The lais of marie de france summary

What are the differences between Chaucer's Boccaccio's and Marie de France's visions of this myth in modern American society? How? Where?

THE LAIS OF MARIE DE FRANCE

BY

ROBERT W. HANNING

The Vision of History in Early Britain: from Gildas to Geoffrey of Monmouth

The Individual in Twelfth Century Romance

BY

JOAN M. FERRANTE

The Conflict of Love and Honor: The medieval Tristan legend in France, Germany, and Italy

(Translator.) Guillaume d'Orange. Four

Twelfth Century Epics

Editor with George Economou.

In Pursuit of Perfection: Courtly Love in Medieval Literature

4

Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante

5

To our students

6

Qtontent5 INTRODUCTION s, ' w i

PROLOGUE W W X 28

GUIGEMAR 9 w w 30

EQUITAN ' w w 6o

LE FRESNE w w ' 73

BISCLAVRET W W W 92

LANVAL w w w 105

LES DEUS AMANZ w ' ' 126

YONEC w w w 137

LAUSTIC w w w 155

MILUN w w w 162

CHAITIVEL w w w 181

CHEVREFOIL w w w 1go

ELIDUC w *1 w 196

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY % X X 235

7

8

THE LAIS OF MARIE DE FRANCE

9

INTRODUCTION MARIE DE FRANCE was perhaps the greatest woman author of the Middle Ages and certainly the creator of the finest medieval short fiction before Boccaccio and Chaucer. Her best work, the Lais-the collection of short romances and tales translated in this volume-is a major achievement of the first age of French literature and of the "Renaissance of the Twelfth Century," that remarkable efflorescence of Western European culture that signaled the end of the "Dark Ages" and the beginning of many ideas and institutions basic to modern civilization. One of the twelfth century's most significant innovations was its rediscovery of love as a literary subject-a subject that it depicted, anatomized, celebrated, and mocked in a series of masterpieces, almost all of which were written in lucid French verse. Among these pioneering love texts, which would soon be adapted and imitated in all the vernaculars of Europe, none better stands the test of time than Marie's Lais. The combination of variety, virtuosity, and economy of means that characterizes the twelve short stories of fulfilled or frustrated passion -the shortest of which, Chevre f oil, is but 118 lines long, while the longest, Eliduc, requires but 1,184-gives ample and constant evidence of Marie's mastery of plot, characterization, and diction, while the woman's point of view she brings to her material further distinguishes the Lais from the longer narratives of love and adventure composed by her male contemporaries, of whom the best known to modern readers is Chretien de Troyes, the creator of Arthurian romance and the first chronicler of the love of Lancelot and Guinevere.

Unfortunately, we know practically nothing about this superb storyteller, except for her name, her extant works (in addition to the Lais, a collection of animal fables and the moral, supernatural tale, St. Patrick's Purgatory), the approximate period of her literary activities (116o?-1215?), and the fact, derived from her name and comments in her writings, that she was of French birth but wrote at or for the English court, which, as a result of the Norman Conquest, was Frenchspeaking in her days. (See below for further information about Marie's activities and other works.) From the Lais, however, a comprehensive picture of Marie's artistic personality and predilections emerges, several facets of which deserve particular attention.

10

Perhaps the most recognizable "signature" of her work is the symbolic creature or artifact around which a lai is organized for maximum intensity and suggestiveness within the least possible narrative duration. The nightingale in Laiistic, the hazel tree wound about with honeysuckle in Chevrefoil, the hungry swan in Milun-all provide valuable insight into the nature of love in their respective narratives, insight that might otherwise require development through thousands of lines of poetry. Marie carefully places her symbols in the context of character revelation and tersely expressed dramatic irony, which prompts the reader to draw separate conclusions about the worth of the lovers and their love in a given lai. Accordingly, symbols and situations frequently parallel each other in two or more lais, yet the denouements, and the judgments we pass on their justice or injustice, will vary widely from one lai to another. The result of this process of "paired contrasts" is that, as we read on, our experience of each narrative is reinforced and complicated by resonances, often ironic, of its predecessors. What emerges is not a unified moral perspective on passion and its consequences: Marie's art avoids easy generalizations such as "married love is wrong, adultery right," or the reverse, but demonstrates instead that character, fortune, and the ability to seize and manipulate opportunities interact in any love relationship. Devotion, loyalty, ingenuity, which transcend marital ties or social norms, provide the grounds for our sympathies with or condemnation of any of Marie's lovers.

In addition to our involvement with the protagonists of the Lais, we respond constantly to the mastery with which Marie presents them. The deft touches of irony (as in the conclusion of Equitan, where the adulterous king, to avoid discovery, leaps into the vat of boiling water he has prepared in order to destroy his mistress's husband), or of homely sentiment (e.g., the description of the early-morning discovery of the abandoned infant heroine of Le Fresne by the porter of a monastery), remind us of the artist's complete control across the entire spectrum of narrative technique. Marie tells us in the Prologue to the Lais that she has undertaken the novel task of translating the body of love tales created by the Bretons, those famous exponents of the art of exotic storytelling. As there are no extant "Breton lais," we cannot substantiate Marie's claim or decide to what extent her plots may follow Breton originals. But it is clear from her use of classical Latin and contemporaneous French material that she was a welleducated and highly trained literary craftsman who wished

11

to be recognized for her skills. She wrote as an expert on love and storytelling for the first large, sophisticated, and elite audience of medieval Europe-an audience that appreciated, as we can, the inventiveness as well as the charm and power of her love tales. In order to appreciate Marie's achievement fully, the modern reader should know something of the cultural milieu in which she worked.

The twelfth century in Western Europe saw a tremendous expansion of intellectual, social, and artistic activity; it was truly a cultural renaissance, responding to new political structures, social tensions, and economic advances that were only dimly foreshadowed during the early-medieval centuries. The expansion of urban life brought with it the rise of scholastic centers, which were usually attached to the cathedrals of important towns like Chartres and Paris. Training in grammar (or, as we should call it, literary analysis and philology), rhetoric, and dialectic or logic produced a new class of intellectuals who were technically clerics but were often only minimally involved with or controlled by ecclesiastical authority, unlike their early-medieval predecessors, who were almost all monks and deeply committed to a life of religious observance and obedience. Graduates of the twelfth-century schools were equipped for service at the burgeoning courts of France and England, where they formed a civil service and also found an outlet for their literary abilities. The rise of a courtly aristocracy at these same centers of political power gave the school-trained cleres an audience that was also new in medieval civilization. It comprised, in addition to the learned clerics themselves, the greater and lesser aristocracy of chevaliers, who fought for a living but also cultivated arts of nonlethal competition and personal refinement that were unknown to early-medieval warriors; and-most important, in the opinion of many scholarsit also included noblewomen, many of whom were involved in feudal politics and highly educated in religious and secular subjects, even though regular courses of advanced study in the schools were open only to men. (Among the many remarkable women of the twelfth century, besides Marie, special recognition is due to Eleanor of Aquitaine, heiress to a great duchy and successively wife to the kings of France and England; her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne and patroness of Chretien de Troyes; and Helo►se, mistress and later wife of Peter Abe'lard, well known throughout France for her brilliance, courage, and successful career as an abbess.) The fertile interaction of these groups gave birth to a

12

vernacular literature in which learned interests, previously expressed exclusively in Latin, and themes of importance to a courtly elite in search of self-defining ideals mingled and cross-pollinated.

One of the themes explored in twelfth-century courtly narrative was the individual's recognition of a need for selffulfillment and his or her struggle for the freedom to satisfy this need. The tension between the personal quest for perfection and one's social obligations was a recurring theme of courtly literature, and narrative and lyric poets alike used love as a symbol of the quintessentially private sphere of existence and desire. The nature and problems of love-for it was by no means always viewed as a positive force by Marie and her contemporaries-were explored in lyrics and in long and short narratives. Besides Marie's Lais, the latter group includes contes, short tales borrowed from the works of Ovid, the classical master of love and self-conscious art, whose influence was everywhere visible in the period. Among authors of longer chivalric romances, Chrhien de Troyes dominates the age, but Beroul and Thomas, authors of versions of the tragic love story of Tristan and Isolt, and Gautier d'Arras also excelled. All explored the problematic interrelationship of love and chivalry from many points of view, with an art that moved easily from quasi-symbolic representation to detached social comedy.

The narratives of the courtly poets were connoisseurs' literature: fanciful, ingenious tales that simultaneously amused their audience and challenged it to discover deeper meanings beneath the polished language and the idealized adventures. A long chivalric romance of Chretien, for example, comprises a series of puzzles to be solved by aficionados of the genre: Why did the hero or heroine act in a particular, unexpected way at a particular moment? What vice or anti-courtly attitude does a villain represent? Unlike earlier medieval epics, in which heroic values are universally acknowledged even though cowardice or treachery may cause their subversion, twelfthcentury courtly tales and romances usually portray the protagonist's gradual discovery of real values through love (one thinks of Marie's Guigemar, for whom love is wounding and healing, a cause of sorrow before it is a cause of joy), or the transformation of a delusory set of external appearances and relationships by the timely revelation of a hero or heroine's true identity (as is the case in Le Fresne). The line of European narrative fiction that uses the portrayal of love as a means for exploring the interaction of self and society, appearance and reality, descends

13

continuously from the twelfth-century courtly narrative to the twentieth- century novel. Marie is thus one of the creators-the only woman among them-of a grand tradition that has shaped and defined our literary culture.

We know almost nothing about Marie herself, except that she was originally French and lived in the latter part of the twelfth century. It is not unusual to have virtually no information about medieval authors except what we can glean from their and others' works. There are none of the public records and reactions we take so for granted with modern writers no copyrights or publication dates, no standard editions, no critical reviews, no authors' memoirs or letters to establish the date or proper text of a work. More often than not, the best manuscripts we have are much later than the works themselves and have gone through several copyings; if there is more than one manuscript, they usually do not agree in all particulars. All of this means that we have to learn mainly by inference, to establish the text by judicious comparison and selection, and to deduce facts about the author from references in the work, from connections with the works of others (when there are obvious sources or influences), and, though much more rarely, from direct remarks by other writers, as in Gottfried's literary excursus in the Tristan.

All we know about Marie besides her name is her work: the Lais, the Fables, and St. Patrick's Purgatory (L'Espurgatoire Saint Patrice).' Marie names herself at the beginning of the first lai, at the end of the Purgatory, and at the end of the Fables, in the latter case rather assertively:

14

"De France" means, presumably, that she was born in France, either the Continent as opposed to England or the Ile de France as opposed to Occitaine, probably not that she was of the royal house (as some have assumed).' Beyond that, she tells us only that she wrote the Lais for a "noble king" and the Fables for a Count William. The king is probably Henry II (ruled 1154-89)' Count William may be William Longsword (Guillaume Longespee), illegitimate son of Henry II, Count of Salisbury after about 1197, or William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke from 1199, or William of Gloucester, or, most likely of all, William of Mandeville,' Earl of Essex from 1167 (died 1189).

Marie herself is even more difficult to identify. She may be the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou-and hence a sister of Henry 11- who became abbess of Shaftesbury around 1181 and died C. 1216, or the abbess of Reading, or Marie de Meulan, daughter of Count Waleran de Beaumont.' It seems unlikely that we shall ever really know who she was. All we can be sure of is that she frequented the court of Henry II and Eleanor, that she was probably a noblewoman (the circle in which she moved, the subjects that concerned her, and the level of her education make it extremely unlikely that she was not of noble birth-a lower-class laywoman would have had little opportunity for education). She was certainly educated, knowing, besides her native French, Latin, from which she translated the Purgatory, and English, from which she translated the Fables. But even her dates are difficult to determine. If we accept the chronological order of Lais, Fables, Purgatory,° we are still left with a wide range of years. The Purgatory was probably written after 1189 because it mentions a Saint Malachi (1. 2074), who was not canonized until 1189; it may have been done as late as 1208-15.' The Lais have been dated from 1155-70, by analogy with other literary works that seem to have influenced Marie: Wace's Brut, c. 1155, Piramus et Tisbe, 1155-60, and Eneas, c. i 16o.8 Several critics think that Chretien knew Marie's Prologue, which she wrote after the Lais, by the time he wrote Erec;9 if this is so, the Lais were probably written by 1170.

We can make such connections with other literary works, but they do not help us with the dating, since we cannot date the analogous works precisely. Eliduc was probably a source for Gautier d'Arras's We et Galeron, dated 1178-85.10 Denis Piramus mentions Marie's Lais in his Vie S. Edmund le Rei, saying that they are popular among counts, barons,

15

knights, and ladies (11.35-48); if Denis wrote between Ii7o and 118o, as his editor, Kjellman, thinks, the Lais must have been written by then. Certainly Marie knew some version of the Tristan legend (she tells part of the story in the Chevrefoil and seems to use episodes in other lais: the procession of lovely ladies, each mistaken in turn for the heroine, in Lanval; the trap of stakes set for the lover in Yonec; the secret shrine of love in the woods in Eliduc); but whether she knew the Tristan poems that we have-Beroul, Thomas, or some earlier version -we cannot tell 11 We can only say that Marie probably wrote the Lais between 116o and I9q.l2

She wrote them all in French, in octosyllabic couplets. For the Lais, she drew on Celtic tales, probably oral, and French sources, in some cases written. She seems to have known Ovid and contemporary versions of other classical material, like Wace's Brut, the Roman de Thebes, and the Roman d'Eneas, as well as Arthurian tales and the Tristan story. The Fables draw on at least two versions of the Romulus, derived from a Latin version of Aesop; the Roman de Renart material; popular tales; and fabliaux. The Purgatory is a translation of a Latin text, Tractatus de Purgatori sancti Patricii, by the monk Henry of Saltrey.

Marie begins the Fables, as she does the Lais, with a conventional prologue that reveals her sense of moral obligation: those who know letters should give their attention to the books and words of philosophers, who wrote down moral precepts so that others might improve themselves. This didactic purpose is not absent from any of Marie's material. She has translated the Fables, she tells us in the epilogue, from English into French as Alfred had translated them from Latin into English, and as Aesop did from Greek into Latin (a popular belief). They are short tales with a moral lesson at the end, using, for the most part, animals as the principal actors, in the Aesopic tradition. The lessons are conventional: the dangers of greed and pride, the oppression of the weak by the strong, the superiority of a simple life over a luxurious one lived in servitude or terror-the Lais make many of the same points, but in a far more subtle way. Marie gives several of the Fables a feudal twist with the lessons she draws from them: xxvii, a man cannot have honor if he shames his lord, nor can a lord have honor if he shames his men; xix, those who choose bad lords are foolish, for by subjecting themselves to cruel and evil men they gain nothing but shame; lxii, a prince should not have a covetous or deceptive seneschal in his kingdom unless he wants to make him his lord. Some of these lessons

16

are of interest in connection with a recurring theme in Marie's Laisthe journey to another land and a new life: ci, no one should put himself in the hands of one who would harm him: rather, he should go to another land; xxii, if you look for a better land, you never find one where you will be without fear or sorrow; lxxx, those who do ill in their own country and depart leave it to no purpose, because they will do the same wherever they go; it is their hearts they should change rather than their countries. This is, indeed, what several of Marie's heroes do.13

In Saint Patrick's Purgatory, the hero makes a spiritual journey to another land, from which he returns a better Christian. This work, which Marie translated from Latin, has a religious as well as a moral purpose: it was intended not only to help others to improve themselves, but also to teach them to fear and serve God. At the same time, although the subject is overtly otherworldly-the pains of purgatory and the joys of the earthly paradise as seen by an Irish knight-one cannot help, once again, making connections with the Lais. The journey through purgatory is described as if it were real, but the narrative is preceded by a comment that suggests it is actually a vision: many souls, we are told, leave their bodies temporarily, have visions or revelations, and then return; they see in the spirit what seems to be corporeal, and they only seem to feel the real pains (11. 163ff.). (One wonders if this is what happens to those characters in the Lais who apparently have strange, otherworldly adventures-e.g., in Guigemar, Lanval, and Yonec, people are transported by magic by the will of those who desire them; it is perhaps only the spirit that goes, and yet the body seems to have the experience.) The Irish knight, after he has repented his sins, approaches purgatory through a deep hole in the earth, following a long, dark passage that finally opens onto a field, where he sees a beautiful house (cf. the tunnel through the hill, then the meadow, and finally the bird-knight's castle in Yonec). In the house, monks prepare the knight for the journey he is about to undertake, and for the temptations and torments of the devils he will encounter. He passes through them all-and they are described in graphic and grotesque detail-calling continually on God to defend him. Finally he crosses a bridge that leads to a land of light, where a religious procession welcomes him with joy; the Irish knight may expect to return to this place after he dies, and after he has actually experienced the torments he just witnessed. This paradise, where souls go when they are delivered from the pains of purgatory, is on this earth, in the East; here

17

they will remain until the Last Judgment, when they will go to heaven. It may be the same sort of earthly paradise that Marie has in mind, in the Lais, as the homeland of the fairy in Lanval, or of the bird-knight in Yonec. Her heroes or heroines can experience the joy of such a place only briefly, only as momentary visions, in this life, but that is often enough to sustain them. Lanval alone chooses to relinquish this world and follow his love back to her otherworld; the lady in Yonec makes her way to such a land, but is not permitted to remain.

The Lais are the one work for which Marie does not claim a literary source. They are tales she has heard and put into rhyme: Celtic tales, which were originally transmitted by Breton minstrels, but whether Marie heard them in French or in Celtic is not altogether clear. She does give some of the names in "Bretan" (Risclavret, 1. 3; Lanval, 1. 4; Laustic, 11. 2-4), which suggests that she knows something of the language, but since she also gives the meaning of some names in English, we cannot assume on that basis that her direct source was Celtic. In any case, she makes it clear that she is the first to put these stories into rhyme, that is, into a conven tional literary form, the octosyllabic couplet. She is not the first to render short narratives in verse (the Ovidian tales, Narcissus and Piramus et Tisbe, antedate the Lais), but she may be the first to do it with nonclassical material.

Courtly romances in Marie's period treat Celtic subjects in narrative poems, but they are much longer than Marie's Lais. The romances also differ from the Lais in that they are concerned with both love and chivalry, with the proper balance between a knight's responsibility to his society, his service to others, and the fulfillment of his own desires while Marie's primary concern is with the personal needs of the knight orand this is unique in this literature-of the lady. In her Lais, the lovers often live in a hostile world-a court that rejects, a marriage that enslaves, social conventions that constrain-and love offers the only opportunity to escape that world; to free the mind, if not the body, from the world's oppression; to endure the pains. This is not to say that every lai presents a picture of an ideal love; several (Equitan, Bisclavret, Laiistic, Chaitivel) reveal the treachery or selfishness of imperfect love. In fact, as many critics have pointed out, the Lais offer a spectrum of love situations.14 If one goes systematically through the collection, noting the aspect of love that Marie emphasizes in each, one ends with a fairly complete sense of her idea of

18

love, as well as the strong impression that she conceived of the lais as complementary pieces.15 We cannot be sure that the order we follow is the order Marie intended. It is, however, the order given in manuscript (H), which is the earliest extant manuscript, the only one that contains all twelve Lais, the one and widely accepted as the best available version; but H is mid-thirteenth-century, not contemporary, and therefore may not reflect the author's plan. Bearing this reservation about the order of the Lais in mind, we can nonetheless note obvious correspondences among them, opposing perspectives and variations on the same theme.

The message in the early lais seems fairly clear, but as we read further into the collection, and as they resonate more and more with each other, the moral line becomes more ambiguous, more complicated. The first two lais (Marie does tell us in so many words that she is beginning with Guigemar) offer a fairly straightforward contrast between fulfilling and destructive love. Guigemar is a good knight who lacks only love, which is symbolized by his wound; his lady, trapped in an unhappy marriage with a possessive old man, also lacks love. Guigemar's love frees and fulfills her, her love cures and fulfills him. Neither chivalry nor marriage can function properly without love (in Milun, Marie will show how chivalry can interfere with love and marriage). Guigemar focuses on the needs of the hero and on the bond between the lovers; there is no relationship, no trust to be broken, between the woman's husband and the hero, and the husband's claims on his wife are undercut by his treatment of her. The love is thus virtually without stain (if somewhat limited in comparison to what we see of love in the last lais), as the aid and sanction of supernatural forces suggest. In Equitan, the second lai, there is a bond between the two men (the husband and the lover) that is both personal and public-the husband is the lover's seneschal and serves him loyally, so the king's affair with his wife is at once self-indulgence and a betrayal of a public trust. The wife's moral position is not justified because of any mistreatment; indeed, it is vitiated by her husband's goodness and her possessiveness and ambition. There is no supernatural intervention; on the contrary, the machinations of the lovers are responsible for all that happens. One concludes that, important as love is in the fulfillment of the individual, it is not to be pursued at all costs. The different natures of these two loves-one necessary and true, and ultimately rewarded; the other self-indulgent and treacherous, and finally punished -are pointed up by the ease with which

19

the first is acknowledged (a woman with a good sense of her own and her lover's worth, Guigemar says, need not be begged at length [11. 5'3ff•1), while Equitan has to carry on a lengthy debate, filled with ironies, in order to persuade his lady to love himas if the more words, the less feeling.ts

Guigemar shows how necessary love is, and how real love can endure the proofs of suffering and separation; Equitan shows how a love that arises solely for pleasure, from selfindulgence rather than deep need, can lead to treachery and self-destruction. In the third lai, Le Fresne, a love that begins as simple pleasure and physical indulgence rises, through the woman's devotion, to self-sacrifice, which ultimately earns its reward. But in Bisclavret, the lai which follows Le Fresne, the woman cannot attain the degree of devotion her situation requires; instead, fearing for her own safety and unmoved by her husband's suffering, she betrays him and is punished for it. The devotion Fresne shows to her lover, despite his willingness to bow to social pressures and marry another woman, is eventually repaid, not simply by marriage to him, but by reunion with her parents and sister, and a recovery of her identity. Bisclavret's wife, who faces an equally demanding test, fails to pass it. She betrays her husband's love and trust, turns to another man, and incurs lasting shame for herself and her descendants. Bisclavret, like Fresne, lives many years in exile from his true self (Bisclavret as a werewolf, Fresne as a foundling) ; both had been rejected by women who failed in their family responsibilities, in the first case, that of a wife to her husband, and in the second, that of a mother to her child; both are protected in their defenseless states: Fresne by the abbess who takes her in, Bisclavret by his king, who rescues and sustains him. Marie has extended the scope of her attention to significant human relations beyond the pair of lovers (the family, and the court). The king in Bisclavret rewards the loyalty of a good vassal, whom he does not recognize but whose gesture of devotion he appreciates, in contrast to the king Equitan, who abused the loyalty of a faithful minister; in both Bisclavret and Equitan, the wronged husband is avenged on his wife and survives, a nice balance to the defeat or destruction of the unsympathetically treated husbands in Guigemar, Yonec, and Milun.

Indeed, Marie attempts to balance her presentations to a remarkable degree. In the first four lair, she seems to be concerned with a sexual balance: a good pair of lovers in Guigemar, a bad pair in Equitan, a woman's devotion in Le Fresne, a man's endurance in Bisclavret; a

20