the knight with
jhis castle over the water is a Fairy King and, like Mider
jin the Tochmarc Etaine, he finally manages, by loaning his
ihorse, to win his mortal bride.
62
(
dozen Middle English short poems of the thirteenth and four-
i
jteenth centuries which either claim to be Breton Lays (Sir
brfeo. Emare. Earl of Toulouse, Chaucer's "Franklin's
Tale"), are translated from known Breton Lays (Freine, the
two Launfal poems, Haveloc), are analogous to known Breton
Lays (sir Gowther. Sir corneus) or fall into the style and
scope easily associated with these other Middle English and
the standard selection of French Breton Lays (Sir Degare,
26
and Sir Cleges). Some of these appear to be fairly late
and greatly reworked from their French originals, but among
the earliest and most respectable of these English lays is
Sir Qrfeo which would seem to be translated from a French
original that was probably at least related to the Lay of
Qrfeo mentioned three times in late twelfth- and thirteenth-
27
century French literature. While this lay is distinctly
classical in origins, it is also distinctly Celtic in
handling, and thus it provides a link between the Breton
26
The closing lines of Sir Degare and Sir Cleges are
missing in the oldest and best manuscripts, which may have
had some Breton Lay formula. The text of eight of these
lays is reprinted in Thomas C. Rumble's The Breton Lays in ;
Middle English (Detroit, 1965).
27
A. J. Bliss's excellent introduction to Sir Qrfeo
|(Oxford, 1954) contains the text of these allusions.
Lays of Marie and lays of Classical or other non-Celtic
material which must have been assimilated by the Celtic per
Iformers into their repertories at a fairly early time and
|thus became part of the "Breton" stock of tales. Further
support for the possibility of the Classical-Breton Lay may
be derived from the numerous early references to classical
titles other than Qrfeo in juxtaposition with known Breton
Lays, e.g. Eilhart von Oberge1s grouping of the Lav of
Graelent with the Lay of Thisbe and the Lay of Babylon. or
28
his naming a Lay of Dido in his Tristant.
Another piece of evidence frequently neglected is the
grouping of the lays in their manuscripts. Clearly MS. S
and MS. N were designed as collections of Breton Lays, and
thus it behooves us to consider as a piece of evidence that
someone at least thought that Aristote, Amors. Cort Mantel,
Strandar Liod, etc. were Breton Lays fit to share company
with Marie's.
In this respect it is well to consider a list of
ititles dating from the thirteenth century which is now in
the Shrewsbury school Library, and was published in 1950
28
Eilhart von Oberge, Tristant, ed. F. Lichtenstein
I (Halle, 1877), 11. 3584-85.
j 64
i 29
by Georgine Brereton. The list contains sixty-seven
jtitles of which seventeen are clearly standard Breton Lays
(including ten of Marie's), five more are clearly extant
musical lais, and three others contain the word lay in their
titles. Eight others correspond to titles of Breton Lays
which are alluded to as Breton Lays in twelfth and thir
teenth century texts; two correspond to Middle English poems
not otherwise known as Breton Lays but which could easily
30
qualify to standard Breton Lay characteristics. Thus,
over half of the works listed correspond to narrative or
lyric lays, and among the other thirty-two, eleven titles
appear to be the names of places and heroes well-known to
legend and romance, and the other twenty-one are either
undecipherable or ambiguous; there is nothing to suggest
29
"A Thirteenth-Century List of French Lays and Other
Narrative poems," Modern Language Review, XLV (1950), 40-45.
30
I take no. 37 to represent some version of the Sir
Cleges story rather than Chrestien's long romance Cliges.
No. 44 would seem to be about the Laududez whose lay is
mentioned by Chrestien in 1. 2155 of Le Chevelier au Lion,
ed. M. Roques (Paris, 1965), p. 66. Since all of the other
recognizable titles with "lay" included as part of them
represent lyric lais, no. 21 may well represent either a
known lai such as "Lai des Amants" or the lyric predecessor
;of MS. S's Lay D'Amours; in any case, Lav D'Amours is
closest to a pure lyric of any of the narrative lays.
65 |
ithat all of the titles might not be titles of Breton Lays*
!
j J
jespecially since the titles are bracketed into groups of
three and four, and most groups contain at least one of the
known lays. It seems likely, then, to suppose that this
might be a list of the lays in a collection like MS. S, or a
list of the lays in a collection, library, etc. if so, two
things are clearly shown— that lyric and narrative lays
were considered in somewhat the same category (although the
lyric lays would seem to be called "lay" in their titles
while no generic term is used in the titles of the narrative
works), and that lays concerning sites, saints, founders,
and historical kings were much more popular in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries than the two or three survivors
would suggest.^
In further support of the likelihood of the conclusions
drawn from the assumption that the Shrewsbury School list is
in fact a list of lays, one might accept the observation
jthat there is a very high degree of correlation between the j
! 31
A final word of caution should be provided by the
case of A. Monteverdi who, in "II 'Lai de Noton,1" Archivum
Romanicum, XI (1927), 589-591, seemed to "prove" that the
|reference to a Lay of Noton in the Roman de Renart must be
ia scribal error, since there was no other reference to
I"Noton" in medieval literature. Since then, however, cf.
|no. 36 of the Shrewsbury school's list.
I 66 '
I |
i i
■known Breton Lays and known Breton Lay titles, and the later
i i
medieval English popular poetry represented by such things
i 1
i
32
las the Percy folio and the Child Ballads. Some of the
items included in these collections, like Sir Lambewell. may
be just late corrupt versions of written Breton Lays, but in
many other cases one is tempted to see some relationship
between the musical source of the Breton Lay and its ballad
analogue. The tie between "Fair Annie" and Fresne. between
"King Orfeo" and Sir Qrfeo. etc. is more specific than mere
shared folk-motifs or names, but it seems too divergent to
be a mere corruption of a translation. If in fact we can
suppose some correlation between "The Boy and the Mantle"
and Cort Mantel, between "Sir Collin" and Espine, between
"The Ballad of William the Conqueror's Landing at Dover
Beach" and Strandar liod, and indeed "The Ballad of Queen
Dido" and the Lav of Dido which Eilhart refers to, then it
becomes pertinent to note that, like the Shrewsbury School !
I list, the Percy Folio contains a good number of poems of a |
historical and genealogical nature ("King Humber,"
‘ 32 *
Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, ed. John Hales and ;
|Frederick Furnivall (London, 1867); Francis Child, ed. The j
English and Scottish Popular Ballads (New York, 1956),
5 vols.
"The Drowning of Henery I" etc.) as well as poems on classi-
33
|cal and romance themes. Unfortunately, no conclusive
Iproof can be offered without further decipherment of the
Shrewsbury list and preferably further ballad evidence being
discovered.
There is, however, one more criterion on which to judge
the connection between Breton Lays and popular-ballad
poetry. One is immediately struck by a similarity between
the general stylistic characteristics of the Breton Lays and
the ballads. While it is not easy to make generalizations
which will hold for all the extant lays, the following
observations do seem to be valid: (1) the lays deal with
at least nominally upper class characters, even when these
characters are bawdy, villainous, etc.; (2) the lays usually
seem to be as concerned with dialogue and motivations as
with actions, jumping from scene to scene with only the
slightest connectives; (3) often the lays employ a kind of
symbolism centering on significant or emblematic objects, of
some supernatural expressions of natural motivation and
psychological reaction; (4) the lays share a considerable
I 33
| Percy's Folio. Ill, 152, "William the Conqueror";
p. 156, "Henery I"; p. 435, "King Humber"; p. 499, "Queen
Dido."
68 ]
number of incidents, phrases, and names; sometimes the lays i
i ;
involved seem hardly related, but sometimes they are so
j
obviously interrelated that one cannot clearly say which one|
particular lay, if any, was borrowing from another; and (5)
most of the lays are framed by an introduction and a conclu
sion which usually state the title of the lay and insist
that the story is true and worthwhile.
None of these characteristics is incompatible with the
ballad style as we know it.34 The oldest ballads tend to
identify most of the heroes and heroines as knights and
ladies (e.g., even the two brothers of Child 49 who go to
school together and wrestle are called "Sir John," and "Sir
Willie"); the ballads tend to be written in terms of scenes
with dialogue and at least implied motivations and morality,
and the action often centers on or gains climax from a
significant (or symbolic) object or magic gesture; the
ballads, when their various versions are compared, show a
regular tendency to disperse into plot variants with a
i |
j i
'variety of name substitutions, e.g., "Lord Randall,"
i :
Child 12, shares with "The Cruel Brother," Child 11, and
34
| For confirmation of these ballad characteristics, see
|G. H. Gerould, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1932),
ip. 11; and M. Hodgart, The Ballads (New York, 1950).
I
VEdward," Child 13, the family murder and the questioning,
j
!"What will you leave ... 7" Also it has degenerated into
a simplified, child's version— "My Little Wee Cooing Dove,"
with a stepmother murdering a child— and a parody version
known in America as "Oh, where have you been, Billy Boy,
35
Billy Boy?" Bronson's variants give over a dozen differ
ent names for the hero, ranging from the all-purpose, stan
dard names like William and Henry to definite local corrup
tions such as an Oklahoman's "Durango"; while most of the
older ballads do not have a formula introduction or ending,
this may either have dropped off as the ballad became very
well-known, or may have been provided by a spoken comment of
the performer.36
The fact, then, that the ballads share their most
important stylistic characteristics with the Breton Lays
confirms the oral origins of the latter and strengthens
35
Bertrand H. Bronson, The Traditional Tunes of the
Child Ballads (Princeton, 1959), pp. 191-236.
36
The ballads which we have in versions closer to their
original sources (e.g., several Robin Hood ballads, chevy
Ichace, etc.) do contain this formula in the oldest copies,
jbut later versions usually drop it. Also, almost all medi
eval literary works of a strong oral tradition (i.e.,
jfabliaux, the tales of the Mabinogion, the Old Irish tales, j
jetc.) usually exhibit formula introductions and/or
| conclusions.
70 !
37
our suspicions about a possible rapport between the two.
{
In conclusion, then, about the scope of materials to
be found in extant Breton Lays, we must affirm that the size
of a Breton Lay may vary from the slightest anecdote (not
even self-sufficient) to a most complicated romance extend
ing to a thousand lines, or slightly more, of tetrameterj
the plot may vary from a complicated plot hinging on action
and adventure to a very simple plot hinging on some question
or didactic discussion; the action need not necessarily con
cern itself with Celtic materials or sites (although this is
certainly most common) but may deal with non-Celtic histori
cal materials, classical mythology, or adventures which lead
away from northern Europe toward Rome, or even the romantic
Orient.
The question of the lyric lais of the late twelfth and
thirteenth centuries provides a more ambiguous evidence, but
all of it seems to point toward the conclusions above. The
editors of the standard edition of these lais, Alfred
37
The ballads would also comply with the predominantly
lEnglish settings, etc. which form other Breton Lay char-
acteristics. Except for these national materials, the
I stylistic notes hold true for the Scandinavian and other
ballads.
Jeanroy and Pierre Aubry, agree that the lais seem to have
originated or first become popular in the region of Brittany
j
around 1175. They further suppose that the music of the
llais may well be Celtic in origin and that the relationship
between the lyric lais and the narrative lays is most likely
one in which the lais were played and sung with essentially
non-narrative words, and stories (which Jeanroy calls "la
'raison romance'") were told with them to explain the con
text and meaning of these words, which were, perhaps, still
38
sung in some Celtic dialect.
Other scholars have tended to reaffirm Jeanroy's con
clusions. While the Celtic origins of the music cannot be
39
proved, experts consistently affirm Jeanroy's conclusions.
The idea of the combination of explanatory story and lyric
t 40
song has been supported, among others, by Bedier, who
cited Aucassin and Nicolette as a possible surviving example
of a Breton Lay performance, and also this description of a
38
Alfred Jeanroy, Pierre Aubry, and Louis Brandin,
Lais et descorts francais (Paris, 1901), pp. xiv-xv.
39
Cf. Chapter II, n. 5 above.
i
40
I Revue des deux Mondes. CVII (1891), 850.
[jongleur performing in the romance Claris and Laris:
|
La escoutoient bonement
| .1. conteor, qui lor contoit
Une changon et si notoit
Ses refrez en une viele ^
Qui asses iert et bone et bele.
Maurice Valency, speaking of the Provengal razo (a term
linguistically related to Marie's "reisun" in Eliduc, 1. 2)
concludes that "it seems entirely likely that the jongleurs
interspersed their musical numbers with prose recitations of
this sort in such a way as to provide an integrated program
42
of entertainment." Rachel Bromwich reaffirms previous
observations that the prose-verse and song-story combina
tions were popular in the Middle Ages (e.g. "Sons of Usnach,"
Voyage of Bran. "Wooing of Etain," etc.) and that it is
still popular today among the Celtic people of Wales,
43
Ireland and Brittany.
41 . .
Li Romans de Claris et Laris, ed. Johann Alton
(Tubingen, 1884), p. 269, 11. 9940-44.
42 i
In Praise of Love (New York, 1958), pp. 90-91. I
[would add that Dante’s La Vita Nuova, which is clearly
iwritten in an attempt to create moral and Christian facets
for the Troubador tradition, seems conclusive proof that at
least by Dante's time the Troubador songs were disseminated
iin the form of cogent biography-stories interspersed with
songs.
43
"A Note on the Breton Lays," Medium Aevum, XXVI
(1957), 36-38.
| I would add to this evidence the fact that Aucassin
i
land Nicolette appears beside the Lav of Graelentmor in its
manuscript, and Graelentmor also has a staff of music with
it, although there are no notes on it. Also, a similar
staff without notation appears with each of the lyrics of
the Lav of Aristote in MS. S, another indication that song
and story were closely acceptable with Breton Lays for the
twelfth and thirteenth century audience.
There is one final piece of evidence as to the nature
of the Breton Lay: a set of five Portuguese songs of the
thirteenth century which are labeled in their manuscript
44
Lais de Bretanha. Three of them are translations of lyric
lais found in the thirteenth-century French prose romance of
Tristan. The other two have been identified by Carolina de
Vasconcellos as representing lyric lais mentioned in the
prose Merlin and the prose Lancelot, but not represented by
any lyric text in any of the French copies, vasconcellos
considers these two to be translations also, of lost French
|originals, and her conclusions are supported by William
44
I Carolina M. de vasconcellos has edited the texts
|of these in her article "Lais de Bretanha," Revista
iLusitana. VI (1900), 1-43. The UCLA library has a discrete
|copy.
Entwistle. This suggests that there may once have been
i
many more lyric lais embedded in the prose romances and that
•‘ T •— ■ • •
those which do appear may be vestigial remnants of Breton
Lais, many more of which once formed the kernel around which
each incident grew.
Jean Maillard has demonstrated the difficulty in arriv
ing at any positive conclusion; some of the lais are clearly
thirteenth-century compositions with exacting meter and
46
rhyme schemes that favor French as the original language.
But whether or not all of these particular lais can be
authenticated fails to change the importance of their very
appearance. They serve as another indication that people of
that time (from Chrestien through the thirteenth-century
prose romance writers) associated lyric songs with romance
stories. It does not seem likely that all of these songs
were composed by the romance writers who refer to them,
rather they must have been songs popular at that time which
45
The Arthurian Legend m the Literature of the Spanish
Peninsula (London, 1925), pp. 64-75. Entwistle gives trans--:
lations of some of the songs and some of vasconcellos1 con
clusions.
46
"Coutumes musicales au moyen age, d'apres le Tristan
en prose," Cahiers de civilisation medievale (Poitiers), ii
(1959), 341-353.
r 751
i
I
jwere connected to characters and situations that were per-
jtinent to the romances. It has always been observed that
i ;
almost all the known Breton Lays concern incidents and
situations that also occur in one or more of the long
romances, and that Breton Lay heroes and incidents are often
mentioned as background information or appear in minor
capacities. This should serve to alert us to the probabil
ity that the Breton Lays and the separate incidents in the
longer romances share common oral sources, and to strengthen
in our minds the notion that much of the origins and diffu
sions of Arthurian materials took place on the level of
separate incidents and oral tradition, rather than on the
level of composite, literary ur-Tristans.
While we have produced no single irrefutable piece of
evidence as to the nature of the Breton Lay, we have surely
collected a considerable number of items which, while some- ;
what ambiguous, still agree on the essential points and
circumscribe together a practical boundary within which the I
jreal, original Breton Lay must have set.
Surely some Celtic songs became popular among French
speakers during the late twelfth century. These songs were ;
either lyrical in nature and were accompanied by a narration
! :
i j
jof the story-context, or somewhat narrative in nature (like i
the English Child ballads), or perhaps both, since the term
I
|"lay" like the term "song" could include both a lament and a
ballad. The French (under the stimulus of Marie de France)
iretold many of the stories connected with these Celtic
songs and called their stories Breton Lays. The variety of
length, complication, and subject matter attests a varied
repertory of Celtic songs, and probably a certain degree of
freedom in handling the material.
While these conclusions may seem vague and too simple
to be useful, they are of the utmost importance to the lit
erary criticism of the Breton Lays (and the longer romances
as well, by implication), and are almost always overlooked.
When Bennkt Wennberg defines a lay as "a courtly short story
47
in verse" he is failing to consider an important aspect of
the lay— that it has its strongest roots in an oral tradi
tion rather than in a literary tradition.
In their book The Forms of Fiction, John Gardner and
iLennis Dunlap make a significant distinction between the
48
Tale and the Short story. The Tale (a fictional form with
47
"Marie de France and the Anonymous Lais" (unpublished
dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1956), p. 5.
I • • :
■ 48
New York, 1962, pp. 28-37.
77
strong roots in oral tradition, the shorter form of a
|
Romance) takes place in a world governed by "psychological
i ;
|or poetic truth" rather than physical reality, and may well ;
pleal with magic and other supernatural phenomena; the char
acters and settings tend to be vague in general respects but
highly specific and pictorial in the scenes when the author
must convince one of the truth of his conclusions. The
characters are most often stereotyped and the structure
rather loose, with major scenes of intensity and very flat,
discursive passages between. The Short Story (a written
genre, the short equivalent of a novel or epic) deals with
rounded characters in recognizable physical reality, and is
usually more carefully constructed to build gradually and
steadily to the climactic point, which often does not
resolve the plot, but instead provides the peak of our
understanding of the characters and situations.
Clearly, by this distinction, the Breton Lays are
essentially tales in verse, and cannot be judged on the
standards we usually apply to short stories. Many of the
characteristics of the Breton Lays are general characteris
tics of oral fiction, and should be accepted as such; the
iuse of similar names and folk motifs is removed from the
jrealm of borrowings and plagiarism, and the similarities in
phrasing between certain Lays and certain Romances become of
minimal importance, since they probably represent standard
oral formulas rather than literary borrowings. Characters
must be expected to be standard, and the incidents they
participate in belong to them because their author says they
do; so it behooves us to reconcile the elements in each lay
for ourselves, rather than search for analogues in Romances
from which we can say they are borrowed, and therefore are
49
inferior to. The relationship between other oral-
centered literature and the Breton Lays is one of interde
pendence and they cannot be easily separated: many a Breton
Lay story must have found its way into the repertory of a
fabliau teller or into a long romance, so when we recognize
a correlation between a known Breton Lay and an incident in
Thus it is well to note that the few textual similar-:
ities often noticed between various Breton Lays and some of
the longer Romances are far less significant than the fact
that one usually cannot find a parallel, even in similar
incidents, between a Romance and a Breton Lay because of
stylistic differences, but you can find a huge number of
textual similarities between the Breton Lays and other oral
jliterature like the fabliaux in which many a bourgeois is
jcalled "preuz et cortois," etc. Thus the basic reasoning
behind Stefan Hofer's elaborate attempts to show that all
the incidents in Guinqamor and Desire and other lays are
merely copied from analogous incidents in long romances
iseems to me to be basically fallacious, and consequently thei
"proofs," inadequate as they are, are worthless.
79
!
ja Romance we must accept the fact that they probably derived
jfrom a common oral source, not from each other, and then
( !
'evaluate each on its particular treatment of the motif; and j
when we recognize a tale among the fabliaux that either
claims to be a lay (e.g., Vair Palefroi) or has most of the
other characteristics of a lay (e.g., Du Chevalier qui
recovra l'amor de sa Dame, or Du Chevalier ki fist les cuns
parler), we should be willing to accept the possibility that
it is, or at least closely derives from, a Breton Lay, and
then evaluate it anyway on its particular treatment of the
motif. This would follow also for works of an indefinite,
semi-lyric, or didactic style which claim to be Breton Laysj
we must accept the possibility that they represent the
didactic commentary on a Celtic song of a lyric nature, or
even a fairly close rendering of a didactic Celtic song, and
evaluate them on that basis.
The oral tradition behind the Breton Lay obviously does
not value originality of basic incident, characterization
(in the sense of delineation of personal peculiarities), or
phrasing, but rather values an interpretation of standard
land basic material, in their formula introductions, part of
;the "Truth" that the authors are claiming for their
jparticular versions is the truth of the right interpreta-
I :
ition. Thus, when we analyze a group of related lays, such
las the five lays of the Guingamor group, we must assume that
the authors made what changes and variations they made for
the definite purpose of changing the meaning of the story as
they understood it.
CHAPTER III
A PLOT ANALYSIS
The five lays of "the Guingamor group" are related by
similarities in names and plots. Both "Guingamor" and
"Guigemar" are derived from the Old Breton name "Winhomarch"
and the names "Graelensmor" and "Lanval" are derived from
equally old Breton names.1 Most critics have noted that in
each lay the hero-knight is led into strange, amorous adven
tures while disporting himself in the forest; he forms a
secret liaison with a supernaturally beautiful woman and,
though they are separated when their relationship is
revealed, the lovers are finally reunited. Despite a gener
al agreement on these similarities, only one critic, Edith
Ricker, has ever made a careful comparison of all five lays
noting both their common elements and their points of
1Heinrich Zimmer, "Beitrage zur Namenforschung in den
altfranzosischen Arthurepen," Zeitschrift fur franzosischen
Sprache und Literatur, XIII (1891), 1-7.
81
Icontrast. Unfortunately, Rickert's one-page study in the
I
'notes to a translation does not attempt to draw more than a
i - -
few superficial conclusions or to entail any stylistic
interpretations of the five works.
In attempting a comparison of the five plots, I will
first outline each lay separately, dividing it into episodes
and scenes, and then analyze the statistics of these epi
sodes. By the term "episode" I mean a larger segment of the
narrative which has some unity of purpose leading to an
emotional climax, and by the term "scene" I mean a smaller
segment of the narrative separated from surrounding passages
by a break in time, place, or action, and usually distin
guished by a strong unity of location. Both of these divi
sions, as well as the titles I have given them for easy
reference, are somewhat artificial, often introducing a
break within a sentence or couplet which the poet has
clearly contrived for the purpose of smooth transition; but
the terms are nonetheless quite useful for exposing the
mechanics of composition and the differences in emphasis
which the several authors of these lays have used.
i 1
2
Mane de France: Seven of Her Lays (London, 1901) ,
Ipp. 168-169.
Guingamor
i
j
Formula (11. 1-4, 4 lines)
The following lay is true, not someone's invention. It
is called Guingamor.
prologue (11. 5-22, 18 lines)
The wealthy and powerful king of Bretaingne, since he
could not have a child, adopted his noble and handsome
nephew Guingamor to be his heir. Everyone loved Guingamor.
Episode I, The Spurned Queen
(11. 23-134. 112 lines)
Scene One (11. 23-55, 33 lines).— One day the king went
hunting, but Guingamor stayed home because he had been bled
and felt weak. To amuse himself, Guingamor went to the
castle to play tables with the seneschal. While they are
playing, the beautiful queen passes on her way to chapel; a j
ray of sunlight happened to be illuminating Guingamor's face
so that it catches her attention. He is so handsome that
i
she falls in love with him immediately.
i
Scene Two (11. 56-115, 60 lines).— The queen sends a
waiting-maid to bring Guingamor to her chambers. When he
jarrives, she asks him to sit beside her, but he does not
jperceive her designs. She tells him that since he is the
most desirable man in the country, his lover must love him
very much. When he says he has no lover, the queen asks him
to love her. He answers cautiously that he does love her as
he should love his king's wife. She says she did not mean
that kind of love, but rather sexual love, and kisses him.
He blushes and turns to leave, but she seizes his mantel in
order to hold him back. The clasp breaks and she is left
holding the mantel.
Scene Three (11. 116-134, 19 lines).— Guingamor returns
to his game of tables but is so distracted that he does not
even notice his missing mantel. The queen, afraid that he
might accuse her to the king, sends the mantel back to him
via the waiting-maid. He does not even notice when she puts
it around his shoulders while he is playing.
Episode II— The Challenge
(11. 135-246. 112 lines)
Scene One (11. 135-185, 51 lines).— That evening while
the hunters were boasting about their day's catch, the queen
says, knowing Guingamor will understand what she really
means, that everyone boasts of his prowess, but no one dares
hunt the White Boar. indeed Guingamor understands. The
king says she ought to know better than to speak of the
White Boar when she knows he has lost so many of his best
knights hunting it. Silently, everyone goes home.
Scene Two (11. 186-246, 61 lines).— The king goes to
his bedroom, and Guingamor follows him there. Guingamor
kneels before him and begs to be granted a favor. The king
grants him a favor, which only then does he reveal is per
mission to go hunting the Boar. The king, unhappy, attempts
to persuade Guingamor not to go, but Guingamor is adamant.
When the queen adds her entreaties to his, the king is
forced to relent.
Episode III— The Hunt
(11. 247-421, 175 lines)
Scene One (11. 247-268, 22 lines).— Guingamor is so
excited he cannot sleep all night. At the crack of dawn, he
begins preparations for the hunt. The king makes him take
along his best hunting dogs and horse. Everyone— courtiers,
farmers, and townsmen— accompanies Guingamor as far as the
edge of the forest, the women lamenting loudly.
Scene Two (11. 269-362, 94 lines).— The dogs are set
loose and quickly pick up the scent of the Boar. Guingamor
alone follows them into the forest; as soon as they can no
86 j
j
ilonger hear the sound of his horn, the others go home. The j
Boar gradually tires out most of the dogs, so Guingamor letsi
loose the king's chief bloodhound. Guingamor follows the
sound of the hound's cries for a while, but then he loses
it. After wandering around for a short time listening, he
again hears the hound baying and sets off in the direction
from which the sound comes. He sights the Boar and pursues
it, blowing his horn. Just as he is about to overtake it,
he looks up.
Scene Three (11. 363-396, 34 lines).— Before him stands
3
a castle of green marble with a silver tower. The ivory
doors are not locked, so he enters, but finds no one at all
; inside. The interior of the castle is made of pure gold
3 .
On one hand, I would insist that the green marble has
a symbolic meaning; as in the description of Prunhilt's
throne room in Book II of the Niebelungen1ied, the associa
tion of natural color green with the stone marble (which is
not naturally very green) suggests both something rich,
strange and slightly unnatural, and also a blending of the
vital and living with the rigid and morbid. On the other
hand, I would like to mention that when, in the summer of
1966, I visited in Brittany the ruins of a castle at Elven
which had lain wasted for some 300 years, the walls were so
completely coated with moss that they actually seemed to be
made of some green stone; could the author of our lay have
in mind the ruins of a castle such as he evokes in 11. 543-
544 and 601-602?
i ~........” '.... ~ . ~. !
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|inset with precious gems. Not wanting to lose track of the j-
Boar, he returns to the hunt.
Scene Four (11. 397-421, 25 lines).— At first he cannot
hear the hound, and angrily castigates himself for dallying
in the castle when he ought to have been hunting. Then he
hears the baying again, and sets off after it.. The Boar
leads him to the heath.
Episode IV— The Fairy Mistress
(11. 422-570, 149 lines)
Scene One (11. 422-502. 81 lines).— There he finds a
pool lined with gold and silver gravel, in which is bathing
a beautiful lady assisted by two waiting-maids. Guingamor
is excited by her beauty, and, wishing to make her remain
there until after he has captured the Boar, he seizes her
clothes and hides them in an oak tree. But she notices and
calls out angrily, "Leave my clothes alone; would you want
it told that you had done anything as discourteous as steal
a girl's clothes? Why don't you stay a while; you don’t
seem to be catching anything anyway." He gives her her
clothes, but declines the offer to stay. She warns him that
he will never catch the Boar without her help, and if he
will stay with her three days, promises to give him the Boar
I 8 8 |
j i
as a reward. He agrees. The lady dresses and the waiting- I
imaid brings a palfrey and a mule for them to ride on.
Guingamor lifts her into the saddle and they ride off.
Guingamor asks her sweetly if she would consent to be his
lover. She consents and they kiss.
Scene Two (11. 503-532, 30 lines).— The waiting-maid
rides on ahead and prepares the castle for a feast, she
makes the three hundred richly attired knights of the castle
go out to greet their mistress. Among the throng of cour
tiers, Guingamor recognizes the ten knights who were lost
from his uncle's court. Everyone greets him affectionately,
and he is well entertained by a sumptuous banquet accompa
nied by the songs of pageboys and girls. Guingamor intends
to stay only three days, but when he requests the Boar and
his bloodhound so that he may return home, his lover answers
that in his country three hundred years have passed and all
that he knew is gone. He does not believe her, and demands
his hound again. She says that she will give him his hound
and the Boar, but warns him that he must not eat anything
while in his old country.
Episode V— The Return
(11. 571-674, 104 lines)
Scene One (11. 571-581, 11 lines).— His lover has the
hound and the head of the Boar brought, and accompanies
Guingamor as far as the river. Commending him to God, she
leaves him.
Scene Two (11. 582-632, 51 lines).— Guingamor finds the
forest curiously overgrown and hardly recognizes his way.
Then he hears a woodsman chopping and seeks him out. He
asks the charcoal-man where his uncle the king is staying,
and the man answers that he does not know what Guingamor is
talking about, that this king has been dead some three hun
dred years. Guingamor tells the man who he is and gives the
man the Boar's head to keep while he goes to look for some
other people. The woodsman thanks him.
Scene Three (11. 633-667, 35 lines).— Guingamor has now
been out riding all day, and he is very hungry. He sees a
wild apple tree, picks three apples, and takes a bite of
one. The minute he swallows a bite, he becomes very old and
weak. He falls off his horse and does not have the strength
to raise himself. The woodsman is about to go help him when
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two girls appear. Gently scolding him, they pick up
Guingamor and carry him back across the river in a boat.
Scene Four (11. 668-674, 7 lines).— The woodsman takes
the Boar's head home and presents it to the king, telling
him the miraculous story of how he got it. The king dis
plays the head at many feasts.
Formula (11. 675-679, 5 lines)
In order to record the event, the king had a lay made
about it. The lay is still called Guingamor by the Bretons.
Graelensmor
Formula (11. 1-4, 4 lines)
I will tell the story of Graelent as I heard it. It is
good to hear the lay and remember the music.
Prologue (11. 5-18, 14 lines)
Graelens was so well born and so magnificent, he was
called Graelensmor. The king of Bretaingne was waging war
against his neighbors, so he was retaining many knights.
The king honored Graelent much because he exerted himself so
much on behalf of the king.
j 9 1
Episode i— The Spurned Queen
(11. 19-152, 134 lines)
Scene One (11. 19-39, 21 lines).— The queen had heard
so much praise of Graelent that she fell in love with him.
She calls her chamberlain and asks him, if Graelens is
really as good as they say, to fetch Graelent to her to
become her lover. The chamberlain comments that that is
quite an honor, since the queen is so lovely that even a
monk in Troy would have to notice her, and love her.
Scene Two (11. 40-54, 15 lines).— The chamberlain goes
to Graelent*s lodgings and invites him to the queen's cham
bers. Graelens prepares himself, and rides to the castle.
Scene Three (11. 55-128, 74 lines).— The queen greets
Graelent very warmly and has him sit beside her. The queen
speaks frankly, but Graelent speaks with a courtly formali
ty. The queen wonders why he does not make some formal
proposition to her, and finally asks him directly if he
already has another lover. He answers with considerable
courtly formality that he does not wish to have a lover
because the proper kind of love is too difficult to obtain
and maintain. Citing Cicero on friendship, he enumerates
aspects of courtly love. The queen is much taken with his
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intellectual manner and asks him directly if he will be her
lover. Graelent refuses on the grounds that since he is a
sworn retainer of her husband, this love affair would con
stitute a breach of his loyalty. Graelent leaves.
Scene Four (11. 129-152, 24 lines).— The queen is upset
but loves Graelent no less. For some time she sends him
gifts and messages, but he adamantly refuses to accept or
reply. Gradually she grows to hate him, and begins to
slander him to her husband for revenge. The king begins to
withhold his wages until he is so impoverished that he can
not even afford to travel away to fight for another lord.
Episode II— The Hunt and the
Fairy Mistress (11. 153-330,
178 lines)
Scene One (11. 153-194, 42 lines).— What will Graelent
do now? the narrator asks. One day Graelent's host and his
wife went to visit friends for dinner, leaving Graelent at
home alone with their daughter. The girl asked Graelent to
have dinner with her, but not wishing to, Graelent said he
had to go out and ordered his one remaining servant to pre
pare his horse. When the servant noted that Graelent no
longer owns a saddle, the girl offers to lend him an outfit.
The embarrassed Graelent leaves as soon as possible, riding j
Out through the town while the citizens mock him because of
his worn-out and cheap clothing.
Scene Two (11. 195-205, 11 lines).— while Graelent
wanders sadly in the forest, he sees a snow white doe which
he begins to chase, but he cannot catch her.
Scene Three (11. 205-330, 125 lines).— He pursues the
doe closely enough, however, that she heads him to a plain
on which there is a pool where a beautiful girl is bathing.
The girl has two serving maids; her clothes are laid in a
bower, as soon as Graelent sees her, he forgets about his
doe; he has never seen an earthly creature so beautiful. He
attempts to seize her clothes, but the maids notice him.
The girl angrily warns him that stealing her clothes would
be a low and undignified act, and besides only the rich
mantel would be valuable to him, so why not give her her
underclothes? He replies that he is not a merchant's son,
and has no intention of stealing the clothes; he simply
wants her to come out of the water and get dressed. She
refuses to come out on the grounds that he would seize her,
and insists that they are not of the same class. "I can
wait," he replies, and when it becomes obvious that he
intends to do so, she decides to get out of the water, after
extracting a promise from him that he will not harm her.
When she is dressed, he formally requests her to be his
lover, but she refuses on the grounds that it would be
unseemly for two people of their ranks to become lovers.
4
Seeing that she will not be persuaded, Graelent rapes her.
Afterwards, he pleads with her again to be his lover, and
she decides that he makes love so well, a relationship
between them would really be worthwhile after all. She
agrees to become his lover on the condition that no one will
ever be told about their affair; she will give him all the
wealth and companionship he desires, but he must never dis
close the source of his wealth, nor tell anyone that he has
a lover. She also confesses that she really came to the
pool to meet him, and that she knows full well that she will
suffer because of him. But nevertheless, she goes on to
warn him again to act with moderation, and not to boast.
She says that he should remain living in his present land
for a year, but then he should come to live with her,
because she did not want to leave her country. Since it is
4
This is assuming the omission of Grimes's 11. 293-294
which appear only in the inflated MS. S and which conflict
with the sense of the adjacent passages.
95
after the nones, she sends him home with the promise that
she will send her messenger to him.
Episode III— The Fairy Mistress
Revealed (11. 331-502. 172 lines)
Scene One (11. 331-398, 68 lines).— Graelent returns to
his lodgings and sits pensively at the window. He sees
approaching a serving boy leading a white charger loaded
with a large trunk. The boy stops at his house and informs
him that the horse is sent as a present from his lover.
Graelent joyfully accepts. The boy further reports that he
will stay with Graelent as a servant and has plenty of money
to pay all debts. The boy carries the trunk to Graelent's
room and unloads from it fine clothes and other expensive
presents. Furthermore, he orders a feast, and sends the
host out to fetch any needy knights or pilgrims to attend.
Graelent distributes presents generously to the minstrels
and citizens, and many people have a wonderful time at the
feast.
Scene Two (11. 399-412, 14 lines).— For the next year,
Graelent lives happily and wealthily, winning tourneys and
visiting his lover. He is loved by everyone.
Scene Three (11. 413-502, 90 lines).— At the annual
feast of Pentecost, the king holds a banquet for all his
retainers, at which he causes the queen to stand on the
table and undress so that everyone can testify that she is
the most beautiful woman in the world. Everyone eagerly
attests his consent except Graelent, who merely chuckles to
himself and remains silent. The queen notices that he has
hidden his face and points this out to the king as an
insult. The kind demands to know why Graelent is laughing,
and he replies that he feels the whole affair is degrading.
Graelent suggests that the other barons just feel obliged to
say that they think the queen is beautiful, and for his own
part, he knows many other women more beautiful. The queen
demands that Graelent be forced to prove this by producing
someone to be judged against herself. The king orders that
Graelent be sent to prison until he produces evidence that
there is a more beautiful woman. Graelent begs the king's
pardon, but the king keeps him anguishedly in prison for a
whole day until the pleas of the other courtiers convince
the king that he ought to be given a year's time to find
the girl. So Graelent is set free with the warning that if
he does not bring the world's most beautiful woman to next
year's Pentecost banquet, he will suffer the judgment of the!
king. !
Episode IV— The Trial
(11. 503-654. 152 lines)
Scene One (11. 503-527, 25 lines).— Graelent returns
home to find that his lover's servant boy has vanished, and
his lover will not appear or speak to him. He sits and
mourns her loss for the whole year, until he falls into poor
health.
Scene Two (11. 528-654, 127 lines).— At the banquet,
Graelent confesses that he cannot produce the beauty, and
submits to the king's judgment. The king demands of the
barons that they impose a fully just punishment on Graelent
who has confessed that he insulted his liege lord. Still
the barons are hesitant. Suddenly a boy appears who begs
them to wait a while. Then two girls of surpassing beauty
appear and beg the king to hold up the trial until their
mistress arrives. In just a moment two more maids arrive
also asking a few moments' grace; the people agree that even
these maids are more lovely than the queen. When the
mistress herself appears, the people are unanimous in pre
ferring her. She is richly dressed and her horse richly
; 98 !
j I
jaccoutered. she pleads for Graelent, noting that while he
did behave badly in that he angered the king, still he spokei
truth in that there could never be one woman so beautiful
that there would not be her equal somewhere in the world.
Graelent is unanimously acquitted. The mistress begs leave
of the king, and departs with her maids. Graelent chases
them.
Episode V— Reconciliation
(11. 655-730. 76 lines)
Scene One (11. 655-714, 60 lines).— Graelent pursues
her closely all day, but he cannot catch up with her and she
will not answer his cries. Finally they arrive at the pool-
source of the forest's river where Graelent had first met
her. She plunges into the water, warning him that he should
not try to follow her, but he does anyway. She seizes his
reins and forces him back to shore again but as soon as she
has let him go, he follows her a second time. The current
is so strong that he is washed off his horse and carried
downstream, close to drowning. The maids plead with the
mistress to have mercy on him and save him. She relents,
and pulls him from the water; taking off his wet clothes and
wrapping him in her mantel, she leads him off into her
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jforest. people still say that that was the last seen of j
Graelent.
Scene Two (11. 715-730, 16 lines).— Graelent's horse,
which had run off into the forest, returned to the site
where his master had disappeared. He neighed so loudly
that people could hear him throughout the countryside. Many
people tried to capture him unsuccessfully. For many years,
at that same time of year as Graelent had disappeared, the
sounds of the good horse could be heard at that place.
Formula (11. 731-736, 6 lines)
The marvel of the horse and the adventure of the knight
who went away with his lover were heard throughout Britain.
The Britons made a lay from it called "The Lay of Graelent-
Mor. "
Lanval, by Marie de France
Formula (11. 1-4, 4 lines)
I will tell you the story of another lay just as it
happened. in the "Bretan" language they call it Lanval.
ilntroduction
(11. 5-38, 34 lines)
King Arthur was staying at Cardoel because the Piets
and Scots were invading Logres; that is why he was there
for the Pentecost feast. He gave rich gifts to everyone at
the Round Table except a worthy knight named Lanval, of whom
everyone was jealous because he was so well-endowed by
nature. They pretended to love him, but if something had
happened to him, they would not have been upset. Lanval was
the royal prince of a distant country, so he was far away
from his vassals and relatives. All of Lanval's holdings
were spent, but still the king gave him nothing and he did
not ask for anything. Lanval is very sad about his diffi
culty. Lords (the narrator says), do not be surprised^ a
man in a foreign land without help or advice is bound to be
sad.
Episode I— The Fairy Mistress
(11. 39-193. 155 lines)
Scene One (11. 39-193. 155 lines).— One day, Lanval
went riding in the forest for diversion. He-comes to a
river in the middle of the plain, and his horse begins to
tremble. Lanval decides to stop there. He lies down and
folds his mantel under his head as a pillow. He is very
101
jsad. Suddenly he glances up and sees two girls coming
toward him from across the river. They are beautiful and
i
richly dressed, and they are carrying gold basins and
towels. They walk directly up to Lanval, and, calling him
by his name, invite him to come visit their mistress whose
tent is nearby. Leaving his horse to graze, Lanval follows
them to the tent which is more expensive than anything Queen
Semiramis or the Emperor Octavian could afford. Within it
sits the most beautiful girl he has ever seen, dressed in
the richest clothes, which she has partially removed because
of the heat. He sits down beside her couch, and she tells
him that she has come especially to see him, and if he
behaves in the proper courtly fashion, he may have more joy
with her than any king could have. Love sets his heart
afire, and he answers in his best, courtly fashion that he
would gladly do anything she desired. They pledge them
selves as lovers, and she tells him that she will give him
enough wealth that he can live in luxury and generosity if
he promises never to disclose to anyone that she is his
lover. If he does disclose their affair, she warns, then
he will never again see or hear from her. He promises, and
they spend the afternoon together in bed. That evening, she!
■reminds him that she will appear to him whenever he wishes, j
102
They have a splendid supper together, which includes many
kisses as sidedishes. When they finish supper, the maids
lead in Lanval's horse which they have richly accoutered.
He sets off for home.
Episode II— The Spurned Queen
(11. 194-303, 110 lines)
Scene One (11. 194-218, 25 lines).— As Lanval is riding
home, he thinks over his adventure of the afternoon, and can
hardly believe it. But when he arrives, he finds new ser
vants and wealth at his lodgings with no apparent explana
tion. Lanval generously expends some of his good fortune to
all needy people in town, and is all the more happy to find
that indeed his love does come to him whenever he wants.
Scene Two (11. 219-303, 85 lines).— Around the Feast of
Saint John, thirty knights were enjoying themselves in a
garden beneath the queen's tower-bedroom. Walwain comments
that it is a shame that Lanval is not with them, so they
fetch him to join their games. The queen was watching from
the tower window with three maids. She noticed Lanval and
watched him. She decided to go down to join the men, and
summoned thirty of her ladies in waiting to accompany her.
The ladies and the knights all paired off except for Lanval
103
who withdrew to one side, thinking of his lover, with whom
he longed to be. The queen goes and sits beside him and
offers to become his lover. Lanval replies that it would be
dishonorable for him to betray his sworn lord in such a
manner. The queen angrily accuses Lanval of being stupid
and homosexual. Lanval angrily retorts that these charges
are untrue, and that the real reason he spurns her is that
he does have a lover, a girl more beautiful than any Lanval
has ever known, whose poorest handmaiden is more beautiful
than the queen, and more polite.
Episode ill— The Accusation
(11. 304-414, 111 lines)
Scene One (11. 304-331, 28 lines).— The queen rushes to
her rooms, weeping, and vows to make the king take revenge
on Lanval. When the king returns home, the queen kneels at
his feet and tells him that Lanval asked her to be his
lover, and because she refused, he insulted her by claiming :
that he had a lover whose poorest chambermaid was worth more
than the queen. The king angrily swears that if Lanval can
not prove his boast in court, he will have him hanged or
burnt. The king sends three barons to fetch Lanval.
l " 104 i
(
Scene Two (11. 332-358, 27 lines).— Lanval sits in
his lodgings pensive and anguished because he realizes that
he has lost his lover by revealing their secret to someone. |
He cries out to her, begging her at least to speak to him,
but there is no answer. He weeps, sighs, faints, curses his
stupid mouth, and otherwise punishes himself so much that it
is a wonder that he did not die. The barons arrived and
told him that the queen had accused him and he was summoned
before the king. Lanval follows them sorrowfully towards
court, wishing that they would kill him.
Scene Three (11. 359-397, 39 lines).— Lanval stands
before the king silent and sad. The king addresses him
insolently as "vassal" and repeats the terms of the accusa
tion. Lanval denies that he had behaved badly toward either
his king or queen, but insists that his lover and her maids
are as beautiful as he claimed. He humbly submits himself
to the judgment of the court. The king angrily calls to
gether his men and demands that they decide what ought to be
done with Lanval, so that there can be no question of injus
tice later on. The men comply, some gladly and some reluc
tantly. They decide that Lanval should have a formal trial
before the whole court (not just themselves) and that
' i
meanwhile he should be released only on the bond of pledges.j
The king agrees to their decision, and demands a pledge from!
Lanval, but he has no friends or relatives. Walwain, how
ever, offers himself and his men as a pledge for Lanval, and
they depart for Lanval1s lodgings.
Scene Four (11. 406-414, 9 lines).— Walwain and his
knights reprimand Lanval for his behavior, and have to
return to his lodgings daily to make sure he is eating
properly, and that he does not commit suicide.
Episode IV— The Trial
(11. 415-641. 227 lines)
Scene One (11. 415-641, 227 lines).— On the trial day,
the pledges presented Lanval before the king and queen and
assembled court. Everyone felt sorry for him, and, the
narrator says, I think some hundred of them were doing all
in their power to have him freed. The king presents an
accusation and turns the case over to the barons for judg
ment. They are quite sad about the case, because on one
hand they feel sorry for the foreign noble Lanval who is
alone in a strange land, and on the other hand they feel
they must convict him since his lord has accused him. The
count of Cornwall points out that even though a vassal above
all owes dedication to his lord, the offense is hardly a
grave one, and there would be no case at all if the accusor
were not the king himself; he further recommends that Lanval
have his lover appear at court to substantiate the terms of
Lanval's reputed insult. When the knights ask Lanval to do
this, however, he replies that he is sure the lover would
not come to stand warrant for him. The barons still hesi
tate although they now know no help is soon likely to arrive
and even though the king continues to press them for a
verdict. Just when the barons are finally about to render a
verdict, they see two girls approaching on handsome pal
freys. They are so beautifully dressed and beautiful that
everyone gladly stares at them. Walwain points out the
girls to Lanval and asks if one of them is not his lover,
but Lanval replies that he does not know them. The girls
ride up to King Arthur's dais and, dismounting, ask him to
prepare a silk-curtained room for their lady who will be
arriving shortly. The king politely arranges to have them
shown to suitable rooms, and then returns angrily to the
barons and demands a verdict without further delay. The
barons claim that because of the arrival of the girls, they
have made no decision yet, and return to their delibera
tions. Suddenly two well-dressed, beautiful girls riding j
107
Spanish mules come riding along the street. Ywiens rushes i
: i
to Lanval and asks if these might not be his lover, but
: i
again he answers that he does not know them nor love them.
Again the girls ride up to the king's dais and request
suitable rooms for their mistress, who is coming to speak
With him. Again the king has them taken care of (although
their mules are not officially taken away), and then turns
to the barons to demand a verdict, since the queen is get
ting angry at being kept waiting for so long, They were
just about to decide, when the most beautiful girl in the
world came wandering down the street on a noble palfrey,
which was also the most handsome and well-accoutered in the
world. The girl's dress was laced up the sides so that her
bare flesh showed through. She had light brownish hair
and flashing eyes. She wore a cloak of royal purple, and
carried a falcon on her wrist. Everyone in town turned out
to stare at her. Lanval's friends rushed over to him to
inquire if this might not be his lover. Lanval blushes and
cries out that indeed it is. Now, he says, he does not care
what they do with him unless she will have pity on him, for
only by seeing her will he be saved. The girl approaches
the king's dais and, dismounting, lets her mantel fall so
jthat everyone can see her even better. She addresses the j
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king with great moderation, stating that she has been
Lanval's lover and that now she has come to defend him in
court. She guarantees that Lanval did not proposition the
queen, and concludes that as far as the boasting goes, he
should let the barons decide. The king grants the barons
the right to decide, and they unanimously agree that
Lanval1s boast was justified. As soon as the judgment is
rendered, the girl leaves, and no one can stop her, though
many tried. Lanval mounts on the stepping stones used by
the armoured knights to get on their horses; when the girl
rides by, Lanval leaps onto the horse behind her and they
ride off together to Avalon.
Formula (11. 642-646. 5 lines)
The Britons recount to us that he was taken away by
the maiden to an island that was very beautiful, and no one
ever heard of him again. Nor do I, the narrator says, know
any more to tell you about it.
Desire
Formula (11. 1-6, 6 lines)
I intend to retell the story about which people
living at that time made a lay as a reminder. It is
i ” i
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j"The Lay of-Desire, " who was noble and prudent. j
Prologue (11. 7-95, 89 lines)
In the area of Scotland called Calatir, near the White
Heath, across the sea which is so great, there is the Black
Chapel that they say is so beautiful. Once a vassal of
the king of Scotland lived there, a knight who was much
honored and held many possessions. His wife was a noble
woman and they loved each other, but they could not have
a child together, much to their sorrow. One night the wife
said to her husband that she had heard about a saint's body
in Provence which was reputed to perform miracles for the
faithful who made a pilgrimage there. She begged her
husband to go there with her and pray for a child. The
husband agreed and they crossed the sea to Saint Giles,
where they prayed and gave offerings to the silver statue.
When they were returned home, the wife became pregnant, and
they were both very happy. When a son was born to them,
they called him Desire, because so long a time had passed
before they had prayed to Saint Giles for the miracle. The
child grew up to be a handsome lad, and at the proper time
they sent him to serve the king. He learned willingly about
the forest and river, and the king grew to love him. When
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|he was dubbed knight* Desire traveled across the sea to |
j
Normandy and Brittany* where he was widely loved and praised
by the French. He' stayed there for seven years* participate
ing in tournaments and other knightly activities. Then he
returned home* where the king richly rewarded him* and all
the people praised him for his beauty and valor. He always
stayed with the king at Calatir* but by the order of his
father, he went to visit his mother at the beginning of
summer.
Episode I— The Hunt and the
Fairy Mistress (11. 96-257,
162 lines)
Scene One (11. 96-117, 22 lines).— On the fourth day of
his visit* he got up in the morning and dressed himself in
rich clothes brighter than April flowers. He ordered his
mantel and spurs and his good horse* for he wanted to go
out riding for amusement. He was handsome anyway, but
looked even better when mounted on his steed. He stood up
in the stirrups and spurred the horse forward. He rode out
through the town without any companions.
Scene Two (11. 118-133, 16 lines).— Near the White
Heath* he sees the white* flowering trees and hears the
birds' songs* and is excited. He rides on into the Heath
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■where lived a hermit that Desire used to visit when he went i
horseback riding as a child with his father. He decided to j
i
try to find the hermit's chapel.
Scene Three (11. 134-174, 41 lines).— As he rode toward
the chapel* he looked up and saw a girl dressed in rich*
grey clothes. She was beautiful: her hair hung down and
she wore no wimple. She stood barefooted in the dew near a
spring that arose beneath a nuge tree. She held two golden
basins in her hands. Desire dismounted and greeted her in a
courtly fashion. He wants to make her his lover, so he lays
her down on the wet grass; I think* the narrator says* he
must have been near her, when she cried out that he should
not dishonor her body. She promises that if he does not
rape her, she will introduce him to her mistress* the most
beautiful virgin in the world. She warns him that if her
mistress is pleased with him* he will lack no comfort or joy
in this world* but that if she is not pleased, he may never
escape. Further* she promises that if he does not like her
mistress* then she will make love to him* and that in any
case* she will aid him someday in great need. Desire
decides to accept her offer.
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| Scene Four (11. 175-202, 28 lines).— The girl leads himi
to her mistress who is seated in a bower on a costly couch, i
The girl steps to one side and tells Desire to go ahead and
take what he wants, isn't, she says, my mistress the most
beautiful person you ever saw? Her lovely complexion, her
laced sides, her fine hair: such beauty was never born. Go
ahead, she says; there is no need to hesitate. Desire gives
his horse into the keeping of the maid and starts to ap
proach the girl.
Scene Five (11. 199-247. 49 lines).— But as soon as the
girl notices Desire approaching, she leaps up and runs away
into the thickness of the forest. He pursues her, catches
up with her, and seizing her hand, begs her most politely
to become his lover and promises to serve her faithfully.
She curtsies to him and accepts his offer of love service.
They spend a long time together there in the forest, making
love. When Desire is ready to leave, the girl tells him
that he may speak to her or visit her at any time as long as
he behaves properly and maintains his knightly standards.
She gives him a ring as a token of her faith, and warns him
that the ring will be lost, along with her love, if he acts
i
badly. They kiss good-bye and he rides away.
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Episode II— The Fairy Mistress
Revealed (11. 248-336, 89 lines)
' f
Transition (11. 248-272. 15 lines).— When Desire
arrived home, he did many good and generous deeds; he gave
more gifts in one month than the king did in six. He went
back to the forest to visit his lover frequently. They were
lovers for such a long time that she had a son and daughter,
but she did not tell him about them. One time the king went
✓ 5
abroad and took Desire with him. When they returned from
abroad, Desire went to Calatir but spent only one night
there before journeying out into the White Heath in search
of his lover.
Scene One (11. 273-300, 28 lines).— On his way to their
trysting place, Desire happens upon the hermit's chapel
which he had sought in vain earlier. Since he is not sure
when he might find it again, he decides to stop and visit
At this point appears a 26-line passage in MS. S
which, like several other shorter embellishments, has no
counterpart in the Cheltenham manuscript copy or in the
Strengleikar translation, and therefore has been regarded as
another interpolation by the MS. S scribe. The passage
tells how, when the king's forces are besieging a foreign
castle, Desire challenges and jousts with the lord of the
castle, and, eventually defeating him, turns him over to the
king as a vassal. Could this episode be an analogue to
the Sir valentine episode in Thomas Chestre's Sir Launfal?
114
jthe hermit for a brief while to be shriven. He enters the
Chapel and confesses all his sins to the hermit* including
j
his affair with his lover. The hermit gives him the proper j
penance to do and blesses him. As Desire reaches for the
reins when remounting his horse* he notices that his ring is
gone. He thinks that he has lost it.
Scene Two (11. 301-336, 36 lines).— He quickly rides on
to the trysting place to tell his lover about the ring. He
waits at the trysting place all day* but she does not appear
or speak to him. Finally he cries out to her* begging her
to appear* pleading with her that he meant no wrong by tell
ing the hermit about her. He promises not to do the penance
if that is what is offending her. When he sees that she
will not answer* he curses the hermit* his tongue* his
horse* etc. for having participated in losing him his
mistress.
Transition (11. 337-348, 12 lines).— When it becomes
obvious that his pleas are to no avail* Desire returns to
Calatir and languishes for a year. He laments so much that
everyone* including himself* considers him doomed.
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Episode III— Reconciliation j
With the Fairy Mistress
(11. 349-480, 132 lines)
Scene One (11. 349-408, 60 lines).— But hear, the
narrator says, what happened to him a year later. One day
he awoke to find that everyone else had gone away to amuse
themselves leaving him quite alone. As he lay in bed
sorrowfully, his mistress appeared to him. Joyfully, he
sits up, bracing himself with a pillow. She exhorts him not
to want to die, and says that if she has been harsh with
him, surely he deserved such treatment for having confessed
about her as if their relationship were sinful. I knew, she
says, that our relationship was over when you wanted to con
fess about us, because one confesses that which one hopes to
forgo. She says that if he was thinking that she had
bewitched him, he should forget about that, for she is from
no evil place; she will appear at mass with him tomorrow
to prove it. Even though he has acted badly, she will for
give him because he has also loved her very much; they can
again meet regularly if he will refrain from going to con
fession about it. Desire declares himself already as good
as cured, and kisses her. she goes away. He is very happy
and begins to recover from his illness. ‘
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Transition (11. 409-418, 10 lines).— When he goes to j
mass, his lover does appear beside him and takes communion, i
He speaks to her often enough. He is all cured, and spends
his time as he did before. He is with the king constantly.
Scene Two (11. 419-475, 57 lines).— One day the king
and Desire went hunting. Beside a large tree, they both
aimed at a large stag, but neither seemed to hit it. They
could see their arrows lying on the ground, so they dis
mounted to pick them up, but when they went to the spot
where they were, they seemed to have disappeared. The king
cries out that they must be bewitched. As they walk around
searching, they come upon a boy dressed in rich red clothes.
He is a handsome child with blonde, curly hair. He holds
their arrows in his hand and offers them to the knights in a
courtly fashion. Then he tells Desire that he is his son,
and that his mother has sent him to stay a while with his
father so that they would come to know him. He gives Desire
the ring as proof of his origin. Desire seizes the boy and «
kisses him a hundred times] the king and his companions also
kiss the boy. Desire tells them all the story of his affair:.
They take the boy with them.
j Transition (11. 476-480, 5 lines).— Everyone loves the
boy, and Desire is absolutely inseparable from him. After
two months, he knew all his relatives well.
Episode IV— Separation
(11. 481-668, 188 lines)
Scene One (11. 481-518. 38 lines).— One day he got up
and dressed himself, and mounting his hunting horse, went
before his father, who was just returning from church and
about to mount his horse. The boy tells his father that he
wants to go back to his mother immediately. Desire protests
that it would kill him if his son left. The boy replies
that he must go, and rides away at top speed. Desire
mounts as quickly as possible, but is still too late; he
pursues his son all day, calling to him to stop and talk it
over. The boy rides on into the forest steadily until
nightfall. Desire follows him until his horse stumbles and
crashes into a tree.
Scene Two (11. 519-606, 88 lines).— Desire wanders in
the forest for only a moment before he sees a fire, which he
takes to be the campfire of some rich man who had spent the
day hunting and was caught short by nightfall. But he finds
only a dwarf by the fire. The richly dressed dwarf is
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grinding pepper to put on a boar which he is roasting.
Desire greets the dwarf politely, but he answers nothing.
He does, however, hurry to care for Desire's horse and to
prepare a kind of couch for Desire from the bushes and
leaves, covered with a rich cloth. Still without speaking, ;
the dwarf returns to his cooking. When the meal is ready,
he brings Desire two basins of water and a towel to wash
with; Desire recognizes the basins as the very ones carried
by the maid on the Heath when he first met his mistress, but
he carefully keeps from revealing this to the dwarf, when
dinner is served, Desire is careful to offer good portions
to the dwarf; the dwarf is so pleased at seeing Desire
behave so well that he decides to talk to him, even though
he has been prohibited from doing so. He tells Desire that
he was sent to meet him and provide for him. Desire thanks
him, and asks who sent him. He replies that Desire's mis
tress sent him, and if Desire should so desire, he will take
him to his mistress' very bedroom. Desire gladly accepts.
Scene 'Three (11. 607-663, 57 lines).— When they have
finished dinner, the Dwarf leads Desire to the castle of his
lover. They go to the bedroom which has only one entrance—
ia window at one end. Inside the well-lit room they see two
beds on which lie two girls, sleeping. The dwarf tells
Desire that the girls are his mistress and her sister, and
encourages him to go in. He also tells him that he will
recognize the waiting-maid who is sewing a tunic for the
mistress. Desire leaps through the window with both feet
together and lands badly next to the beds, injuring his
side. The noise of the fall awakens the sister who cries
out in fear. Guards are alarmed and begin to arm them
selves. The maid who was sewing takes Desire by the hands
and leads him away. She tells him that if he is discovered
in that place he will be killed, and that she is helping him
escape because of the pledge she made to him; she suggests
that if he wishes to be polite to her in return, he will
leave as quickly as possible so that they will not be caught
and she will not lose her job with the mistress. Desire
promises to leave quickly. They shortly catch up with the
dwarf, whom the maid beats on the chest and castigates for
betraying such a nice man as Desire. The dwarf and Desire
hurry back to their campfire, where Desire collapses on the
"couch" from the weakness incurred by his wound. He feels
himself to be quite ridiculed.
120
I Transition (11. 664-668, 5 lines).— The next morning
Desire rides home, and remains there for a long time, sorely!
wounded.
Episode V— Reunion with the
Fairy Mistress (11. 669-761,
93 lines)
Desire is so wounded, in fact, that when the king holds
his Pentecost feast, he must hold it at Calatir and summon
all the other courtiers there so that Desire may attend.
After they had all heard mass, and were seated at the
banquet table, ready to eat, into the hall came riding a
very rich girl on a mule accompanied by a maid who is also
well-dressed and also riding a white mule. Both carry white
falcons. Everyone stares at them admiringly, for they are
beautiful beyond compare. With them is a boy who is also
handsome beyond compare. They stop before the king's dais,
and the older girl greets the king, asking him if he will
give arms to the boy and proper counsel to the girl, who
are the children of Desire and herself. The king politely
grants her request, and asks her to join them for dinner.
She refuses, and asks if the king if he will grant her
requests immediately, because she wants to marry Desire and
take him away with her to her country as soon as possible.
121 I
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The king orders arms brought; he himself gives the sword to j
the boy and the kings of Moreis and Leoneis who were at the !
banquet attach the spurs while kneeling at the boy's feet.
When the dubbing ceremony is finished, the king announces
that he will marry the daughter himself since he has never
seen such a beautiful girl before. The two couples go to
the church and are married together; Desire was anxious to
marry his wife. When they return from the court, Desire's
new wife asks leave for them to return to her country, for
she does not wish to linger at all. She tells Desire to
mount and come away with her, since both his son and
daughter are well provided for in this land, and surely will
come to visit them in their land whenever they can. Desire
mounts, and his wife leads him away. He apparently stayed
with her, for he never returned, nor did he want to return.
Formula (11. 762-764, 3 lines)
In order to remember this adventure, they had a lay
made about it, which they call Desire.
Guigemar, by Marie de France
Formula (11. 1-6, 6 lines)
I will tell you briefly enough the stories which I know
are true and about which the Britons made lays. At the j
jstart, as a beginning, I will tell you a story according to
the letter and the writing.
prologue (11. 7-50. 44 lines)
In Little Brittany in ancient times. Hoel ruled the
land, sometimes in war, sometimes in peace. One of his
barons, Oridials, the lord of Leon, was a favorite of Hoel
for his valor and merit. Oridials had a daughter, Noguent,
and a son, Guigemar, who was much loved and loving. When
his father could part with him, Guigemar was sent to serve
a king. The boy was so clever and worthy that everyone
loved him, and soon the king dubbed him richly. Then
Guigemar left that court and traveled to Flanders to seek
his fortune, since there was always war there in those days.
One could not find the equal of Guigemar in Lorraine,
Burgundy, Anjou or Gascony. But Nature had erred in him so
that he had no care for love. There was not a girl or a
woman in the world who would not have accepted him if he had
asked her for her love, in fact, many women asked him, but
he did not seem to have a desire for love. Both friends and
strangers considered him in peril because of this.
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Episode I— The Hunt and the
Voyage (11. 51-126, 136 lines)
Transition (11. 51-57, 7 lines).— He returned to his
native land at the height of his glory. He went to visit
his family, who were eager to see him, and stayed there for
a whole month.
Scene One (11. 58-70, 13 lines).— One day he wanted to
go hunting. He summoned his knights and his servants and
they all went into the forest. They begin to pursue a great
stag, the hunters riding quickly ahead and Guigemar and his
page boy riding leisurely behind. When everyone else is
quite far ahead, Guigemar sees in a thicket a white doe with
antlers on her head, accompanied by a faun. When the hounds
bay, the doe leaps out of the thicket, and Guigemar shoots
an arrow at her. The arrow strikes her hoof and rebounds,
going through Guigemar's thigh into his horse. Guigemar
dismounts and falls on the grass beside the wounded doe,
who moans and speaks to Guigemar saying that because of what
he has done to her, he will not be able to find any medicine
for his wound or any way of healing it except through the
suffering of a woman who loves him. He will also have to
suffer an equal amount for that woman's love. The doe
jorders him to leave her in peace. Guigemar is sorely j
I 124 |
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wounded, in pain, and amazed by the strange incident with
the doe. Further he is worried because he realizes that he j
i
has never loved and wonders if he will be able to find heal
ing for his wound. He calls his page and sends him after
the other hunters, and then painfully mounts his horse and
rides away because he does not want any of his men to find
him or hold him back.
Scene Two (11. 127-186, 60 lines).— Guigemar wanders
out of the forest on a green road that led him through a
heath to a plain where cliffs lead down to a harbor. There
is only one ship in the harbor: an ebony boat with a silk
sail that is so well made that it is priceless. But
Guigemar sees no one around who might have landed the boat.
He rides up to the shore, and painfully climbs onto the boat
hoping to find someone there, but he finds no one. In the
middle of the boat there is a bed of cypress and ivory
inlaid with gold. The sheets and silk with golden thread
interwoven in it. One could hardly tell the worth of the
l
bedclothes, the narrator says, but I can tell you that who- ’
ever puts his head on the pillow will never have grey hair.
The bedspread was lined with sable. Two solid gold candle- ,
; |
sticks with lighted tapers stand at the bow of the boat.
Guigemar, amazed and in pain from his wound, lies down on
the bed for a moment to rest, but when he gets up, the boat
has put out to sea with no land in sight. The wind is swift
but gentle, and there is no hope of returning. Still in
pain, he prays to God to care for him, bring him safely to
port, and keep him from dying. He lay down on the bed and
went to sleep. That day, the narrator says, he underwent
the worst.
Episode II— The Rescue and
Healing (11. 187-516,
330 lines)
Transition (11. 187-242, 56 lines).— That evening the
ship arrived at an ancient city, capitol of its region,
where Guigemar would find his healing. The lord who kept
that place was an old man who was excessively jealous of his
young and beautiful wife. All old men, the narrator says,
are jealous because they hate to be cuckolded; such is the
perversity of old age. He guarded his wife more than
cursorily: he kept her in a garden fenced with green marble;
walls, and the only entrance was constantly guarded. One
side of the castle faced on the sea, and anyone who needed
to enter this way would have to have a boat, inside the
wall, the lord had had built for his wife a room more
beautiful than any in the world. At the door was a chapel.
Inside, the room was painted with frescos depicting Venus
showing the true way to love faithfully and serve well, and
at the same time she is excommunicating anyone who reads
Ovid's book where he teaches that one ought to restrain
one's love, and throwing a copy of the book into a fire.^
This room is where the lady was kept. To serve her she had
only one girl, her niece, whom she loved very much. The
girl went everywhere with her, and no one else was ever
allowed inside the walls except an old, white haired priest
who kept the key to the gate. The only reason he was
trusted was because he was a eunuch. The priest both said
mass and served meals to her.
Scene One (11. 243-258, 16 lines).— That day, the lady
and her maid went walking in the garden after lunch. They
see the ship sailing into the harbor with no one guiding it.
The lady is frightened, and runs away, blushing, but the
^Two of the manuscripts, H and £>, apparently interpret
"estreine" as "control" and say in 11. 223-226 that Venus
was burning Ovid's book. MS. S omits these lines, apparent
ly by interpreting "estreine" as "embrace." The Strenqlei-
; kar, which usually favors H's readings, also omits the ref
erence to burning. Thus Marie's attitude toward Ovid must
|remain ambiguous.
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maid, who was more sensible and brave, reassures her. They j
go to the ship.
Scene Two (11. 259-346, 88 lines).— The maid climbs
onto the ship and finds not a living soul except the pale,
sleeping Guigemar, whom she assumes is dead. The maid
climbs down again and tells her mistress what she has seen,
and the lady insists that they go back on the ship and, if
the knight is dead, fetch the priest, or if he is not dead,
try to help him. They return to the pavilion where the lady
gazes sorrowfully at Guigemar. She puts her hand on his
chest and feels his heart beating. At her touch, the sleep
ing knight awakes. He greets her happily. The lady asks
him sadly where he comes from, and if he is exiled because
of war. He replies by telling her the details of his hunt
and mysterious voyage, and the prophecy of the doe. He begs
the lady to help him leave the ship and find out where he
is. She tells him that this city and land belong to her
husband who is old and so extremely jealous that he keeps
her imprisoned in this garden with an old priest (whom she
curses) guarding the door. Only the maid, she says, is
allowed her for company, but if Guigemar would like to stay :
with them until he feels better, they will gladly help him
! 128
[
jand keep him. Guigemar politely accepts her offer* and with
great pain gets up and walks back to her room.
Scene Four (11. 347-408, 62 lines).— With the girls'
help, he is able to reach the room. They put him in the
maid's bed which is curtained. They bring water in a gold
basin and wash his wound and his thigh. They bind the wound
with white linen, handling him with the greatest care. The
lady withholds enough from her supper so that the knight can
eat well. But he is struck by love of her so that he for
gets entirely his native land, and feels no pain in his
wound, but still breathes with anguish. He begs the ladies
to leave him alone to sleep, and they do so. The lady is
also warmed by the same fires of love which burn in
Guigemar's heart.
Guigemar, left alone, is pensive and troubled. He
realizes that if the lady does not heal him, he will surely
die. "Alas," he says, "what shall I do?" He resolves to
speak out to the lady and tell her that if she acts proud
and haughty towards him, he will die of sorrow. He sighs.
Then in a while he decides that maybe he will just suffer it
through, for that is all he can do. He lies awake all
j
inight, sighing and troubled. in his heart he remembers her ;
Words and her appearance— green eyes and lovely mouth— whichj
touch him sorrowfully. He cries out for pity despite him
self. He almost calls her his love, if he had only known, ;
the narrator says, that his lady felt the same, he would
have been happy. A little comfort would have lessened the
grief that was making him pale. If he suffers for love of
her, she can hardly derive satisfaction from it.
Toward dawn the lady got up; she had been awake, too.
She complains of her sleeplessness, and the maid sees from
her appearance, that she loves the knight, in order to find
out whether the knight is in love or not, the maid goes,
while her mistress is in church, to talk to Guigemar. He
asks her immediately where her mistress is, and why she
awoke so early. Then he sighs. "You love," she says to
him, and advises him not to hide his feelings but to be
frank about them since an affair between her mistress and
him would be quite seemly since they are both well-bred and
good looking. He asks her what he should do, and she
promises him all her help.
As soon as the lady is returned from mass, she wants to
know what he has been doing, because Love is still in her
heart. She goes in to Guigemar hoping to tell him gently
and gradually what she feels. They greet each other, but
both are too agitated to speak out at first. Guigemar is
afraid that if he tells her of his love she will send him
away. But, the marrator digresses, he who does not show his
wound, can hardly hope for it to get healed, and Love is a
wound, deep within the heart so that it does not show, but
it is tenacious, nonetheless, for it comes from Nature.
Some people joke about love, like the courtly peasants who
go philandering everywhere and then boast about it; but that
is not love, that is folly, wickedness, and lechery, if one
can find someone worthy of love, one ought to serve and love
her faithfully. Guigemar loves so intensely that he must
either have relief or live unnaturally. Love makes him
bold, and he discloses his feelings, asking her to become
his lover. She responds properly by laughing and saying
that he is too hasty, for she is not at all accustomed to
granting requests like his. He begs her pardon, and notes
that while a professional coquette must hold back for a long
time in order to make it seem as if she were not too eager,
a woman of good intentions need not behave too haughtily to
a worthy suitor, but rather if they love immediately and
secretly, they will have acted much to their credit. "Fair
maid," he concludes, "let us end this debate!" The lady
immediately consents to be his lover, and they kiss. i
Guigemar is eased. They lie together speaking and kissing
and embracingj and this excess is befitting to them.
Episode III— The Separation
'(11. 517-636, 120 lines)
Transition (11. 517-524,,8 lines).— Guigemar was
together with her for a year and a half, and they were very
happy. But fortune, who never forgets, turned her wheel and
put those down who had formerly been up. Soon it happened
that the lovers were found out.
Scene One (11. 525-558, 34 lines).— One summer morning
when they were lying beside each other kissing, she said to
him that she had a premonition that they would be separated.
She laments that if he dies, she could die, too, but if they
were discovered and he went away, he could find another love
and she could never follow him. He assures her that he
could never love any other. She tells him that if he is
sure, he should give her his undershirt; she ties a special l
knot in the shirt tails and then gives him her permission to
love any woman who can undo the knot. He willingly agrees,
and gives her in exchange a belt which she binds tightly
around her naked loins. She willingly agrees to love only
him who can open the buckle without breaking it. They seal
| 132
ithe bargain with a kiss.
Scene Two (11. 559-610, 52 lines).— That very day they
were discovered. The lord had sent a chamberlain to speak
to the lady, and when he found the door locked, he peeped
through the window and saw the lovers. The chamberlain
reported to his lord immediately, and they returned with
three servants who broke down the door. in his great.rage
at finding the knight in his wife's bedroom, the lord orders
his men to kill Guigemar, who leaps up and seizes a wooden
clothes-tree to defend himself. While Guigemar holds the
men at bay, the lord demands to know who he is and how he
got in. Guigemar tells him truthfully about the hunt and
the voyage and the healing, but the lord refuses to believe,
saying that if this tale is true, Guigemar should make the
ship reappear and make his escape on it, for otherwise he
will be killed. They go to the harbor together to check,
and find the boat there. The lord puts Guigemar on the
boat, and it starts up immediately. Guigemar, regretting
the loss of his lady, weeps and sighs, and prays that God
should bring him quick death, if he is not destined to have
the lover he loves more than his life.
! 133
Scene Three (11. 611-624, 14 lines).— The boat returned
to the exact spot where Guigemar had first boarded it. He
climbs off the ship as soon as he can, and sees one of his
old page boys following another knight leading a stallion.
Guigemar calls to the boy, who joyously recognizes him and
offers him the use of the stallion. They ride back to
Guigemar1s home where everyone is happy to see him.
Transition (11. 625-636, 12 lines).— Guigemar, however,
remains unhappy. Everyone suggests that he needs to get
married, but he will not have a wife who cannot untie his
knot without tearing it. This news spreads throughout
Brittany, and there is not a woman or girl who does not try
to untie the knot, but no one succeeds.
Episode IV— The Reunion
(11. 637-864, 228 lines)
Scene One (11. 637-669, 33 lines).— I want to tell, the
narrator says, about the lady who loved Guigemar. According
to the counsel of his barons, her lord has her imprisoned in
a black marble tower, where the nights were even worse than
the days. No one can tell the anguish that the lady
suffered in that tower. She was there more than two years
without any joy or diversion. She constantly laments her
I 1 3 4
jlost love, promising him that if she can ever escape, she
will throw herself into that same sea over which he departed!
from her. in a daze she happens to go over to the door and s
finds it unlocked. Just on the chance that she might
escapej she goes out and manages to get to the harbor with
out anyone bothering her. As she climbs a cliff to throw
herself into the water and drown, she finds Guigemar's boat.
She is barely able to drag herself to the side of the boat
and fall onto its deck.
Scene Two (11. 670-724, 55 lines).— The ship arrived in
Brittany at the castle of a lord named Meriaduc, who was
then engaged in a war with his neighbors and had arisen
early to see his troops off. As he stood at his window, he
saw the ship sail in, and, calling a chamberlain, went on
board and found the lady, who in her beauty resembles a
fairy. Meriaduc brought her to his castle and provided for
her well, making his sister her maid. He fell in love with :
her to excess, but then she was excessively beautiful. Even
though she was very sad, he asks her to be his lover. She
refuses, showing him the belt and explaining that she could
never love anyone who could not remove it without violence.
He tells her with irritation that there is some knight
nearby who also refuses to love anyone who cannot undo a
knot in his shirt tail, and adds that she probably tied the
knot, when she hears this newSj she faints dead away.
Meriaduc catches her and cuts her laces; he also tries to
open the belt, but he cannot. Then he summons knights from
all over the country to try the belt, but none of them can
open it.
Scene Three (11. 725-844, 120 lines).— So the belt
remained undone for a long time, until Meriaduc called a
tournament against his enemy which he was sure Guigemar
would attend. Indeed Guigemar arrived with more than a
hundred followers. Meriaduc lodged him with great honor in
a tower. He commands his sister to prepare the lady in her
most splendid clothes and bring her before Guigemar. When
the lady hears Guigemar's name, she faints in the arms of
the sister. Guigemar rises and scrutinizes the lady,
wondering it it can indeed be his beloved, and if so where
did she come from, and how did she get here. Then he de
cides that it is really quite unlikely that this woman is
his lover; it must be someone who resembles her. So he
kisses her politely and sits beside her without asking
further questions.
| 136
Meriaduc watches them carefully, and is worried about j
i
their appearance. He calls to Guigemar laughingly to let
the sister try to undo his knot. Guigemar grants his
request, and a chamberlain fetches the shirt, but the sister
cannot untie the knot. The lady is even more agitated, for
she recognizes the knot and would like to untie it but is
afraid. Meriaduc perceives her anguish and asks her if she
would like to try to untie it. She does so quickly and
easily, but Guigemar will still not believe it is she until
he has felt her sides for the belt that he placed there. He
joyfully asks her how she could have gotten here and she
tells him the details. Guigemar publicly announces that he
has found his true love, and requests Meriaduc to give her
to him, in return for which he will swear himself as vassal
to Meriaduc, along with one hundred followers, for three
years. Meriaduc replies politely that he has no need for a
hundred and one men for three years, and prefers to keep the
lady. Guigemar calls all those faithful to him to mount and
leave with him, and the entire assembly of knights does so.
They all pledge their allegiance to Guigemar, so now it is a
shame if he fails.
; 137
i
Scene Four (11. 845-864, 20 lines).— They all went to
the castle of Meriaduc's enemy who gladly received them
because he knew they could easily break Meriaduc's resis
tance. The next day they left the town with great clamor,
Guigemar leading the troops which proceeded directly to
Meriaduc's castle and laid siege to it. After a while, all
the people inside the castle starved and they took the
castle and killed Meriaduc. Guigemar took his love away
with him. Now their trials were over.
Formula (11. 865-868, 4 lines)
The Lay of Guigemar was composed about this tale that
you have heard. When someone plays the lay on harp or rote,
the music is good to hear.
One can see immediately, even from the gross placement
of the incidents, that the meaning of these lays must be
different. The Spurned Queen episode precedes and causes,
or results in, the Hunt and the Fairy Mistress episodes in
Guingamor and Graelentmor, while in Lanval, the Hunt is
completely missing, and the Fairy Mistress appears first and
causes the spurning of the Queen. The Spurned Queen is
entirely absent from Desire and Guigemar. so that variations
ion the Hunt and the Fairy Mistress episodes occupy the bulk
! i
of those poems.
{
A comparison of the size of the various episodes ;
reveals a similar divergence of interest on the part of the i
authors. The Trial in Graelentmor occupies only 127 lines, j
or less than 18 percent of the whole lay; while the Lanval
Trial takes 227 lines, or more than 35 percent of the whole
lay, and thus is twice the size of the Graelentmor Trial.
Suffice it to say, then, that the five lays, despite
their superficial resemblances in name and incident, and
perhaps their common origin in a single folk tale or myth,
are each a distinct and separate compound of the given
elements, and each must have a completely different meaning
because of the variation in mixture. Furthermore, even if
we were to suppose that, for example, Graelentmor was a
splicing together of parts of Guingamor and Lanval, that lay
still consists of such a random and differently treated
selection of details that it constitutes a new, unique, and
individual work which must be assessed as such.
CHAPTER IV
A THEMATIC ANALYSIS
John Reinhard in his comprehensive study, The Survival
of Geis in Medieval Romance , demonstrates adequately that
the five lays discussed above do derive from a particular
type of Celtic tale in which a mortal man takes a fairy
woman as his lover, with one certain condition to their con
tinuing love, namely what the Old Irish call a "geis": a
type of spell which either requires or prohibits a given act.
In the case of Guingamor, the geis is against partaking
of mortal food, and in Graelentmor and Lanval against
speaking of the fairy mistress to mortals. Desire and
Guigemar are so far removed from their Celtic analogues that
the geasa are hardly evident at all; Desire's mistress never
forbids Desire to speak of her or visit her home or see her
and her children together, the white doe speaks more in the
1Halle, 1933.
| 139
iform of a prophecy than a curse, the magic overtones of the
! ‘ i
"discovery" of Guigemar and his lover are entirely lost, and|
the exchanged geasa against loving anyone else have become
very physical contrivances which seem to be modeled on
2
twelfth-century practice with chastity belts.
But even in those lays which still openly contain the
geis as a tabu, it is doubtful, as Mr. Reinhard points out,
that the authors understood the prohibitions as Celtic
spells. Rather, just as chrestien de Troyes treats the
geasa and religious objects which are central to the Celtic
sources for Erec and Yvain either as ordinary human actions
(desires for glory or companionship, commands for silence or
limited absence) or as the merveilleux, a mystery or magic
beyond explanation (magic groves and rings, mysterious
fountains and storms), so the authors of the lays either
interpret the geasa in human terms (Desire's mistress's
indignation at being considered sinful) or leave them as
unexplained magic and mystery (Guigemar*s boat; Guigemar1s
mistress's miraculous escape).
For further discussions, see analyses of each lay
below.
Not all of these transformations may be due to our j
Anglo-French authors, however. A look at the twelfth- j
century texts of a Celtic rendition of an older Celtic tale,;
the Tochmarc Etaine. "The Wooing of Etain," reveals that the
Irish audience apparently did not understand or held of
minor importance the pagan meaning of the story, which
revolves around transmigration of souls and the expiation
in one life for the wrongs committed in the previous incar
nation. In the various manuscripts, the names and incidents
are juggled around enough to suggest that the pagan meaning,
if known at all, was considered subordinate to the lyrical
aspects of the story, and details in the story which acci
dentally happen to sound like stock details in the twelfth-
century romances (e.g., Aillil's "courtly" love affair with
Etain). In this last respect, it is important to note that
one of the poems in Tochmarc Etaine contains several lines
which are hostile to Christian notions of sin and morality;
this may well mean that the references to sin and guilt
spoken by Lanval's and Desire's mistresses may have had a
specific referent in the Celtic source, and not at all be
the addition of a twelfth-century Anglo-French
moralizer.
But there are two other factors in the handling of
Celtic source materials which throw even more of a burden of
responsibility on the authors' and readers' interpretive
powers— traditional symbolism, and the mere evocative power
of the description of an incident aside from its technical
magic meaning. All of the twelfth-century artists— both
Celtic and Anglo-French— would have been familiar with a
wide variety of Christian symbolism in the form of allegori
cal interpretations of the scriptures, bestiaries, lapi
daries, and the type of exempla later collected as the Gesta
3
There is no definitive edition or single English
translation of Tochmarc Etaine. Osborn Bergin and R. I.
Best present the text of the best single manuscript, with an
English translation, in Eriu, XII, pt. 2 (1938), 137-196.
The Irish texts of the other manuscripts are edited by Ernst
Windisch in his irische Texte (Leipzig, 1880), pp. 113-133.
A rather stuffy translation of these other texts can be
found in A. H. Leahy, Heroic Romances of Ireland (London,
1905). Volume I, pages 1-34 contain the full translation,
and volume II, pages 143-161 contain an interlinear transla
tion of the climactic scenes. One must read all of these to
get the full sense of the variation in handling and meaning.
The best text of Mider's anti-Christian lyric "Fair Lady,
will you go with me?" is contained in Gerard Murphy's Early
Irish Lyrics (Oxford, 1956), pp. 104-107. An even greater
sense of the similarity between the Breton Lay and the Irish
tales can be derived from reading a number of the tales in a
book like Tom cross and Clark Slover's Ancient Irish Tales
(New York, 1936); here one can see how one tale is made to
blend to the tradition by the addition of a brief version of
some background tales, e.g. the variant Etaine attached to
the beginning of The Destruction of Da Perga's Hostel.
143 |
Romanorum. Could anyone in the twelfth century, hearing of j
a person prohibited from eating, fail to think of Adam; and
could anyone, hearing of the person eating forbidden fruit,
refrain from interpreting it the way it was common to
interpret Genesis, as referring to apples and innocence?
And it is generally agreed among Chrestien scholars that
while Chrestien did not understand the Celtic meanings of
his mysterious objects and actions, still he understood them
to be symbolic and derived a meaning for them from their
very appearance and function, so that, for example, the
pouring of water from Laudine's fountain on a stone becomes
a breach of the castle's water rights, and The Joy of the
Court, quite aside from its Celtic death ritual origins, is
interpreted as a grove of death simply because Erec and many
4
brave knights face death there. So, one must assume that
when the author of a Breton Lay encountered in his source a
magic boat, it must have seemed to him to be representative
of just a long journey or that metaphorical long journey to
a Christian death, rather than the means of reaching the
Celtic land of the fairies.
4
Another obvious example of both points is Chrestien's
handling of the "grail," bleeding lance, etc. but this is
too complicated and controversial to handle completely here.
; 144
Thus, it behooves us to investigate each lay carefully
. I
to find how the author felt about the material, and we must i
suppose that he may have intended symbolism at any point and
that he could not have helped being aware of accidental
parallels between incidents and descriptions in his Celtic
source and common Christian lore.
Unlike any of the other four lays, Guinqamor seems to
be concerned with genuine innocence and its death; appropri
ately, it is the only one of the four which is largely
tragic in tone.
Guingamor is the king's nephew and adopted son, both
relationships favoring his youth. The seneschal throws his
arms around Guingamor's shoulders, a sign of affection and
intimacy most fitting for a young man who has been raised in
the seneschal's care and knowledge.
But aside from these suggestions of physical youth,
Guingamor is truly innocent. When the queen sends for him
and has him sit beside her, he cannot understand what she
may want. Even after her first verbal sally against him, he
does not realize what she wants and replies simply that he
has never had a lover (another suggestion of youth). The
queen calls him shy and begs him to be her lover, but he
still, after thought* thinks she means a platonic love.
When she finally kisses him, he is ashamed and blushes,
leaving angrily, when he returns to the game of tables, he
is so disturbed and shaken by the incident that he does not
even notice the maid's putting his cloak back on him. His
reactions in this incident are characteristic of immaturity
and inexperience, especially by comparison with Graelent-
mor's courtly, rhetorical, yet knowing parries of his
queen's advances, or Lanval's momentary loss of temper which
is followed by his gaining repossession of his sense of
balance.
The queen in Guingamor is also depicted as a woman who
is, if not entirely innocent, at least basically good and
only tricked by circumstance. She is on her way to church
when she sees Guingamor; it is only a coincidental ray of
I
sunlight that gives his face an attractive color and high-
5
lights it so that her attention is caught. When Guingamor
appears before her for an interview, as it were, she is
delicate and cautious, at first being careful to allow him
5
Stefan Hofer's assumption of a necessary borrowing of
the beam of light on the lover's face from Tristan seems
additionally feeble because the detail grows so logically
out of the context here (Guingamor being bled, etc.).
146
to keep his lover if he has one, and then, when he has con
fessed his inexperience, she offers her true love with a
gentle regard for his shyness.
Verifying this impression of the queen as basically a
good woman appears to be a major function of the episode
with the mantle. If we compare this episode with that of
Joseph and Potiphar1s wife (Genesis 39:7-20), which it cer
tainly must have recalled to any Christian audience, we see
immediately that the queen is quite the opposite of the
lecherous wife. Potiphar's wife has pursued young Joseph
day after day despite his refusals; she seizes his clothes
first, before her bald request, "Lie with me!" and as soon
£
as he has fled, leaving his shift in her hand, she calls
the men of the house and accuses Joseph on the spot. The
queen's behavior differs in precisely the points that make
the wife seem most cunning and evil. This is the first time
the queen has spoken to Guingamor, and she begins with
6
The Biblical suggestion is that Joseph in the hot
Egyptian climate was wearing only one garment, so that he
fled naked; thus Joseph's "garment" would provide much more
likely, incriminating evidence for a charge of rape. If we
could assume that the northern, ahistorical medieval mind
had understood this, we might assume that this is another
example of the author’s conscious modification of details to
decrease the sinful implications of his incident.
! 147
i
jutmost politeness and delicacy; she graps his mantle only
when he has first shown his anger, confusion and shame—
reactions not wholly justifiable by courtly codes of the
Middle Ages— and she grasps it in an attempt to hold him
back presumably to "explain things" to him as she had done
twice before when he responded in an ingenuous rather than
a courtly fashion to her discreet— by courtly standards—
proposals. Her first reaction after Guingamor's flight is
not one ox malice towards him, but rather of concern for her
husband; she fears that Guingamor will gauchely tell his
uncle what has happened and thereby cause unseemly scandal
by publicly indicting her of attempted adultery. The pawn
in their relationship is the cloak, which she could use as
Potiphar's wife did— especially since, as a good Christian,
she must have known the Genesis story— but she chooses not
to; she sends the mantle back to him, presumably as a token
of good will, as a formal rejection of the role of
7
Potiphar1s wife.
But Guingamor is too nervously preoccupied to realize
what is happening, and consequently he does not reply to her
7
A similar set of observations could be made concerning
the phaedra-Hippolytus affair, but the medieval audience
would be less likely to have that story in mind.
I 148
igesture, so that she must assume that he still holds a j
j i
grudge against her— and unjustly by her standards. The signi
i
to the audience of Guingamor's intrinsic goodness and his
possible "education" to a fulfillment of the chivalric code,
is the fact that he does not consider accusing her to the
king; but she cannot know that, and therefore she must
attempt to get rid of him in order to insure his silence and
prevent future blackmail, thus protecting the seemly stand
ing of the queen of the realm and the welfare of the whole
kingdom.
The means she chooses to be rid of him again under
scores her basically kind nature. She could, like Guinevere
in Lanval. attempt to degrade him to criminal status, or
like the queen of Graelentmor. dishonor him by general
slander; but instead, she chooses to challenge him to
attempt a glorious feat which, especially considering his
inexperience, will probably end in his disappearance, but
which will, in any case, place his name among the "best ten
8
knights" who have attempted the feat before.
8
By medieval standards (cf., for example, Chaucer's
"Knight's Tale") the glorious death while engaged in fitting
deeds would have been an honorable, seemly, fulfilling
destiny. I
! 149
This carefully constructed conflict between two basi- j
i
cally good people who are brought into a crucial, destruc- j
^ j
tive pass by circumstance— the ray of light— and minor flaws’
in behavior creates much of the tragic tone for the open
ing of the lay.
Guingamor, with genuine immaturity— i.e. a lack of
knowledge and experience of the dangers involved, reckless
self-confidence,— plays along with the queen's calculating
challenge and attempts the foolhardy hunt. The long de
scription of the hunt exudes an atmosphere of confusion and
excitement which must mirror Guingamor's delight in the
hunt— a mindless delight to a large degree, it would seem,
for he is still— despite his uncle's warnings about the
tragic legend, his aunt's connivings, and the people's
laments— thinking to catch the boar.
The agitation of the chase adds, by contrast, even more
feeling of serene calm to the description of the deserted
castle. This unearthly, impossibly costly yet undefiled
palace with no living soul in it, with the "jewels of
paradise" (1. 391) forming its walls must represent Death
for the twelfth-century Anglo-French author as surely as the
castle was an "otherworld" dwelling in Celtic legend. Yet
IGuingamor's reaction to this phenomenal mystery is again
;an immature response, for he fails to comprehend the
possible implications or results of the situation; he is
i
actually happy because he thinks he has found merely a good j
story to tell back home, and he still assumes blindly that
he will return. It is only after he finds that he has lost
the boar's trace that he first realizes the whole affair may
go awry and he may not be able to return at all; and even
this realization he expresses in a charmingly juvenile
fashion— by ranking the fabulous green marble palace of
Death as a mere "maison" and claiming that the chance to see
it was worth less than hunting a boar.
The resumption of the hunt leads this time to the pool
with gold and silver gravel where the lady is bathing. The
repetition of the same change of tone from the excited chase
to a serene and magical locale reinforces our sense of
mystery about the lady and predicts her later association
with the deserted castle. Like the castle, the lady is more
beautiful than anything in the ordinary world, but again
Guingamor does not evaluate the remarkable qualities ade
quately. He quickly hides her clothes just to keep her
there until he can return; there seems to be little or no
malice or prurience in his action, merely an artless
^expedient. j
j 151 1
! !
; I
j The lady asserts her dominant personality at once by |
commanding him haughtily to return her clothes, and by
' i
chiding him, as one might scold a child, for a prank that
God and his fellow knights would consider a misdeed.
Guingamor's reaction to her authority is manifested in her
phrase, "Venez avant; n'aiez esfroi" (1. 453), which tells
us that he has apparently cowered back in confusion or
fright. The lady capitalizes further on her superior posi
tion by commanding him to stay with her and taunting his
failure at hunting. Guingamor returns her clothes with
simple politeness, and thanks her for her offer, but
explains that he wants to continue his hunt (a repetition of
his earlier response to the castle). Again she demonstrates
her command of the situation by informing him that she con
trols his hunt and so he may as well obey her, in return for
which she will later supply him with the lost boar and
hounds. His acceptance of her offer represents his complete
submission to her power, and a rejection of the simple codes
of masculine prowess and honor which seem to have promoted
i
his earlier susceptibility to the challenge and devotion to
the hunt. But at the same time that he relinquishes the
rigid and simplistic right/wrong, good/bad codes of child-
jhood, he begins to accept the more complicated, subtler i
jcodes of chivalry and courtliness— -the adult world. Thus,
the pact with the otherworldly lady represents, ambivalent
ly, both death and initiation. Once he has made the first
step toward a complex relationship, he is able for the first
time to begin to care for a woman, and shortly thereafter he!
is asking her to be his lover so that a second pact results.
The author (or perhaps the MS. S scribe) modestly
switches the scene from the lovers' first embraces to the
maid, who rides ahead to prepare' the castle, which is
suddenly filled with hundreds of people, including the ten
knights who were lost on previous hunts of the white boar.
The fact that all these "lost" people now appear in the
castle and Guingamor can see them and be one of them objec
tifies the change that has taken place in his life.
The love of the lady and Guingamor is not really men
tioned again (perhaps due to the meddling scribe?) but the
evocation of a continual round of sensual delight sustains
9
the image of pleasure. Furthermore, the fantastic wealth
9
We must suppose that in the original pagan religion
behind this mythic tale, the water spirit functioned as does
many a combination sex-death goddess such as the Sumerian-
Babylonian innana-lshtar of the Gilgamesh epic who takes
leach new hero as her lover. One is reminded of Gilgamesh’s
failure to stay awake and guard his flower of immortality,
I too. But our Anglo-French author fails to suggest whether |
‘ the -other tenkn-ights-wer-egiven such an-amorous .reception. ;
153
and joy of the people suggest paradise strongly, a feeling
that is reinforced by our previous perception of the magic
palace and by the sharp juxtaposition with the image of the
total destruction of the world that Guingamor had known.
Guingamor's failure to accept his lover's word for the
passage of time and the death of his former way of life con
stitutes an entirely understandable lapse into his former
way of thinking; for despite all the strange beauty of the
lady's realm, one might easily be tempted to disbelieve
partially in such total magic, and desire to return to his
former world just for a peek.
The return is the crucial test of Guingamor's develop
ment both in terms of the Death and the initiation imagery—
for the one a representation of how well he has overcome his
basic mortal ties, for the other a representation of how
well he has understood and passed beyond his "recent"
innocence. The charge that the lover places on him not to
eat or drink mortal food crystallizes this ambivalence,
since hunger is a prime mortal characteristic, and the food
he will eat will be the apples of Christian innocence-
symbology.
The focus of the narrative switches soon to the
jCharcoal Man whose lonely job turning dead wood into ashes |
again manages to create a mood of foreboding and death.
i
Aside from the Charcoal Man1s function of creating atmo
sphere, the idea of telling the final portion of the story—
Guingamor's painful sense of loss, his terrifying debilita
tion into a 300-year-old man, and the tenderness of his
rescue by his lover and her maid— through the eyes of a
stranger avoids a potential embarrassingly sentimental con
clusion, and at the same time it both forms a clever transi
tion into the formula ending which insists on the validity
of the story and keeps the crucial, meaningful climax of the
story wisely close to the limits of human perception, is
Guingamor to be changed back into a young man by his lover?
Can man triumph over death and the death of innocence?
These questions remain tense and unanswered as they do to
mankind in general, while the author, with great honesty,
admits that what man knows of immortality is mortal fame and
longing. The boar and the boar's head, then, become the
culminating symbols of the tale, since the boar is ambiv
alently an object of food— and hence a reminder of the
grosser, physical aspects of man, including sexuality— and a
source of prowess and fame, the only kind of immortality of
which man has proof. The author has brought both levels of
his tale, in perfect balance, to rest. j
155
The great vitality of Guingamor derives, I feel, from |
i |
two sources— the author's ability to evoke moods and atmo-
1 I
spheres which give the reader an intense sensation of the
incidents in the story, and the delicate, well-controlled
balance between the two suggested interpretations of the
story. On one level we understand a story of a young man
who experiences an initiation into the complexities of a
sensual, adult world, and succeeds in transmuting the vigor
of his innocence into something vital in his new life; but
when, years later, he realizes how far he has come away from
his innocence, and how little he has accomplished in the
< < •
lifetime which seemed to pass like a few days, then he
suffers a painful sense of old age, of mortality and of a
futility which renders him weak and useless, and which can, :
perhaps, be somewhat soothed and smoothed over by the
spectres of success and happiness. On another level, we
understand the story of a young man who faces death at first'
with foolish, uncomprehending bravado, then with a blind
faith in magic salvation, and finally with a painful under
standing of the utter transience of earthly life.
There is perhaps another level of meaning behind
Guingamor, an anthropological interpretation based on
|Jungian archetypes. This kind of interpretation, insofar j
las it appears valid, is especially applicable to Guingamor
I
because of the author1s exploitation of the suggestive pos- I
sibilities of atmosphere and symbol. Dell Skeels' evalua
tion of the Guerrehes episode from The First Continuation of
Chrestien's 'Perceval' identifies an Oedipal triangle be
tween the young knight (Guingamor's grandson), his fatherly
challenger, and his beautiful, and magic young mother (who,
it seems, might even by Guingamor's lover, and hence, in
human terms, Guerrehes' grandmother as well as his
mother).^ in one sense, Guingamor can be seen as a varia
tion of this same triangle. Guingamor's uncle, his effec
tive father, is apparently (or effectively) impotent in that
he is unable to have a child, and the "mother figure" turns
to the "son" for sexual love when he is too young, and con
sequently incapable of satisfying response. But she repeats
her challenge and he finally accepts. The three-fold
repetition of the forest-castle sequence suggests their
changing relationship (the authoritarian lady is certainly
a dedoublement of the "mother" seen in the new sexual con
text)— first the exploratory venture, then the confirmation
■^"Guingamor and Guerrehes: Psychological Symbolism in
a Medieval Romance," in The Anthropologist Looks at Myth,
ed. Melville Jacobs and John Greenway, pp. 52-83. j
pf a continuing sexual relationship, and finally the recog
nition of the "crime" involved in the death-by-replacement
of the "father." An adequate study of this aspect of the
Breton Lays would have to be undertaken by an expert in
jungian psychology and anthropology, and so is beyond the
scope of our particular study; however, the possibility of
these archetypal patterns should be mentioned.
Instead of the innocence-Death motifs as in Guingamor,
the dominant theme in Graelentmor is the tension between
surface appearances and genuine, underlying values.
The king retains Graelentmor as a knight because he
proves a good fighter; the queen falls in love with his
reputation. She tells her chamberlain about her intention
to take Graelentmor as a lover, and the chamberlain replies
with an ambivalent, flattering speech which either indicates
the false extravagance of courtly manners, or if he is
sincere, indicates that he truly loves the queen and she is
being consciously cruel to flaunt her love affairs to him
(and the casualness with which she tells him suggests that
this is not the first time she has had a lover). in either
case, the officious way in which she announces her projected
adultery helps to raise the question of the sincerity and
social propriety of her behavior— even allowing for the j
Courtly standards of the day, which might have excused one j
lover. !
The chamberlain and Graelent are all manners: he
greets Graelent "avenanment" and Graelent calls him "biaus
amis chiers." After the queen has embraced Graelent for
welcome, the author tells us that "she spoke to him quite
simply, but he answered her courteously without saying
anything satisfying to her." Then the author supplies an
example: the queen, with an egoism that reinforces the
unpleasant officiousness of her treatment of the chamber-
lain, wonders why he is not begging for her love, and asks
him point blank why he does not. He responds with a thirty-
four line speech ornamented with such rhetorical flourishes
as enumeration, allusion, parallelism, and careful balance
of phrases. The subject of his lecture is the proper con
duct of a love affair, and he intimates, since it is also a
formal refusal of her offer, that she is pretty but false,
unchaste, and in various other ways shallow. He has under
stood her and her purpose immediately and completely. The
author stresses again after the speech that Graelent spoke
"cortoisement."
Graelent's implications about the queen's shallowness
jare reinforced by the author's next comment: even if she i
159
had not loved him before, his courtly speech would have con
vinced her. Then she goes on to reveal that, trite as it
was, she did not fully understand the implications of the
speech, for she claims to love him "quite perfectly" and
insists she has never loved anyone except her "seignor."
The use of this term was as tactless as possible, for it
must remind Graelent of his complicated feudal relationship
which would be violated by the proposed liaison. On another
level, however, Graelent's new objection is not valid, since
the codes of courtly love which he was mouthing a few
minutes earlier do not preclude a love between a lady and
her husband's vassal, if the affiliations between the three
people remain properly balanced in respect to sincerity,
external propriety, and loyalty. When Graelent has made
this last, formal rejection, he "takes leave of her," and
goes, presumably in cool, polite form.
The queen's reaction to this rejection is rather like
that of Potiphar's wife: after a few conventional sighs,
she begins to bombard Graelent with further requests and
presents via messenger; when Graelent continues to refuse
her offers and bribes, she suddenly "hates him very much,"
and slanders him to her husband for revenge. This cool and
clean switch from love to hate essentially belies her j
160
i
i
earlier contention that she loved him truly and completely
j ' j
for, as everyone in the Middle Ages knew, true love was
ended only by death, and rejected love demanded faithful
and silent suffering.
The nature of the queen's slander is evident, if not
istated formally. She advises the king to give him just
enough equipment so that he could go on fighting for the
king, but he could not afford to desert and swear allegiance
to the enemy; therefore she probably accused him of weakness
of fidelity in regards to that very bond of social
allegiance which he invoked in refusing her "love."
Furthermore, it is unlikely that the king would believe her
unless she were in his confidence and favor (which weakens
her reasons for taking a lover) and also unless the king had
some other evidence for suspecting that Graelent1s oaths and
behavior were more superficial than genuine, and likely not
to be honored.
The episode with the bourgeois's daughter again raises
the issue of underlying versus surface values. Graelent's
hosts, although technically of a lower social class, now
have more money than Graelent and their daughter is
"courtoise," i.e., learned in courtly manners. Yet Graelent|
j(perhaps the first of a tradition of knights in reduced j
161
bircumstances which includes Lazarillo de Tormes1 squire)
refuses to accept her dinner invitation and pretends he is
not hungry, because, presumably, it is beneath his station
to owe all his sustenance to a lower-class person (he will
have been officially billeted at their home so he will not
owe them rent, although he would be expected to show
"largesce"). Yet Graelent's denial of hunger is basically
dishonest and skirts the main issue, namely, that the in
junction against indebtedness to a bourgeois is only the
surface requirement of a much more profound injunction that
the good knight should never allow himself to sink into such
a state of deprivation in which he needs to accept any long
term charity, when Graelent issues orders to saddle his
"chaceor" (while he has no saddle and only a "roncin") he is:
again on the borderline of dishonesty and ostentation. The
girl proves her courtly graciousness by covering up the
squire's blunt reply, "N'a point de sele" with an offer to
let him use her accoutrements. When Graelent rides through
the streets of the town dressed in an old hide, and allows
the people to joke at him, the question of his pride and his
position is critical. Why has he let himself fall so low?
And why is he pretending to be so dignified when his condi-
jtion is in fact laughable? Does his ignoring of the jeers j
162 |
1
make them less valid? clearly Graelent has not come to j
terms with the tension between surface appearances and
codes, and the deeper meanings they imply or command. He
seems to assume that the ceremony of knighthood has endowed
him with certain qualities of dignity without his further
effort, overlooking the fact that knighthood was earned by
service and that the dubbing ceremony itself is an oath to
continuous striving. Were he truly worthy, the momentary
condition of embarrassment (cf. Chrestien's Lancelot! would
be of little import, and moreover were he truly worthy, he
would be active in making the embarrassment temporary rather
than succumbing to passive pretense. This escapism is, how
ever, precisely his reaction to his situation. He wanders
alone in the woods; he pretends he is not hungry, and he
doesn't hear jibes.
Graelent begins hunting the white doe, a creature whose
rare surface qualities could perhaps bring him renown and
■release from his reduced circumstances, but he drops his
attention from hunting as soon as he sees the lady. Further
more, his reaction to the lady is the passive and "immoral"
one of the voyeur: the author tells us that Graelent does
not want to touch her while she is still in the water;
jrather, he wants to watch her finish bathing, and he even s
| ' 163
steals her clothing in order to detain her as well as to
keep her nude as long as possible. ^
The lady's response to Graelent's action strikes
sharply at the issues raised in the tale so far: the lady
assesses Graelent— of whom she presumably knows since she
calls him by name— on both internal and external qualities
and finds them, unfortunately, equivalent and negative— he
is dressed like a man of the lower classes and his behavior
smacks of lower class behavior, that is, he seems to lack an
instinctive manner which is dignified and kindly. Graelent's
answer bears out her assumption, for he speaks without
verbal respect or courtliness and insists on forcing the
lady into a compromising and embarrassing situation— some
thing a good knight would never do. The lady assesses this,
also, saying that he means to "seize" her, that he uses
unseemly speech, and that he belongs to a different class
from her. Again Graelent fails to accept her challenge to-
behave properly; his reply, "I can wait," stresses his power|
over her, and his blatantly sexual remark, "You have a good !
body," compounds the insulting tone of his earlier address.
■^While there may be undertones of an older Celtic
caution against touching water spirits, the Graelent author
iseems to have interpreted it only in human terms.
j 164
Realizing that he does have her in his power, but that no
self-respecting gentleman would use his power over a
defenseless lady, she again appeals to his sense of honor
by making him swear not to harm her. He allows her to
dress, but one can hardly imagine that he did so without
forcing her to expose herself to further lascivious glances.
Then, despite his lowly attire, of which any good knight
would be ashamed, and despite her obvious unwillingness, he
begs her to be his lover, using, one gathers, the formal
request of which he must have learned the words but not the
meaning. Her reprimand that he should not dare to address
her thus since it is unseemly for someone of his rank to
love someone of hers, ought to strike shame into the heart
of a decent knight. But instead, his patience exhausted,
Graelent rapes her, and thus establishes his ultimate
removal from the proper behavior of a knight.
Now the picture of Graelent presented so far has been
one of an insolent and unworthy knight who behaved badly at
most turns, but the fact remains that he is a knight and
12
there is a great deal of potential in him. He may have
12
Although no formal study has suggested that there
might have been a formal and consistent knowledge of such a !
philosophical tradition among the lower echelons of the
165
applied his knowledge of courtly rituals poorly, but he does)
• i
have this knowledge. His self-pity and false pride are an !
unpleasant mask, but they do hide a little bit of caution
and courtesy in his relations with the bourgeois' daughter.
And most important, despite all his infractions of the
polite love codes, he apparently does love the lady, for
instead of the violent violation and mocking escape of a
common rapist, Graelent makes pleasant and skillful love to
her and then remains to ask her again to be his lover. It
is this basic nobility and potential (along, we assume, with
the "good love" and the controlled, manly vigor used in
Anglo-Norman literary world in the twelfth century, the
principle that appears to be governing Graelentmor is the
concept of "The Great Chain of Being" as outlined by Arthur
Lovejoy's The Great chain of Being (New York, 1960), or more
particularly by E. M. Tillyard in his Elizabethan World
Picture (New York, 1944). When Graelent is surrounded by
the order of the battle, he is a good and orderly knightj
when he is confronted by the corruption of his queen, he
begins to be corrupted himself; and when Graelent is con
fronted with the further disorder of the now corrupted
king's refusal to honor his feudal obligation to pay
Graelent, then Graelent sinks into complete decay. The Lady
reinstates the natural and proper order by supplying
Graelent with the means of reestablishing his proper role in
society. But the queen still needs some correction, and her
shamed modesty at the trial's conclusion provides the rein- !
statement of the ideal, natural order. This interpretation i
does not at all conflict with the one followed in the main
’ text, but rather adds richer, metaphysical dimensions to it.
making it) that the lady recognizes and admires, and so she
consent to be his lover, when this previously perceptive
and honest woman says that she loves him "entirely" or
"truly," we must believe her.
The charge that the lady places on Graelent to keep
itheir love secret takes on a special, culminative signifi
cance. She offers to supply him with the accoutrements to
maintain the outward appearance of a good knight, and she
offers to supply him with the perfect love which must be
maintained carefully on an inward level. Thus she is
charging him to keep his life in perfect balance, or as she
says, "Mais or soies de grant mesure" ("But now behave with
great restraint [or moderation or balance]"). n o w Graelent
!
responds to his "second chance" by beginning to behave as a
knight should— dispensing gifts liberally, and placing first
in all the tournaments— and thus "earning" the large amount
of help his mistress provided for him.
Graelent has yet, however, to pass his greatest test.
The bourgeoisie will honor him just because he has more i
money than they do, but what about his peers? The test of
this occurs at the Pentecost feast when he is forced into a i
dilemma by the king's demand that everyone say whether the
queen is the most beautiful or not. This is, of course, a
1 * t
I 167
| . !
Question of surface value— especially since we know already,j
' |
along with Graelent, that the queen is not a very profound |
person— and Graelent is forced to make a moral decision
whether to dissimulate, pretending to agree with the general
opinion of the queen's beauty (which, by the way, would seem;
to be the unrivaled winner in the ordinary public world,
since the lady exists only in Graelent's private world), or
to disagree and place his relationship with his mistress in
danger. Since his mistress is his strictly personal fancy,
and since the king's treatment of his wife is in itself
questionable by courtly standards, the decision to dissimu
late would not only be wiser but also quite defensible.
Graelent chooses to be scrupulously honest, or perhaps just
cannot repress his laughter and thus fails in control
(mesure) even if not in judgment.
Appropriately, his error is punished not just by the
king's trial, but also by the lady's removal of those
external tokens of knighthood which she had given Graelent
earlier. Graelent again shows his strength and weakness— on!
one hand he remains faithful in his love for the lady,
refusing to reveal further details about their liaison, even;
though they might help to exonerate him, but on the other
! t
hand he again sinks into a state of passive lamentation and j
! 168 |
privation; this time, of course, the lamentations are more j
respectable since he has lost his true love. At his trial !
i
he is accused of having behaved like a peasant, but his dig-;
nified silence at the trial itself belies this as a consis
tent trait, it is for this reason that the lady appears—
that Graelent's honesty might be vindicated and the queen's
false pride be scourged— but hot as a token of her forgive
ness; she is careful in her statement so that the defense
may note that he is guilty of some transgressions, if not of
others.
This duality or ambivalence in the lady's attitudes
sums up the tension between surface values and deeper
values. The whole trial is the result of a contest which
rests on surface appearances rather than on underlying
issues, yet Graelent is essentially being accused of viola
tion of the oaths of chivalry, the most profound and meaning^-
ful issue of his society. Because of the nature of the
;trial situation, however, it is possible for the lady to
appear and exonerate him of the superficial violation with
out denying his guilt in the deeper matters. Thus in the
trial, as in life in general, an active and unreasonable
^ balance prevails between external signs and internal values; !
jthe signs do not always communicate fully or accurately the j
i 169 I
t I
i i
j I
values they mask, yet the judgments of the world must be i
made on the basis of these signs since they are usually the !
only evidence available concerning the nature of values.
But for the good knight, sigjjs and values become two sepa
rate and equally important issues— he must manipulate the
signs to avoid casting any unseemly doubts on his courtly
propriety, and he must be sure that his values are noble at
all times. Graelent is guilty of failing to maintain any
balance between these two objectives, and his society will
not forgive him for this.
But Graelent can redeem himself partially, since his
lover would naturally forgive some flaws in his behavior if
his basic nobility were strong enough. Graelent's attempt
to cross the river, then, stands as a final, crucial test
of his mettle. The lady makes it clear to him that he will
die if he tries to cross, yet he insists on braving it, thus
proving under the most difficult circumstances his loyalty
and courage. It is when the maids remind the lady that she
would be showing pettiness and cruelty to refuse such devo
tion that she relents and reaccepts him as her lover.
Graelent's steed functions rather as the boar's head
did in Guinqamor— to crystallize the issues of the poem in a
single symbolic object. The steed is the sign of knightly j
170
j I
iprowess, and earlier its absence from Graelent's household i
was the measure of his shame. As a noble animal, it is
capable of the same kind of loyalty and anguish that its
master is, and when its master is translated into the mystic
land of the lady, the steed takes over its master's earthly
story by suffering and dying in the nearby forest (as an
ordinary mortal might well have done) with a grief that is
at once unseemly and beautiful.
The steed also serves to hold the focus of the tale in
the forest for a moment longer, which is significant to
Graelentmor1s gross structure. At first, Graelent assumed
that surface formality would suffice him for behavior, but
it failed to do so in his encounters with the queen, who,
like him, lacked the internal consistency to back up the
formalities. Stripped of the outward tokens of his noble
station, he wins a lover in the forest on the basis of his
deeper natural values as a noble man. Then he returns to
polite society and tries to apply his deeper honesty to
superficial situations like the beauty contest, and by this :
error of judgment loses not only the admiration of society,
but also that of his lover. Yet finally he is able to prove
his basic worth to the lover back in the forest where they
presumably remain. Thus we have four trials in two
[sequences— castle/forest, castle/forest— of which Graelent
i
fails both castle-society tests and wins both forest-love
tests. Graelent, then, is a second-rate knight who is
intrinsically noble but who fails to achieve consistent
social competence; but in the world of love, where the
externals are least important, he is more successful and
finds his eventual destiny.
Graelentmor could easily be a much more profound poem
if the author had exploited more fully the metaphysical
overtones of the society-forest tension, or of the other
worldly mistress who seems to exist for Graelent alone. As
it stands, then, this lay is a modest if complex one, not
equal to the scope and finish of Guingamor. It is adequate
ly portrayed, with no excess of superfluous or decorative
materials; everything counts toward expressing the unfor
tunately somewhat limited theme.
When approaching Lanval after Guingamor and Graelent
mor , it is a great temptation to dismiss it as a poorly
motivated, merely decorative poem, for the most striking
point about Lanval, at first, is the coincidental, disuni-
fied nature of its plot. It is Arthurian, but Arthur seems
to have nothing to do with it; whereas Graelent lost his
; 172
| I
jwages as a result of the queen's slander, Lanval loses his !
for an unknown reason; whereas Guingamor and Graelent both j
find their fairy mistresses as the result of a well-
motivated hunt, Lanval's mistress just appears magically
while he by chance is lounging around in the forest. Clear
ly, Lanval lacks the kind of unity and linear psychological
development in which the two other lays excel.
I suggest, however, that the artistry behind Lanval is
directed in another channel, that Marie was not trying to
construct a "well-made" lay, but rather was trying— as she
did in Chevrefoil— to construct a short tale using something
like the entrelacement principle usually associated with the
longer thirteenth-century romances, namely an interweaving
of incidents in which the meaning is derived from the juxta
position with the total context of the legend rather than
13
from any consistent, unified pattern. Whereas the
thirteenth-century romances had a great bulk of material to
draw upon for juxtaposition and counter-juxtaposition, the
relatively brief Lanval relies upon allusion and the sense
of coincidence and illogic in order to make the audience
aware of parallel meaningful situations. \
| I
13
I Eugene Vinaver, Form and Meaning in Medieval Romance.
i 173 |
| |
! Lanval begins with an invocation of Arthur's wars j
against the Piets and the Scots. Hoepffner has shown that
Marie quite likely "borrowed" these details from Wace, and
suggests that she did so to glamorize an older story and
make it more fashionable, since the Arthurian literature
of Wace and chrestien was apparently the rage in the late
14
twelfth century. I would suggest that on the contrary
Marie is alluding to a specific incident in the Arthurian
cycle— and why not Wace's popular, available version?— in
order to annex the audience's knowledge of the Arthurian
legends for the purpose of providing a net of materials for
her story to rest upon. Arthur's battles against the Piets
and Scots point up the unreasoning powers in the world, for
the great Arthur, spreader of peace, wealth, and Christian
ity, is being threatened and rejected by the wild and
ruinous men of another country. At the same time, of
course, these dark and wild, foreign forces are trying to
recapture parts of their former homeland, and this reminds
us of Arthur's great desmesure of wanting to rule the whole j
14
La geographie et l’histoire dans les Lais de Marie
de France," Romania, LVI (1930), 1-32, cf. also Roger
Loomis, Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, pp. 117-
120. |
I
I
world when he could not even rule his own wife. So we are j
alerted, by this one allusion, to three problems or themes:
(1) the tension between constructive and destructive ele
ments in society, (2) the relativity of society, in which
distance and relocation change values, and (3) the tendency <
of even great men to succumb to desmesure. These same
themes will reoccur later in the tale, and each will, upon
occasion, provide meaning.
The first thing we learn about Lanval is that he was
the only one of Arthur's knights who was not well paid; the
fact that no reason is offered for this treatment suggests
to us the corruption of Arthur's court, and this is borne
out immediately by the indication that many men at the court
pretend to like Lanval but secretly they are jealous and
would be glad to see him die. Interwoven with these lines
dealing with Lanval*s wages (11. 18-26 and 30-32) are two
passages announcing Lanval as a foreigner: Lanval is of the
king's house in another land and, by implication, such
treatment would not occur there; furthermore, the author
stresses, the stranger in a foreign land is always lonely
and helpless. Thus we have the themes mentioned above
reannounced.
175
Lanval's response to his misfortunes is withdrawal— he
wanders by himself in the woods. There he is greeted by a
magic force which is a function of the positive aspects of
foreign lands and being a foreigner, namely the possibility
of "far-flung fame" and aid from distant quarters— the woman;
has heard of Lanval and comes from afar to be his lover.
However, there is also a catch to the woman's love: it must
remain secret and foreign or it will be corrupted and de
stroyed by evil influences. Thus the foreign lover becomes
the stranger's private and secret world, a world so rich and
strange it seems almost symbolic of the creative imagina
tion .
The garden scene plays upon the positive and negative
aspects of society in the way that the previous scenes had
played upon the positive and negative aspects of foreign
ness. Gawain's sense of social courtesy and propriety—
which does bridge the foreignness gap and recognize Lanval
as a prince— causes him to want to invite Lanval to their
recreation. Once there, however, Lanval is confronted with
the somewhat negative image of the unfaithful queen. His
rather tactless terms of refusal bring to mind the fact that
indeed the queen's unfaithfulness will play a role in the
eventual destruction of Arthur and his kingdom. This idea
jis reinforced by the desmesure of both the queen and Lanval;j
both lose their tempers and insult each other in what con-
t
stitutes a complete misuse of social courtesy. It is only
in an attempt to degrade the queen that Lanval mentions his
secret lover. So both of them are right and wrong at the
same time— just as both Arthur and the Pict-Scot invaders
were— and both of them deserve some punishment, which is
provided through the structure of the trial.
Beyond its literal meaning, however, the trial gains
power and significance from the fact that it is, on one
level, a reenactment of the first half of the tale done in
reverse. Lanval begins as he had ended the first half of
the tale, as a foreigner alone in a corrupt society.
Arthur's anger is excessive, and the trial would never have
taken place, the author implies, if Lanval were not a for
eigner; but at the same time, Gawain and the knights side
with him just as they had chosen to invite him earlier.
Finally, the mistress appears to the court in all the mystic
and majestic glory with which she had earlier appeared to
Lanval alone: now the foreigner is vindicated by proof that
his own land has things as brilliant as his present resi
dence. This reverse process gives a sense of implied logic j
to the tale: Lanval gets himself into a situation, Lanval
yrorks himself out of the situation.
!
The final incident of the lay connects with the opening;
allusion to Arthur's court. We know that the brilliance of
the mistress cannot survive in the corrupting influence of
society, and so both Lanval and his mistress withdraw to a
foreign land. The vital issues of whether the mistress for
gave Lanval completely and whether their love could survive
in the foreign society remain ambiguous; this reinforces in
our minds the comparison with Arthur himself who, after
defeat, ambiguously vanished also to Avalon, perhaps to
return.
From this summary, it would seem that the meaning of
Lanval is much looser and less specific than that of the
more unified Guingamor and Graelentmor, which is certainly
true. Lanval does, however, evince meaning greater than the
summary suggests; most of this sense of significance is
gathered by implication from two aspects of the work— the
consistent coincidence and the texture of details described.:
The constant sense we have that incidents were not carefully
caused and neatly patterned adds to our understanding of the
war between order and chaos, between strange and native
jelements. For example, Lanval's loss of pay might well be j
jdue to just a clerical error, but the results are quite as
bad as if Arthur deprived him out of spite. Thus all the
characters are constantly vulnerable— as both victim and
unintentional victimizer— and the private dream world seems
more necessary and real. The distinction between society
and the personal world is further sharpened by the details
Marie chooses to mention about each. The world of the
mistress and Lanval— i.e., the private world of the out
siders— is seen in terms of ordered but flexible forms while
the world of Arthur and his queen— i.e., ordinary society—
is seen as rigid and consequently breakable. Lanval can
take off his mantle and roll it up for a pillow; the mis
tress disrobes when it is too hot, even though she has
guests; the formality of the dinner is supplemented with
side-dishes of kisses; the mistress wears a most daring,
bare-sided dress to the trial. This image of the mistress—
who was first seen in a supple tent— is countered by the
image of the queen— who is first seen leaning out of a
"carved window" and descending a staircase to the garden.
The queen never does anything deviant: she waits for her
husband to return home before formally asking him for
'justice against Lanval. The resolve of these two images is
jin the trial— a formal rigid structure which the king and
179
Queen invoke to insure punishment whether it is just or not;
however, the flexibility of the mistress allows her to de- j
■ t
!
feat the formal injustice— or rather manipulate it, since j
the injustice could not have occurred if she had appeared in
the first place— by refusing to appear until the moment when
her entrance would make the greatest impression.
I am not sure that the experiment of adapting the tale
to a complex style was entirely successful in Lanval; the
long romance, with its greater variety of incident, seems
better able to encompass and actually resolve such complex
ity. Nevertheless, Lanval has a vitality and a deserved
popularity that rests entirely on its superb handling of
realistic details, which make the scenes in this lay more
vivid and attractive than those in much other medieval
literature. The descriptions of women's clothes and of the
legal procedures show extreme care expended on the part of
Marie. Furthermore, a great deal of skill and charm is
evinced by the selection of details mentioned above and in
the realism of the speech patterns in several of the scenes,
notably the angry exchange between the queen and Lanval with
its combination of curt and run-on phrases and its sugges
tion of various tones of voice such as the veiled sarcasm
behind "cel mestier." The proportioning of the trial scene j
j 180
is considerably more artful than that of the trial scene in
Graelentmor; Marie is careful to arrange not only a build-up!
: I
!
of better details to be mentioned about each successive
woman, but also she arranges that the number of lines devot-i
ed to each segment of the trial gradually increases so that
we have the feeling of the expansive grandeur of the mis
tress's appearance. The technique of Lanval is truly
distinguished.
That Marie was capable of working with and molding a
lay around a more unified theme is clearly demonstrated by
Guigemar, but even here, despite the theme, a curious com
bination of a seemingly naive formality on the part of the
narrator with an extremely vague and subtle symbolism marks
a style significantly different from the relatively tight
and obvious structures of Guingamor and Graelentmor.
The only flaw in Guigemar is the introduction which
spends some dozen lines naming irrelevant characters for
the purpose either of establishing a truly historical back
ground for the lay (which hardly seems important to us), or
of, perhaps, flattering Breton nobles at court who might
have been supplying patronage or otherwise influencing the
fate of the author. Not until line 40 does Marie announce
her theme— Guigemar is unnatural in that he pays no heed at
all to love* a fault which is not justified even for a young
man ("li damaisels," 1. 66).
The inciting incident does not begin until some twenty
lines laterj when Guigemar goes hunting. He finds in the
forest an unreal beast— a pure white doe with stag's antlers
and a fawn— and shoots it. Now this episode corresponds in
position to the episodes in the other Guingamor-group lays
in which the hero accosts his lover in the forest, a fact
that favors a sexual connotation to whatever symbolism there
be here. Furthermore, the terms used to describe the shoot
ing suggest sexual activities, e.g., the arrow striking, the
wounded thigh, falling back into the thick (drue!) grass;
i
and the punishment prescribed by the dying doe rests on love
matters. I suggest, then, that the white stag-doe with a
fawn represents the pure— white— ideal of marriage— male and
female joined as one, raising children— and that the in
cident as a whole is a totally symbolic representation of
Guigemar offending against the principle of marriage, either!
in an abstract way by refusing to partake of it or, more
likely, in a literal way by performing some act such as
jraping a mother, if we accept this premise, then the curse j
!of the doe makes perfect sense: Guigemar can find healing j
182
|
jfor his wound— guilt at having despoiled a family— only by
^suffering for his own true love in a marraige-like bond, and
: i
; i
|it is important that the lay does not end until their actual;
marriage is consummated.
The boat that carries Guigemar away is clearly a death
boat: like Guingamor1s castle, it is supernaturally rich
and beautiful, and magically operative without human help;
furthermore, a pillow inside it keeps the sleeper from grow
ing any older, and Guigemar appears to be dead when he is
found later. Guigemar, then, is symbolically dying, leaving
his old way of life to be reborn into a new life of proper
loving.
Also, behind the magic involved in the stag-doe and
boat incidents is the suggestion of a psychological symbol- *
ism. Before finding the boat, Guigemar sends his page to
fetch a horse for him; when he returns on the boat— some
year and a half later, supposedly— the page and his men are !
waiting for him at the shore with his horse. This should
tell us, I suspect, that the whole marvelous section is
indeed unreal, and meaningful only in a symbolic sense: it
takes place only in Guigemar's mind, for the outside world— ■
i.e., Guigemar1s companions— has not noticed it. For j
: I
Guigemar, it clearly represents falling in love. The
183 j
stag-doe represents some ideal of love, and Guigemar is !
struck by an arrow coming from it— the traditional way of
expressing the idea of being struck by the image of love.
He goes on a voyage to a dream world where he finds an ideal
lady imprisoned by an old, sexless man— and Guigemar had
behaved like an old person previously in his sexlessness—
and he woos the lady in the proper fashion, pledging to love
only her. When he returns to reality, he suffers from the
remembrance of her, and only when he meets someone very much
like her— notice that they do not recognize each other at
first sight, but only slowly, through tokens, realize that
they have found each other— is he able to end his suffering
by seizing her for his wife. This interpretation reinforces
at all points the main theme of the work, the proper devel
opment of a love relationship, and incidentally prefigures a
theory of love psychology— that the lover perfects the image(
of the loved one in his mind— that dominates much of later
15
French fiction. The tokens exchanged further reinforce
this interpretation. The knot and the belt will, supposed
ly, ensure fidelity, but since they have no reason to
15
For a complete discussion of this idea see Andre
Maurois, Cinq visages de 1'amour (New York, 1942), trans
lated as Seven Faces of Love (New York, 1944). j
j 184
f
|
janticipate willful infidelity of each other, the purpose
must be in fact both to prevent their violation by other
people and, since they accept these tokens of impotence
i
willingly, to stand as a symbol of their unwillingness to
16
love anyone but their ideal lovers. On one level, then,
the tale concerns two people who suffer through years of
adversity dreaming of an ideal lover, and are finally
rewarded by meeting a realization of the loved one.
The literal level of the tale is held together by a
sub-theme of mesure. Guigemar is at first guilty of
desmesure by not loving at all; then he is punished by a
supernaturally inflicted wound, and begins to atone for this
by loving in the most pure and perfect fashion. The lady's
husband is guilty of a desmesure— growing naturally out of
his age, Marie tells us— in his unnatural imprisonment of
his wife, and he is punished by the supernatural appearance
of Guigemar and later the supernatural release of his wife
16
The chastity belt would of course render the woman
incapable of participating in a sexual act, and the knot is
probably symbolic of impotence, as in the Gunnhild-Hrut
episode of Nial's Saga. See Brennu-Nials Saga (Reykjavik,
1954); English translation by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann
Palsson as Nial's Saga (Baltimore, 1964). The Gunnhild
episode occupies chapters six and eight.
185
i
jfrom the tower. Finally, the lady has a supernatural
beauty (1. 685) which constitutes in itself a desmesure
(1. 690) for which she, Guigemar, and Meriaduc must suffer.
Meriaduc serves a further, special purpose, for he is a
worthy knight that the lady might well choose to love, and
Guigemar might well fear to resist; the choice of him as the
obstacle, then, makes the testing a complex and significant
business, and makes the lovers' success more admirable.
Furthermore, the lady's excess of beauty makes Meriaduc's
fatal attraction to her and his insistence on keeping her an
understandable if unforgivable flaw in his character that
justifies as well as renders tragic his death. This theme
of mesure presupposes an orderly cosmos in which a feasible
balance co-exists with an imbalance caused either by natural
flaws (the lady's beauty) or misbehavior on the part of
willful humans. Guigemar demonstrates Marie's belief that
the imbalances and excesses in one's life can be rectified
or atoned for by patient suffering, active struggle, or
tragic death.
Guigemar is hardly less magnificent than Lanval in the I
richness of its poetry; the lament of the wounded stag-doe, ;
the magic boat, the lady's room, and the love scenes are all
lof Lanval1s calibre. Guigemar lacks Lanval's functional
^proportioning, and the long introduction/ as noted, does
seem irrelevant. All of the other apparent flaws in the
tale— the coincidence of the suddenly unlocked door, for
example, or the brevity of the descriptions of the hunt and
the final battle— are, however, carefully planned, function
al parts of the story: the marvelous and magical elements,
such as the unlocked door, are unreal and nonlogical because
they mirror conflicts between a mental, imaginary world and
a physical, real world; the hunt and the battle in them
selves are unimportant to the theme of the tale, so they are
treated in a brief, concise fashion. In a lay like Eliduc,
of which the main theme is the interrelationship between
personal and public events, Marie gives quite an extended
description of battle, showing that she could do so if she
wished.
in this connection, I would like to stress that I feel
it unfair to discuss Marie's lays separately; I believe that!
the twelve lays collected in the Harley manuscript with the
dedicatory prologue are not a random selection of tales, but!
rather a group of tales conceived as a meaningful whole, and;
arranged in a careful sequence. Guigemar, the first in the j
collection, speaks of the proper development of a love
affair, in which the protagonists attempt to atone for their!
jdesmesure. while Equitan, which follows it in the manu
script, speaks by contrast of the improper development of a
love affair, in which the protagonists compound their
desmesure with treachery; both lays feature the protagonist
as a hunter, the lovers in preliminary debate, and the
exchange of love tokens. This pair of lays is followed by
what is clearly another pair: Le Fresne in which a woman
patiently bears the trials of her lover, and Bisclavret in
which the woman impatiently takes advantage of her husband's
trials in order to betray him; both of these lays employ
discarded clothing as a central recognition device. The
next pair, Lanval and Les Deus Amanz. both deal with the
desmesure of the hero whose secret love is forced to public
trial; again, one ends positively, one negatively. The next
three lays, Yonec, Laiistic and Milun, all use birds as
central symbols of the communication of adulterous lovers;
the first two end tragically for the lovers (though Yonec
does avenge his father) but the third, again employing the
father-son motif, ends happily for everyone. The last three;
lays all deal with the complexity of multiple lovers—
Chaitivel1s lady has four equal suitors, Chevrefoil1s
: i
unnamed queen (presumably isolt) loves Tristram but is
junwilling to discontinue her relationship with King Mark, |
and Eliduc is caught between his love for Guildeliiec and
Guilliadun— and all three end happily in various ways; both
Chaitivel and Chevrefoil end with the protagonist composing
the lai, and all three lays are specifically concerned with
the public and social aspects of private affairs. Further-
more, Eliduc— with its love dialogues, its battles, its
magic animals, its abbey, its secret messages and secret
escape from the unknowing father, its voyage, its murdered
sailor, its slandered knight, its patient wife— serves as a
very fitting, allusive summary of the whole group, as well
as providing a peaceful and logical conclusion resting in
religion. Taken as a planned whole, we find these lays to
be a cogent and complete statement about life and love in
Marie's society: each individual character may be a flat
stereotype, but he will be paralleled by an antithetical or
intermediate character in another lay; the scope and focus
of each lay may be limited, but in the other lays we find
constantly the other aspects and alternatives handled. We
find not only love, in all its manifestations, but also war,
sports, travel, medicine, religion, history, fashion, busi
ness, education, and public law. The only other example in i
medieval literature of a similar scope and complexity of
statement through a grouping of tales is Chaucer's j
I 189
: j
Canterbury Tales, which, of course, is vastly more complex
by virtue of the additional tension of the narrator-
pilgrims; but Marie, writing two centuries before Chaucer,
is certainly making an estimable achievement in developing
the possibilities of the tale-collection, and, I think it
could be argued, she surpasses, by virtue of her conciseness
and polish, the works of Chaucer's contemporaries Boccaccio
and Juan Ruiz in the same form.
While it might be argued that the arrangement of the
lays is purely incidental or coincidental, I submit that,
taking, for example, the twelve anonymous French lays
(Desire, Doon, Expervier, Espine, Graelentmor, Guingamor,
Lecheor, Mantel, Me lion, Tydorel, Tyolet, and Trot) one
would find it quite difficult if not impossible to force
them into any kind of meaningful sequence, even if one dis
regards such clever aspects of Marie's artistry as her care
ful alternation of long and short lays. Above all, one can
not, in the anonymous lays, find anything like the consis
tent depth of world view that Marie displays— a persistent
faith in, and demonstration of, the ultimate orderliness and
meaningfulness of human life.
| 190
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| That materials as diverse and obscure as those in j
Lanval and Guigemar could in fact be unified in the tight j
fashion of Guingamor and Graelentmor is proven by Desire.
Like Guigemar, Desire opens with an introduction telling of I
Desire's parentage, but here the circumstances of the hero's
birth are integrated into the meaning of the tale. First
the author tells us that Desire was born in a region near
two rare and magical sites— a Black Chapel and a White
Heath— both of which are not only of crucial significance
to the later events of the story, but in fact come to be
associated with the principal conflicting elements, namely
nature and religion, or natural passionate desires and con
trolled, reasonable desires. Then, Desire was conceived
with special help from a saint, and hence was probably given:
an especially religious upbringing. As he is educated, he
learns not only how to be a perfect knight, but also learns
"to know the forests and rivers." Thus, from the material
in the prologue, we expect Desire to be a person proficient
in natural as well as societal things, or perhaps torn
between them.
When Desire rides out in the forest to disport himself,
the author takes pains to tell us that he is genuinely
jexcited by the sounds of nature. He decides to visit his j
i 191
|
•childhood companion, a hermit of the Black Chapel, but is
I ;
distracted by a lovely girl with her hair down standing j
i
barefoot in the dew. He addresses himself to her "not like :
a peasant" but with such healthy animal spirits that they
are soon lying on the grass; but the author treats the
incident as humorous, quite unlike the parallel incident in
Graelentmor. The girl promises him an even better love than
hers, and leads him to a bower, couched in flowers, in which
reclines a lovely lady, who leaps up and flees nimbly
through the thicket. As soon as Desire catches up with her
and proposes, she accepts being his beloved without argu
ment. How markedly different from the rich and angry ladies
in Guingamor and Graelentmor!
Desire's lady gives him a ring and adjures him to
behave as a good knight should— nothing more specific, just
as a good knight should. This leaves the audience with the
question of how he should behave. The eventual answer is
that he should marry the lady, but that he does not think of
this is not hard to explain: she is clearly a creature from
another world— -the wild, natural world he loves— and it is
not at all customary to marry people like that.
This becomes clearer in the next episode, wherein
Desire confesses his relationship as if it were a sin. As
the mistress indignantly points out, there really is no sin
i
I
about the relationship— or at least there need have been
none— but Desire seems spontaneously to have assumed that
there was. When the lady appears to have communion with him
to prove that she is compatible with religion, the next step
would seem to be marriage, but again Desire does not get the
notion.
Now she begins to exact an expiation for his long
delay, she sends their son to tease him; when the boy runs
home through the forest, Desire cannot follow. Yet she
sends the dwarf to look after him when he gets lost, proving
she still cares for him. This scene in the forest, very
much in the style of Guingamor, suggests a good deal by
association and atmosphere. The boy, like his mother, is a
true wild spirit who can escape through the forest at will.
Desire longs for the forest life but his skills are not ade
quate to his longings. Between them stands the dwarf, a
mock or malformed nature spirit who (as dwarves are wont to
do) behaves badly by leading Desire on in his intense desire
to find the magic home of the lady. Naturally this unseemly
if understandable voyeurism is rewarded by a symbolic
wound— symbolic, probably, of the illicit sexual delight
which is, in the last analysis, unsatisfying; we notice thatj
193
the wound is miraculously cured as soon as the mistress
i
I . ;
'appears again. Furthermore, Desire is only saved from the j
i j
murderous clutches of the guards by the grace of the serving
maid; in the interchange that follows, it becomes even more
clear that the maid and the dwarf are acting as surrogates
for the heroine and the hero— the first pure, able, and
clever, while the second is stunted, inept, and sentimental,;
albeit kindly. So again we have a mistress whose sensibil
ity is well balanced and integrated, and her mortal lover
(Desire, the wanted and wanting one) whose reason and
passion are so discrete that he cannot handle a subtle sit
uation. The scene at the lady's castle, as a whole, serves
to objectify the fact that even in the kingdom of passionate
nature, there is reason and logic, just as in the kingdom of
reasonable society there is passion of the strongest kind.
Desire does not fathom the logic of the other kingdom
yet: he is merely depressed by the failure of his venture,
and languishes, feeling mocked at and abused. Only at the
Pentecost feast is his sorrow ended, and then through no j
action or maturation of his own; the lady finally yields and
comes to his court, begging to be married.
Desire, then, is the story of a knight who fails to
:integrate the natural— love and passion— and religious— i
1 9 4
society and reason— sides of his life. He behaves well
i
1 I
itoward each side, but he never thinks to make the highly j
desirable liaison— i.e., holy matrimony— between the two.
There is a kind of gentle, high comic flavor about much
of Desire. The situations and sins are not as grave as they,
could be, and even at the moment of Desire's greatest and
somewhat deserved distress, the efficient and loving pres
ence of the serving maid reminds us that the mistress loves
Desire too much to let things turn out badly. If the
thematic strand is not so rich or consistent as that of
Guingamor, it is still obviously of the type of the anony
mous lays rather than of the lays of Marie de France.
j
i j
I I
CHAPTER V !
CONCLUSION
From the analyses above, it is perfectly clear that the:
kind of criticism directed toward the anonymous lays by
someone like Stefan Hofer simply cannot be applied to any of
these lays, but most particularly not to Guinqamor and
Graelentmor. which are constructed with such care and con
sistency that each element is undeniably a necessary, proper
and individual part of its lay. Desire is hardly a Chris
tian rationalization of an older lay, as some have suggest
ed; the theme of religion functions as an integral part of
the tale, and each incident is woven in carefully enough
that it may just as well have grown out of this theme. Some
of the plot elements of Marie's lays might have been bor
rowed since the connecting links between incidents are often-
weak and the realistic, logical relationship between parts
is often unimportant, but the way in which the incidents are!
195
told— the texture of description and dialogue— is so
peculiar to Marie's lays that it is in essence hers.
As noted above, because of manuscript variation and the
repeated use in all the lays of stock phrases, these lays
cannot successfully be compared on the verbal level alone.
But the broader elements of style do establish some con
trasts between the poems sharp enough to form useful dis
criminations in terms of possible authorship.
Each of the lays is told by a first person narrator who
mentions himself in the opening or closing remarks, but in
addition to these formulaic references, Guinqamor contains
only one comment which seems to imply the narrator's pres
ence (1. 401, "Or est Guingamors escharniz"), Desire con
tains two slightly stronger references (1. 350, "Oiez cum il
est avenu"; and 1. 148, "Jo quid qu'il l'eust asprimee"),
and Graelentmor also contains two passages (1. 153, "Que
fera ores Graelens?" and the transitional passage from
11. 399-412) which lightly draw the reader and narrator
closer together. In sharp contrast to this, Marie's two
i
lays each have several points at which the narrator breaks
into the story to address the audience directly (Lanval,
11. 33-38), comment on the action (Lanval, 1. 351; Guigemar
1. 186), provide extended moral commentary on love and j
[fortune (Guigemar, 11. 465-480, 517-523) in addition to a
dozen references of the sort cited in the anonymous lays or
of a formulaic nature using "Ceo m'est avis," etc. It is
safe to say, then, that (even allowing for the possible loss
of a phrase or two from Guingamor) the anonymous lays make a
significantly slighter use of the device of the oral narra
tor than does Marie, who seems to employ it regularly as a
natural element in her style, in her Fables and Espurgatoire
as well as in these particular lays.
Despite the implication in this that perhaps Marie is
- \
closer to the oral tradition than the other authors, she in
fact shows many indications of her essentially written
roots, in the prologue to the lays, she not only reveals
herself as a learned person, but also suggests in her state
ment "I have often stayed up nights rhyming them" that she
composed carefully and probably in writing; furthermore,
references in other lays— e.g., Chevrefoil. 1. 6, "E jeo
l'ai trove en escrit," or Guigemar, 1. 5, "Sulunc la lettre
e 1'escriture"— and her other works place her in a written
tradition. But more important than these possibly casual
or misleading references, Marie's lays consciously and
regularly employ the whole range of rhetorical devices in
,the ordinary narrative texture. The only passage in an I
;anonymous lay to rival the literary formality of.Marie's
style is Graelentmor1s set speech on love (11. 73-106), but
this is clearly done for special effect, and it stands out
from the surrounding passages noticeably. Marie's lays,
then, show both more obvious oral devices as well as more
obvious literary devices than any of the anonymous lays.
Marie seems to have paid attention to the formal, literary
craft of her verses, while the anonymous authors strive for
a modest, natural verse flow.
One other group of stylistic devices of crucial impor
tance in discriminating between these lays is their type of
gross structure, description, and characterization. In
respect to these, Marie's accepted lays tally up quite
differently from the anonymous lays.
As noted above, the structure of Guinqamor is neat and
tight, with each incident both linked closely to the main
theme and melting smoothly into the next scene. Graelentmor;
and Desire show somewhat more obvious breaks between epi
sodes, but the integration with the theme is still strong.
But Lanval and Guigemar show sharp and formal breaks between
]
episodes, usually in the form of an interjection by the
narrator, and both lays, whether intentionally or uninten
tionally, are not tightly unified by a single theme. i
199
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Guinqamor, Graelentmor and Desire all evoke scenes by a
few well selected details rather than by painting a full j
|
picture. Guinqamor and Desire rely strongly on atmosphere
and mood, which is evoked in some cases by the very vague
ness of the setting, and in other cases (notably Guinqamor1s
hunt) by an attempt to involve the audience with the action
by imitating its flow rather than by painting a picture of
it from an external viewpoint. Neither of Marie's lays
seems to work in these terms; Marie does not create moods,
but she paints complete external pictures of certain women
and strange places by listing numerous details. The hunt
and the forest seem to mean little to her; her forte is the
idealized bed-chamber or court. One scholar has observed:
The stories of Marie de France come from the mind; they
are imagined, rather than inspired by observation. The
visual imagery is at a minimum. What did our author see
in her lifetime? What pictures has she shown? Very
few. A party of knights riding up to Excester who are
seen from a height. A silver city surrounded by water,
where large ships tie up— some memory of Saint-Malo,
perhaps. A sarcophagus covered with a golden mantle.
A falcon mewed. . . . This paucity of images leads me to
believe that Marie de France was a recluse, perhaps a
nun. She saw very little. Her stories come from books;
her knowledge of love is a dream knowledge.
While our particular lays would add to this list a court
1Norma L. Goodrich, The Wavs of Love (New York, 1964),
ip. 280.
j 200
|
trial, even this excellent scene could be considered to be
derived from book-learning about trials. The curious j
explanation of such an ordinary object as the block used for!
: . i
the knights to mount their horses might make one wonder if
maybe the audience as well as the teller of Marie's tales
were not cloistered. On the other hand, however, perhaps we
should not make too hasty a judgment on the basis of this
one criterion. Marie also, upon occasion, brings a scene to
life by noting one significant detail— Guigemar seizing the
clothes-tree to defend himself, or Meriaduc cutting the
lady's laces— and in some cases, despite what we may feel
about her success in doing so, Marie goes to considerable
pains to delineate a manly, outdoors scene which she could
just as well have summarized in a few couplets telling the
outcome of the venture— for example, the battle in Eliduc,
11. 165-210, in which the strategy of the ambush is care
fully and lengthily noted.
Marie's characters are hardly individualized; they tend
to be nearly perfect or grossly imperfect types, and the
psychology behind their actions is rarely explored except
occasionally in terms of the cliches of medieval love and
and chivalric lore— for example, Guigemar is told he is
jwrong not to love, and that he must love, so he begins to i
Ilove. Quite to the contrary, the heroes of Guingamor and
Graelentmor— and to a lesser degree Desire— are realized in
special and specific psychological terms— alienation from
chivalric values— and they undergo a gradual developmental
or educational process which culminates only in the final
lines. When one considers, however, the artistry and
thought behind Marie's complete group of twelve lays, one
sees that Marie's characters are flat because: (1) Marie
believes in an ordered cosmos in which most people are in
deed simple and do not change much, (2) Marie handles the
complexity of issues by contrasting characters and incidents
in several lays, and (3) Marie writes most specifically in
the genre defined earlier (see pages 76-77 above) as a
"Tale," of which one characteristic was the use of flat
characters. The three anonymous lays, then, are working
away from the "tale" toward the "short story" by virtue of
their interest in characterization.
None of our three anonymous lays could be by Marie
unless she altered dramatically, since these lays exploit
concerns and techniques foreign to her known writings.
Likewise, Marie shows an interest in history and a kind of
artistry which is lacking in these anonymous lays. Further-'
more, the three anonymous lays are similar enoxigh in style !
| 202
jto each other to be by the same author; by no means do
^superficial plot resemblances preclude such a contention,
since the themes and conclusions are so strikingly differ- j
ent. The whole question, however, must remain moot and un
certain: the repetitions and similarities between
Shakespeare's plays and his contemporaries' plays did not
keep him from writing his canon nor them from writing
theirs; and could we justly guess that The Comedy of Errors
was by the same author as King Lear and The Tempest, not to
mention Henry VIII or Two Noble Kinsmen, if they were all
anonymous?
As to the question of whether the anonymous lays or
Marie's lays were written first, the evidence is even more
confused and inconclusive. The thematic sophistication of
the anonymous group could be the result of either primary
composition or clever re-working, just as the particular,
disunified narrative of Lanval could be either a naive first
telling, or a botched re-telling, or a self-consciously
ambitious re-telling.
Beyond these ambiguous questions, we have shown that,
contrary to the impression to be gained from most criticism
on the Breton Lay, three anonymous lays— Guinqamor,
IGraelentmor, and Desire— have an artistic integrity which I
203 |
'removes them from the compass of mere plagiarism from the j
; ■ i
lays of Marie de France. We have also shown that the Bretonj
Lay as a genre is most closely related to oral traditions |
such as the tale and the narrative ballad, and thus more ;
likely to rely upon traditional formulas than a strictly
literary, written form might. Above all, we have shown how
the authors of the five lays under examination have used the
full resources of their traditions to bring alive five rich
and meaningful tales.
A PPENDIX
204
THE CONTENTS OF MS. S, BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE,
NOUVELLES ACQUISITIONS FRANQAISES 1104
1. Guimar— Marie de France's Guigemar
2. Lanval— Marie de France's Lanval
3. pesirre— Anonymous, Desire
4> Tyoulet— Anonymousj Tyolet
5. Dyonet— Marie de France's Yonec
6. Guinqamor— Anonymous, Guinqamor
7• Espine— Anonymous, Espine
8. Espervier— Anonymous, Espervier
9. Chievrefueil— Marie de France's Chevrefoil
10. Doon— Anonymous, Doon
11. .II. Amants— Marie de France's Les Deus Amanz
12. Bisclaret— Marie de France's Bisclavret
13. MiIon— Marie de France's Milun
14. Fresne— Marie de France's Le Fresne
15. Lecheor— Anonymous, Lecheor
16. Aquitan— Marie de France's Equitan
17. Tydore1— Anonymous, Tydorel
18. Cort Mantel— Anonymous, Cort Mantel
19. Ombre— Jehan Renart's Ombre
20. Conseill— Anonymous, Conseil
21. Amoures— Anonymous, Amours
22. Aristote— Henri D'Andeli's Aristote
23. Graalant— Anonymous, Graelentmor
24. Qiselet— Anonymous, oiselet
205
I
BI BL IO G RAP HY
206
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Editions and Translations of Relevant
Medieval Texts
Anglo-Norman Lapidaries, ed. Studer and Evans. Paris;
Championj 1924.
Benoit de Sainte-Maure. Le Roman de Troie, ed. Constans.
Paris: SATF, 1904.
Berol. Tristan, ed. Ewert. London; Blackwell, 1959.
Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript, ed. Hales and Furnivall.
London; Trubner, 1867.
Bronson, Bertrand H. The Traditional Tunes of the Child
Ballads. Princeton university press, 1959.
Buile Suibne [The Madness of Sweeney], ed. and trans.
O'Keeffe. London; Irish Texts Society, 1913.
Chestre, Thomas. Sir Launfal, ed. Bliss. London; Thomas
Nelson, 1960.
Child, Francis j. The English and Scottish Popular Ballads.
New York; pageant Book Co., 1956.
Chretien de Troyes. Le Chevalier au Lion (Yvain), ed.
Roques. Paris; Champion, 1965.
_. Le Chevalier de la charrete (Lancelot),
ed. Roques. Paris; champion, 1959.
_. Cliges, ed. Roques. Paris; Champion,
1957.
207
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I
|
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Creator Moritz, William Earl (author)

Core Title 'Guingamor,' 'Guigemar,' 'Graelentmor,' 'Lanval,' And 'Desire': A Comparative Study Of Five Breton Lays

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

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Advisor Goodrich, Norma Lorre (committee chair), Hadley, Paul E. (committee member), Malone, David H. (committee member)

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