“Yönec” is one of the Lais of Marie de France. It is the seventh lai in the collection, coming after “Les Deus Amanz” and preceding “Laüstic”. It is notable for being the other lai aside from “Bisclavret” that features human-animal shapeshifting and for its similarities to the lai of “Milun”, where both tell of characters across 2 generations and include a revenge-plot.
SUMMARY
A young girl is locked away in a tower by her wealthy and old husband to ensure that she remains his possession, and he makes his widowed sister, an old dame, stay in the same tower to further ensure this. The young girl produces no children after many years. Loveless and lonely, the girl grows miserable and fades in beauty until a hawk flies into her room one day, which upon closer look, transforms into a knight named Muldumarec. Although he seeks her love, she is afraid that the knight is affiliated with the devil and asks him to accept a Christian service and partake in the sacrament. He accepts, and thereafter they become lovers, meeting regularly and secretly in her isolated room.
However, the husband soon notices changes in his wife and asks the old dame to spy on her. The old dame witnesses the illicit affair and reports to the husband, who then sets a trap of iron prongs in the window. When Muldumarec returns, he suffers a fatal injury and bestows his hopes for vengeance upon his unborn son in the young girl. Muldumarec then leaves, and the young girl follows after the trail of his blood, presumably on foot, in the process miraculously jumping off the twenty feet high window and landing on the ground alive. She finds him in a castle of some distant land and they share their final words, in which Muldumarec passes her a small ring that wards off her husband’s possessiveness, a lovely gown, and his sword. He then asks her to take their son to a festival when he becomes of age, where they will see a tomb in an abbey. There, she should hand their son the sword and reveal to him his lineage. With that, he dies and the girl leaves in sorrow.
Their son, Yönec, grows up to be a fine knight. During a religious festival in some distant town, Muldumarec’s words come true. After realising that the king whom the locals buried in a beautifully adorned tomb is in fact Muldumarec, Yönec’s mother does as she was told and drops dead. From there, Yönec takes his stepfather’s life in vengeance and becomes king, and a beautiful coffin is made for her mother and she is placed next to her lover in the tomb.
DISCUSSION
Appearance is to be a major concern in this lai, beginning with how the young girl’s beauty fades and reemerges—she “lost her beauty” as per those “whose will has drained away” when she is kept locked away by her husband (Marie de France 93), and is explicitly mentioned to have “recovered all her beauty” and her behaviour “much changed” to being more spirited and graceful (101). This seems to suggest that outward appearances are a reflection of one’s internal emotional state, and indeed, Marie draws great attention to the girl’s interiority by devoting a significant number of lines—from line 61 to 104—to detail her sorrow and lament. However, this translationality of inner emotions into beauty becomes problematic when Marie points it as the reason to the husband’s suspicions, a fact that is reinforced by Muldumarec’s words “your beauty was the death of us” when he suffers the fatal wound (107).
The male lover, Muldumarec, is characterised by his shapeshifting into a hawk, which is thought to be a noble animal (97). His appearance as a noble hawk seems to capture his human qualities as a “handsome, noble knight” who is also the beloved king of a beautiful land (97, 117). The portrayal of Muldumarec differs from the girl as his appearance does not actually reflect his inner state, which is barely mentioned, but it does suggest that a character’s morality is hinted outwardly. Nonetheless, Marie adds a layer of complexity to this idea by introducing Christian connotations of the deceptive devil to the shapeshifting motif, unlike what is seen in the lai of “Bisclavret”, and Muldumarec must undergo a test of faith before his morality can truly be assessed.
Although the lai is titled “Yönec”, it is clear that the love affair between Muldumarec and the girl of the tower takes centre stage in this lai, and the fulfillment of their love is the goal of the narrative. However, the death of Muldumarec introduces a complication to the goal. During his last moments, Muldumarec makes a lengthy request to the girl about revealing to Yönec his lineage, and concludes on an open note, “[w]hat he’d do then / they would soon see” (113). The remainder of the story then proceeds to play out exactly as that request, making the request seem almost prophetic. By foretelling the subsequent events exactly as they happen, the emphasis of the narrative is able to remain hinged on the lovers, with the evoked sense of a grand destiny making the remainder of the lai more of a question whether their legacy will be inherited. This is supported by how the girl’s character eventually becomes a purely functional one for the narrative, almost as though she has already died, and whose relevance only goes so far as to facilitate the fulfillment of the legacy and exit the stage thereafter (117). It is Yönec’s act of inheriting the legacy that enables the narrative to come to a close. The character of Yönec is significant not so much as a character (and for this, he has been given no real characterisation anyway), but as the representation of his parents’ love bearing fruit. Yönec’s act of revenge is therefore glossed over, with the ending focusing on the girl being “borne in a fair coffin, to the tomb” (119), and the lovers are fulfilled in death, their love literally engraved and sealed for eternity.
REFERENCES
Marie de France. Marie de France: Poetry. Translated by Dorothy Gilbert, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
“Les Deus Amanz” is one of the Lais of Marie de France. It is the sixth lai in the collection, coming after “Lanval” and preceding “Yönec”. The lai is memorable for its tragic ending and features the use of magical herbs and potion.
SUMMARY
The female protagonist is a single child whose existence brings solace to a grieving king who had lost his wife. The king is very emotionally dependent on her and even devises a plan to make it impossible for the girl to be courted—that anyone who wishes to seek her daughter’s hand in marriage must carry her in their arms and climb up the mountain without stopping. None have succeeded. The male protagonist is the son of a count who is valued greatly by the king himself. After falling in love with the girl and concealing their love for some time, the young man suggests for them to elope, but the girl refuses out of her love for her father and asks him to take on her father’s challenge. She sends the young man to visit her aunt in Salerno, who strengthens the young man with her medicine and gives him a potion for stamina recovery.
Gabriel Jacques de Saint-Aubin, “The Two Lovers (Les deux amants)”, 1750, etching, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The king instructs all across the land to spectate after the young man returns and initiates the challenge, and the girl fasts ahead of time to make her body lighter. During the climb however, when the girl begs her lover to drink the potion that she held for him, he refuses out of pride and the thirst to prove his love despite his growing exhaustion. The lai ends with the young man collapsing at the summit, his heart bursting out and the girl, shrieking and throwing the potion after realising it was of no use anymore, kissed him repeatedly and then died of heartbreak. They were buried in a marble tomb and the mountain, as Marie writes, honours the lovers with its name “Deus Amanz”.
DISCUSSION
Interestingly, Marie spends quite a bit of time detailing the setting in this lai, and it is actually a real location that still exists today. The repetition of the word “still” in line 17 to 20, along with how her story about the lovers is apparently a version of the local tale that has been invented to explain the name of the mountain as its origin had been forgotten (Marie de France 82), seems to suggest that the preservation and passing down of history and folklore is one of constant revival, rework, reinvention, and translation.
Marie exerts a more visible authorial voice in this lai, revealing that the lovers’ will end up dying at the start, and injects her presence again when the mountain climbing begins in lines 188 to 190, with “[i]n the end / it will do little good, I fear; / [o]ur youth lacked judgment and mesure”, cautioning against the young man’s actions and reminding the reader that the lai will end in tragedy. This, along with the unusually violent depiction of the young man’s heart bursting from his body, seems to give the lai a more didactic tone than usual, which condemns love that is selfish and love without mesure. The king is an evident example of having a love that is selfish, depriving his daughter of finding love outside and keeping it all for himself. The result is ironic and self-serving, where the king who protects his daughter so intensely out of grief ends up killing her, bringing him further grief. In her footnotes, Dorothy Gilbert defines the term mesure as having “a sense of proportion of the right action or degree of action at the right time and place” (87). In the actions of the young man, this is clearly absent when he takes the romance convention of suffering as a test of love to the extreme. From here, it is clear that Marie does not condone or promote the kind of love that overwhelms reason and requires death as testament. Rather, she supports love that is inexcessive and one that has a good grasp and sense of the proper time and place, not unlike how the female protagonist has known of the way to overcome her father’s challenge all along, but only reveals and utilises it when the time is right.
REFERENCES
Marie de France. Marie de France: Poetry. Translated by Dorothy Gilbert, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Written in 1368, Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess commemorates the death of Blanche of Lancester from the plague and offers consolation to her widowed husband, John of Gaunt, son of Edward III. Though less metrically sophisticated than some of his later works, The Book of Duchess is Chaucer’s earliest significant narrative poem, entrancing readers in its emotionally powerful and awe-inspiring meditation on the death of one’s beloved.
SUMMARY
The poem begins with the poet lamenting his lack of sleep due to a siknesse which he leaves unaddressed. One night, seeing his suffering from another bout of insomnia, someone fetches him a book that tells of Alcyone’s mourning over the absence of her husband, Ceyx. Alcyone prays to the goddess Juno for a dream vision to ascertain Ceyx’s fate, and Juno, answering Alcyone’s prayers, sends a messenger to Morpheus to bring Ceyx’s body to Alcyone. After the deceased Ceyx instructs Alcyone to bury him and to cease her sorrow, Alcyone wakes up to find Ceyx gone. Breaking off from the tale, the poet interjects his wish for a god like Morpheus to grant him sleep, and – as if the gods did hear his plea – falls asleep and begins dreaming.
He finds himself waking up in a chamber with stained glass depicting the tale of Troy and the walls scenes from The Romance of the Rose (a medieval French poem that takes the form of a long allegorical dream vision). He hears a hunt, and leaves the chamber to seek out the hunter(s), who is revealed to be the first Roman emperor, Octavian. While the hunt begins, the poet follows a small dog into the forest and stumbles upon a clearing where a knight, dressed in black, is composing a song for the death of his lady. Upon the poet’s inquiry, the black knight metaphorically explains that he lost his queen and was checkmated when playing a game of chess with Fortune. The poet takes the message literally, and begs the black knight to cease his sorrow over a game. Remaining oblivious to the poet’s misunderstanding, the knight goes on to explain that he met his Love after waiting his entire life, and praises his love – “goode faire Whyte she hete” (good fair White she was called) – at length (line 948). Only when the poet asks for White’s whereabouts did the knight finally say that “she is deed” (line 1309). The poet, aghast at his misunderstanding and at the knight’s loss, wakes up with his book still in his hands. Upon reflection, he decides to set his dream in rhyme – the very one that he has just narrated.
DISCUSSION
The Book of the Duchess is, as the condensed summary above may have suggested, an embedded prosimetrical work that is highly intertextual. In fact, the opening of Chaucer’s poem (that is, the poet’s melancholia and the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone) is a translation of Guillaume de Machaut’s Dit de la Fonteine Amoureuse, or, “Story of the Amorous Fountain” published in 1361, while the poem’s very form – the embedded philosophical dream vision – is informed by Guillaume de Machuat’s Fountain of Love and Boethius’s prosimetrical text The Consolation of Philosophy1. Other literary references include Guillaume de Mchaut’s Judgement of the King of Bohemia, Fortune’s Remedy and the Fountain of Love, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Virgil’s Aeneid, as well as references from other fields such as Aristotelian epistemology, medieval dream theory, and the rules of chess. Where the poet wakes up in his dream to the stained glass images of Troy and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, the poem’s philosophical dream visionformis literally recast and refracted through the canonical works of Latin past and the popular European works during the Middle Ages.
Chaucer’s engagement with this double literary lens to construct his narrative is precisely what demonstrates an independent useof form and originality in thought. By introducing his poet’s psychological state with the translation of the “Story of the Amorous Fountain” (which includes the retelling of Ovid’s tale of Ceyx), Chaucer extracts from Machaut’s tale the classical theme of love-sickness, melancholy, and death. Following the medieval belief that the imagination makes use of images processed by the mind that it later translates to “phantasms” in dreams, the poet’s melancholic imagination that is “alway hoolly in [his] minde” (line 15) translates to his dream, in which his melancholia (his having “lost al lustihede” (line 27)) parallels the knight’s pale complexion (“the blood was fled, for pure drede” (line 490)). While Boethius is consoled by personified philosophical guides in the discourse of natural philosophy, Chaucer instead has the melancholic knight narrate metaphorical references to Love and Fortune that are lost upon the likewise melancholic poet. In this sense, Chaucer’s poet’s somnium, an enigmatic dream considered to express a truth veiled in fiction, escapes Boethius’s humanist philosophical engagement with Nature – that is, death is unveiled as entirely inconsolable.
Manuscript of The Book of Duchess, also known as The Dreame of Chaucer or The Deth of Blaunche. University of Glagow Library.
Chaucer’s sophisticated interweaving of references to tell of a dream, of another time and space, perhaps did fulfill the poet’s cryptic promise to address the cause for his sickness“eft” (that is, another time) (lines 41-43). By perceiving the dream as part of the poet’s furtive expression of loss on a narrative level, the plot’s metonymic movement from one deathly narrative to another may be understood as the poet’s intentional prolonging of our understanding of his sickness to give him space to suggest the loss of his beloved as the cause of his illness. Just as the prolonged misunderstanding over the knight’s metaphorical reference allowed the knight time and space to reconstruct his beloved through words, both men can only resort to furtively expressing their loss in face of their beloved’s death. Moreover, the parallel between the poet’s cryptic “that wil nat be, mot nede be lefte;” (that is, “that which will never be must be left behind” (line 42)) and the accelerated collapse of words – “al was doon” (line 1312) – upon the confession of White’s deathin the somnium abruptly silences any further consolations. The Book of the Duchess, then, seems to demonstrate mourning as a furtive expression of loss, which the mourners deflect when confronted by inexpressible grief, for death’s finality is such that “will never be [again and] must be left behind.”
Indeed, despite his youth, Chaucer’s exploration of this difficult and ambitious topic provides insights that are not only humanist, but human. Through the poet’s dream-like fluidity in his narration, Chaucer is able to situate us in the literary space opened up by the protagonists’ furtive narration and thus, by extension, situate us in the experience of being unhinged by death. Where the poet’s deliberate circling back to the beginning at the end of the poem prompts re-readings, The Book of the Duchess compels us to be reminded and reflexive of our mortal condition.
FOOTNOTES
1Chaucer provided the very first Middle English translation from the original Latin, and Boethius’s thought became foundational to many authors.
REFERENCES
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Book of Duchess.” Dream Visions and Other Poems, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
Weaver, Erica and A. Joseph McMullan. “Reading Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation of Philosophy from Alfred to Ashby.” The Legacy of Boethius in Medieval England: The Consolation and its Afterlives, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018.
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories told during a story-telling contest held by a group of pilgrims travelling together from London to Canterbury. In particular, “The Pardoner’s Tale,” coming after “The Physician’s Tale” and before “The Shipman’s Tale”, is an extended exemplum, prompted by the pilgrims’ appeal to the Pardoner for a moral tale to relieve them of their melancholia over the young maiden’s tragic death in the Physician’s tale.
SUMMARY
Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, from the 15th-century Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales.
The main tale told by The Pardoner is set somewhere in Flanders at an unspecified time. Three young men – drinking, gambling and blaspheming in a tavern – find themselves interrupted by a bell signalling a burial and send their servant boy along to make sense of the situation. The servant boy duly reports that their friend had been drunk when he was suddenly killed the previous night by Death, the thief who had also taken the lives of many regardless of gender and social status. Angered, the three rioters go in search of Death to avenge their friend. Along the way, they meet an Old Man whom Death refuses to slay despite his old age, and the Old Man directs them to an oak tree where Death is supposedly waiting. Finding instead gold lying at the foot of the oak tree, the three young men decide to wait until nightfall before carrying the gold back with them to avoid being mistaken as thieves. They draw straws to decide who should fetch wine and food while the other two guard the gold. The youngest draws the shortest straw and departs. Desiring for a larger share of the gold, the other two men plot to stab the youngest when he returns. The youngest, sharing the same desire, brings back wine laced with rat poison. After stabbing the youngest as planned, the remaining two young men drink to their death. Following their deaths, the Pardoner’s tale seems to serve as a warning against avarice and tavern sins.
DISCUSSION
Chaucer’s inclusion of a prologue, however, presents the Pardoner’s tale as one that provides critical insights into the English society’s socio-religious customs during his time. The Pardoner’s compulsive reiteration of his pardoning ritual and confession of his delight in profiting from his sermon attendees’ desire for absolution (possibly owing to the influence of alcohol) in the prologue effectively satirises his telling of a moral tale. The Pardoner’s attempt to profit from the pilgrims even after his proud confession of his, and by extension, the Church’s moral hypocrisy thus reasonably led to the Host’s violent threat to cut off the Pardoner’s genitals.
Beyond presenting a critical commentary on moral hypocrisy, the Host’s response also reveals the psychological reality of those living through the Black Plague. The Black Plague, otherwise known as the bubonic plague, was unexplainable during Chaucer’s time. Those fearfully living amongst the dead had popularly thought the plague to be God’s punishment for man’s sins. Like the young mens’ futile chase after the “stealthy thief” Death who has “slain a thousand during his pestilence” in the tale (line 675, 78), people living during the Black Plague were desperately attempting to grasp at Death which was everywhere and within themselves, but whose meaning nevertheless remained elusive. As such, moral tales like the Pardoner’s telling of the three young men’s sins as the cause of their premature deaths explains the ongoing excess death as punishment for their sins. To the Host, the Pardoner’s attempt to profit off the pilgrims involves the pilgrims in his blasphemous transaction such that the Host, too, “will have Christ’s curse!” – that is, be punished by death – if he were to kiss the Pardoner’s relics and pay his dues (line 946).
On a narrative level, Chaucer seems to also appeal to readers’ (yes, you and I) strange lack of sorrow when confronted with the presentation of death in excess, as a result of excessive greed, and for the furthering of excess profits. While the pilgrims had been terribly saddened by the death of a single maiden in the Physician’s tale, the Host’s response effectively signals an end to (or, the death of) the remembrance of deaths upon being reminded of his mortality. Chaucer seems to suggest, then, a mortal inability to comprehend excess(ive deaths) when such deaths are implicatory of one’s mortality – a sobering insight the almost grotesque comedy provides into our emotional struggle to comprehend excess death.
Finally, it is worth noting that the Pardoner’s tale is narratively driven by excessive desire – that is, the three young men’s avarice, the Pardoner’s desire for profit, and the pilgrims’ desire for a moral tale. These desires, when viewed through Peter Brook’s narrative lens in Narrative Desire, “creates and sustains narrative movement through the forward march of [a mutual] desire” for a conclusive end (40-41). For Brooks, this desire for a conclusive end is termed as “narrative desire” which, when fulfilled, provides readers with the desired retrospect and mastery over the event narrated. Accordingly, when this desire remains unfulfilled, the experience of an abrupt conclusion drives readers to repeat the narrative plot until their desire is fulfilled. In the case of the Pardoner’s tale, the Pardoner’s and the pilgrims’ morally opposite desires drive the narrative to a conclusion that, though fulfilling their desire to be cured of their melancholia, poses a threat to the pilgrims’ morality and mortality. While the hasty, violent end to the tale compels the pilgrims to seek for tales based on the existing socio-religious customs governing their understanding of the world, we are prompted to reread and continue our life-long meditation on the ever elusive death.
Chaucer worked on The Canterbury Tales between 1387 and 1400, and included many forms and styles to provide a detailed reflection of English society during his time. Written in a mix of prose and verse in Middle English, each line consists of 10 syllabus with alternating accents and end rhymes that would later form the basis of the heroic couplet’s syntax. The pilgrimage to Canterbury includes fictional characters from a wide range of classes and of different natures, offering insights into social relations, customs and practices of the time, including one as blasphemous and “anti-pilgrimaging” as The Pardoner (Lerer 262). Chaucer also used the pilgrimage setting to explore human relationships with the pleasures and vices of the physical world amidst spiritual inspirations. His intricate frame narrative allows for this expansive use of styles and forms to present strong individual character portraits without neglecting the pilgrims’ complex collective reality; in fact, many critics consider Chaucer’s unique frame narrative’s greatest achievement to be its ability to expertly present the relationship between pilgrims and their tales. The Canterbury Tales, however, remains arguably incomplete, and its complexity leaves more riddles yet to be solved.
REFERENCES
Augustyn, Adam. “The Canterbury Tales.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 May. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Canterbury-Tales.
Beidler, Peter G. “The Plague and Chaucer’s Pardoner.” The Chaucer Review 16.3:1982, 257–269. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25093795.
Benson, David C. “The Canterbury Tales: personal drama or experiments in poetic variety?” The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, pp. 127-142, Cambridge UP, doi: 10.1017/CCOL0521815568.008
Like many medieval poems, Pearl takes place mostly within a dream, a literary convention that allows the poet to explore ideas and convey experiences that might otherwise be impossible to express in language—in the case of this poem, the loss of a child.
SUMMARY
Pearl, miniature from Cotton Nero A.x. The Dreamer speaks to the Pearl-maiden on the other side of the stream.
The poem begins in a lush garden of herbs and flowers to which the narrator has returned to mourn his lost “pearl,” since it was here that the pearl first slipped from his grasp and into the ground. Overcome by grief, he swoons into unconsciousness and awakens in an exquisitely beautiful landscape, where crystal cliffs overlook a bright stream winding through a forest of burnished silver. Across the river, he catches sight of his own lost pearl—but now she is not simply a jewel but a young girl dressed in brilliant white robes covered in pearls. The dreamer gradually recognizes her but also sees that she has been radically transformed (though we learn that his daughter lived less than two years, here she appears as a mature being capable of thoughtful, articulate speech). In the conversation that follows, the pearl-maiden tries to convey something of the nature of eternity to the dreamer, who seems to flicker in and out of understanding. Toward the end of the poem, she reveals a dazzling vision of the heavenly city. Mesmerized, the dreamer plunges into the river to swim toward her, but is abruptly thrown out of his dream and awakens once more in the garden, where he meditates on this transcendent vision.
FORM AND STRUCTURE
One of the most striking features of the poem is its remarkably intricate form: each of the 101 stanzas has an ababababbcbc rhyme scheme, with a high degree of alliteration. This creates an echoing effect that is intensified by the use of “concatenation,” or linking together through repetition (the word comes from the Latin catena, meaning “chain”). In each group of five stanzas, there is a single “concatenation word” that appears multiple times, each time with slightly different shades of meaning—as if the poet is holding up each word to the light and examining its different facets. This word appears again in the first line of the next stanza group, producing what poet and translator Simon Armitage calls a “poetic passing of the baton”; finally, the last line of the poem repeats the first almost exactly, evoking a “spherical endlessness reminiscent of the pearl itself” (Armitage 11).
THEMES
In imitating the formal perfection of the pearl, the poem invites readers to reflect on the relationship between beauty and loss, or the role of the aesthetic in thinking about death. At the same time the poem calls attention to the limits of language in representing the infinite: in the end, its repetitions undo any sense of singular meaning and remind us that death will remain always beyond our understanding.
AUTHORSHIP
Pearl, miniature from Cotton Nero A.x. The dreamer falls asleep in the garden.
Almost nothing is known about the author of the poem. It survives in a single, unassuming manuscript that contains three other works almost certainly by the same author (Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). The manuscript itself (known as Cotton Nero A.x.) was almost lost when a terrible fire broke out in the London library where it was being stored in the early 18th century. We can only speculate about the circumstances of the poem’s creation: on one level, it is a work of religious instruction, full of biblical allusions and drawing on the New Testament as inspiration for its central image of the pearl. But the poem also communicates an emotional anguish that suggests that it is drawn from actual experience, from the genuine grief of a father who has lost a daughter.
REFERENCES
Simon Armitage, Pearl: a new verse translation (London: Norton, 2016).
The Lais of Marie de France are a series of twelve lai poems written by Marie de France that are primarily concerned with the ideas of courtly love and chivalric romance. They are highly notable for influencing the development of the medieval romance genre, including the renowned Arthurian romance.
OVERVIEW
Marie’s lais frequently feature two “destined” lovers. True to the chivalric romance conventions, the lais typically depict a nobleman (often a king, or knight) and a beautiful noblewoman (often a queen or an aristocrat’s daughter) who fall in love with each other upon knowing each other’s existence. It is common for one of these lovers to have already been married to another, usually not out of mutual affection but through arrangement. From such a premise, Marie’s lais will go on to focus on the quest for fulfillment of their love, which tends to take the form of illicit affairs and illegitimate children, with the involvement of supernatural and otherworldly elements. One or both lovers may die, and if so, this usually occurs directly or indirectly because of a third party’s jealousy and anger. In these cases, the narrative may shift toward their illegitimate child, who will then seek vengeance and restore the honour of their parents’ love.
The illicit affairs are almost never depicted negatively by Marie, in fact they seem to be deemed righteous when the love between two parties is mutual and purely stemming from affection. This gives Marie’s lais a rather unique brand of morality that can drive unexpected developments in the narrative, with the possibility for both ideal and tragic endings that provide closures without the modern concept of “poetic justice”.
FORM AND STRUCTURE
Marie’s lais are written in eight-syllable lines with rhyming couplets. The length of the lais vary greatly, ranging from as brief as 118 lines (“Chevrefoil”) to as long as 1184 lines (“Eliduc”).
The twelve lais are ordered in the following manner:
The Harley 978 manuscript is the only manuscript that contains all twelve of the lais, along with Marie’s prologue. While it cannot be said for certain if the order of the lais is of any significance, there has been speculation that they alternate between positive and negative actions (and consequences) that can arise from love, such that the odd lais tend to conclude with good endings while the even ones tend to conclude with bad endings (Ferrante 53).
Manuscript of Marie’s Lais.
Nonetheless, due to the lack of sufficient information, the abovementioned conjectures remain open to debate. More importantly, such structural concerns about the arrangement of Marie’s lais constitute more of a problem for the modern reader than her audience in the Middle Ages. It is also noteworthy that while Marie’s lais could be read as secular, there had yet to be any real distinction between secular and religious cultures in the late 12th century. Neither are Marie’s works in any way truly against the religious establishment. While the lais may present some form of critique or deviation, they also show a keen interest in exploring the possibilities of fiction, the joy and relief of escapism, and alternate realities. Therefore, Marie’s writing could be seen more as a thought experiment that allows her to assume different vantage points to examine themes that were of interest to her.
“Eliduc” does not seem to fit within this theory, however, though it is possible that Marie wished to end the collection on a good note and with a religious acclamation – a common trend in poetry during that period of time. However, this appears to contradict the world of Marie’s lais, which has been argued to be consistently and firmly secular (Kinoshita and McCracken 51). The case of the uncharacteristically devout ending of “Eliduc” has thus been seen as palinode for the collection’s various radical propositions (Kinoshita and McCracken 91), perhaps to avoid persecution from authorities. Others have read the range of attitudes toward dominant feudal and patriarchal structures across individual lais—some submissive, others subtly subversive or overtly resistant—as ideally suited to twelfth-century reading culture, in which subsequent discussion and debate was a crucial element of the reception of texts (Fisher 209).
GENRE AND LANGUAGE
Prior to the time of Marie’s writing, literary narratives tended to focus either on the quest for martial glory or on the spiritual experience of devotion. By contrast, Marie’s Lais represent a radical transformation of subject matter: while Marie retains some elements of adventure, quest, and journey from epics, she shifts much of the focus to the experience of an idealised, refined, courtly love. The emphasis on inner feeling and self-fulfilment through secular love, to which earlier texts had given little importance, would fundamentally reshape literary representations of human experience.
In addition, Marie’s lais are notable for being written in the vernacular instead of Latin, which would have been the formal language of writing in many areas during that period. In Marie’s prologue to the lais, she claims that she is translating Breton lais that she has heard. In order to keep these stories from being forgotten, she will set them in writing and in verse, at the same time translating them into Old French. The lais thus occupy a liminal position between orality and writing and at the intersection of multiple languages: derived originally from Welsh narratives, preserved in Brittany, then rewritten in England by a French-speaking author for an audience that primarily spoke Anglo-Norman.
Preserving the tone of the Breton lais and making these tales accessible to a wider readership could have been reasons for the use of vernacular French, although whether Marie was merely engaging in translation work remains debatable. It was not uncommon for writers of the time to state that they were translating tales from other sources to claim some form of authority and legitimacy for their work. While none of the “original” lais that Marie claimed to have referenced survived to modern day, it should be noted that the medieval literary culture was at its core, a culture of translation (Kinoshita and McCracken 19). This, alongside the clear artfulness in Marie’s writing, suggest that the lais likely contained much original input from Marie; in fact, she may even have made up the stories herself and invented a fictional origin for them.
CONTEXT
Marie’s lais were written in England around a century after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which resulted in significant social, political, and cultural change. Important implications brought about by the occupation of England include the shift in the language of the elite and an unprecedented contact with the European continent, especially France.
The Norman Conquest
Anglo-Norman French became the dominant language in literature, law, administration, and more, so much so that English nearly disappeared as a distinct language. It did not fully resurface until at least another century later in the form of Middle English, which came to resemble French more than the English of 200 years ago, thus rendering Old English practically unrecognisable to speakers and writers of Middle English.
It is plausible that Marie was based at the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and this was the kind of French-speaking English aristocracy whom Marie wrote for. Being a French writer situated in England would have allowed her greater access to the highly mobile exchange of cultures and tales incited by the Norman Conquest, more so than her alleged contemporaries such as Chrétien de Troyes who wrote in France. This may explain how Marie could have personally come across the Breton lais and other Celtic sources that inspired her translation and writing. Although Marie was geographically closer to Wales than Brittany, where the mostly oral language of Breton was spoken, the movement of peoples and cultures then was not limited to between the British Isles and continental France, but also within Britain itself. Thus, this is perhaps how Marie’s lais could claim to be of Breton origin yet contain Welsh motifs and settings, and be told through the Anglo-Norman courtly register and perspective, all at the same time.
The question of linguistic and cultural origins is also complicated by the ambiguity of the word “Breton.” While the term now refers specifically to the inhabitants of Brittany in north-western France, in Marie’s time it could also designate the people of ancient Britain now known as the Welsh. (In eliding these related but distinct languages and cultures, the term is perhaps closer to the modern word “Celtic.”) Writing in England, Marie would have been in much closer geographic proximity to Welsh culture, and this is likely what she means by “Breton”. Marie’s relationship to Welsh culture is informed by both the political reality of conquest and the exoticisation of Celtic culture (especially ideas of magic and the Otherworld) by the politically dominant Anglo-Normans.
NOTABLE THEMES
A depiction of chivalric romance. Edmund Leighton, “God Speed”, 1900, Oil on canvas.
Love It is evident that love is the key focus in Marie’s lais. Every lai presents a certain situation that a pair of lovers, a parent and child, or lord and vassal, must overcome. True and mutual love is akin to virtue, which is rewarded with happiness. Whereas love that is selfish often yields misfortune. Additionally, love in Marie’s lais comes with implicit rules of polite, courtly interaction; indeed, the true lovers of each lai are always identified as “courteous”, which comes from the Old French word corteis, meaning “courtly”. It is a condition that must be fulfilled before their love can be further strengthened through trials and suffering, which is distinct from classical and other romance depictions of love as an affliction of irrationality that brings about havoc and tragedy (Ashe 246, 261).
Chance In Marie’s lais, love seems almost whimsical. Unlike the classical concept of “fate”, there is no divine will guiding the narrative and love between two people, and their encounter often occurs by chance. The same can be said about the tokens of love in many of the lais. These tokens usually do not possess any distinctive qualities at all. However, once they are recognised by a character, often entirely coincidentally, they allow separated lovers or kin to rendezvous or reunite with each other. Such ambiguous yet miraculous fulfilment of love in the lais thus make the tokens seem super-charged in significance, as though they are magical.
Loyalty and Justice Loyalty, or the lack thereof, tends to drive conflict in the narrative, whether it be romantic or non-romantic in nature. For romantic relations, loyalty takes the form of fidelity. Most interestingly, illicit affairs are not considered infidelity within Marie’s lais so long as the love is true. In fact, if a character’s preexisting marital commitment was established not out of love but other agendas, said marriage is not considered the true marriage in the narrative (Ashe 248). Breaking away from such unhappy unions to pursue a true lover is thus encouraged and justified, as seen in lais such as “Yönec” and “Milun”. For non-romantic relations, Marie frequently examines the loyalty between lord and vassal, drawing sympathy for those who are not reciprocated despite being loyal, seen in lais such as “Lanval” and “Eliduc”.
Beauty and Desire While courage, generosity, and worthiness tend to be the indicators of good character for men in the lais, outward beauty seems to be the indicator and reflection of good character and interiority in women. It is beauty that signals to the men their supposed lover, where the more unparalleled the beauty, the more desirable the woman. In “Lanval”, this idea is taken to the extreme with the fae-like lady from Avalon, as beauty becomes the basis of the legal system that tries Lanval, and the bedrock whereupon the honour of King Arthur and his court rests. Marie does not, however, reduce the women in her lais to mere beautiful objects; rather, they are empowered by their beauty, possessing a degree of agency to influence others and even challenge rigid societal structures.
Origins and Names Although most characters in the lais are not given names, Marie pays a great deal of attention to the names of each lai, some of which are named after characters in the narrative. Nearly every lai comes with an introduction or closing about the various ways it is referred to across different cultures and different languages, such that at times Marie even steers away from the main narrative, devoting a considerable number of lines solely to discuss its naming and what each name identifies. Lais such as “Bisclavret” show the instability and difficulty of precise designation in naming because the same word (“bisclavret”) could refer to a supernatural creature (the werewolf), the name of the character who turns into said creature, the text itself, the concept of turning into such a creature, a story originating from a certain culture, or even the genre of such tales in general. This is further complicated in translation when an alternative title in a different language is presented, for it inevitably carries its own set of connotations that may or may not differ greatly from the original. Marie’s consideration of names and their implications thus undermines the certainty of any definitive categorisation into singular identities, reflecting the shifting and complex nature of linguistic and cultural identity in the setting in which she was writing.
Human / Animal Marie invites contemplation of what truly constitutes human identity through human / animal transformations in the lais of “Bisclavret” and “Yönec”. Just like the instability of name designation, the characters resist being identified as either properly human or animal. Rather, the lais depict the external form in a state of flux, suggesting humanity to be more of a process and an ongoing transformation, than something intrinsic (Campbell 106). Conditions of humanity include courtly behaviour, belief in God, and in some ways, social inclusion. However, this treatment is notably less applicable to Marie’s female characters, who often undergo a parallel transformation that is less controllable, more exposed, visible, and closer to the classical tradition of depicting physical appearances as manifestations of a character’s inner state (106).
Interiority Marie’s focus on love, an emotional experience, naturally places more weight in her narrative towards interiority. This is seen from how the lais centre on small, select groups of characters often in settings away from society, from their concerns about privacy and being discreet, and from the amount of detail dedicated to the courtly exchanges between lovers, which stands in stark contrast to the brief and anticlimactic descriptions of martial exploits. By shifting the traditional emphasis of the quest for glory to obtaining the lady’s love and self-fulfilment, Marie promotes celebration of the personal qualities, skills, and nobility of characters without them always having to be kings or saintly martyrs. This is in line with developments in theology and knighthood during the 12th century, which enabled writers (including Marie) to be recognised by their individual artistry instead of solely by the authority of their sources or religious truths (Ashe 243-244). Although the lais do not engage as extensively in the characters’ emotional states as some other romances, their concern with inner human experiences may offer insights on early ideas about individuality.
REFERENCES
Ashe, Laura. “It Is Different with Us: Love, Individuality, and Fiction.” 1000-1350: Conquest and Transformation, special issue of The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 1, no. 5, 2017, pp. 241-291. Oxford Scholarship Online, doi:10.1093/oso/9780199575381.003.0006.
Ferrante, Joan M. “Marie de France.” A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier, Harvard University Press, 1994, pp. 50-55.
Fisher, Marianne. “Culture, Ethnicity, and Assimilation in Anglo-Norman Britain: The Evidence from Marie de France’s Lais,” Exemplaria 24.3: 195-213.
Gilbert, Dorothy, translator. Marie de France: Poetry. By Marie de France, W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Kinoshita, Sharon, and McCracken, Peggy. Marie de France: A Critical Companion, Boydell & Brewer, 2012.
