Abstract
Identifying the Breton lays in Middle English as a coherent corpus is a challenge for several reasons because they are rather difficult to distinguish from the romance genre. Very tellingly, in her contribution to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature dedicated to romance, Rosalind Field does not consider these lays as a separate group; rather, she inscribes most of them within the romance genre. In her analysis, there is no such subcategory as “Middle English Breton lays,” but instead short romances that occasionally resort to “the procedures of the Breton lai,” among which she mentions Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal.1 Although she refers to features she deems characteristic of the Breton lais, such as “the formal brevity and the allure of Celtic magic,” she regards them as a tradition more than as a prescribed genre.2 My contention is precisely that in this particular case, generic markers consist of a well-informed inscription within a tradition of composition. Roughly speaking, the diversity of approaches— thematic, structural, or cultural3—yields two groups of poems, which vary depending on the critic. On the one hand, one may consider the lays that are undoubtedly of Breton descent, namely Lay Le Freine and Sir Launfal, both translated from lays by Marie de France. Sir Launfal is a palimpsest in its own right, as Colette Stévanovitch’s essay in this volume demonstrates.
Awareness of generic ancestry offers evidence of the palimpsestuous nature of the “true” Middle English Breton lays.
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Notes
Rosalind Field, “Romance in England, 1066–1400,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 173 [152–76]. Field provides a minimal definition of the Breton lai as composed by Marie de France: “economically enigmatic tales of love and magic, focusing on female action, [which] created in the Breton lai an alternative to the long narratives of war and chivalry” (p. 154). She does not address the specific issue of their Middle English counterparts in any way besides silhouetting them against Marie’s background.
Regarding this type of approach, see John B. Beston, “How Much Was Known of the Breton Lai in Fourteenth-Century England?” Harvard English Studies 5 (1974): 319–36.
Concerning the various adaptations of the Lanval story, see (among others) Mortimer J. Donovan, The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), especially ch. 3, “The Middle English Breton Lays in Couplets,” and ch. 5, “The Middle English Breton Lay in Tail-Rhyme Stanza.”
All references are based on the following edition: Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury, eds. The Middle English Breton Lays (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications for TEAMS, 1995). See also the electronic versions of Lay le Freine: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/freiint.htm
See Paul Strohm, “The Origin and Meaning of Middle English Romaunce,” Genre 10 (1977): 1–28, esp. 25–26. The floating generic identification is addressed in exactly the same terms by R.H. Nicholson when referring to “those lais which have always struck readers as the truest examples of the genre” in his “Sir Orfeo: A ‘Kynges Noote,’” Review of English Studies 36.142 (May 1985): 171 [161–79].
On the interaction between literacy and orality, see especially Roy M. Liuzza, “Sir Orfeo: Sources, Traditions, and the Poetics of Performance,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 21.2 (1991): 269–84.
See Constance Bullock-Davies, “The Form of the Breton Lay,” Medium Aevum 42 (1973): 14.
See A.C. Spearing’s comments in “Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 126 n. 14 [117–56].
Marie insists on the musical quality of the lays in the Lai du Chèvrefeuille: Tristram a Wales s’en rala/Tant que sis uncles le manda./Pur la joie qu’il ot eüe/De s’amie qu’il ot veüe/E pur ceo k’il aveit escrit/Si cum la reïne l’ot dit/Pur les paroles remembrer/Tristram, ki bien saveit harper/En aveit fet un nuvel lai/ Asez briefment le numerai/Gotelef l’apelent en engleis/Chevrefoil le nument Franceis./Dit vus en ai la verité/Del lai que j’ai ici cunté (11. 105–118). Similarly, in Guigemar: De cest cunte k’oï avez/Fu Guigemars li lais trovez/Que hum fait en harpe e en rote./Bon en est a oïr la note (11. 883–86). For all citations from Marie de France, see Lais de Marie de France, ed. Karl Warnke; transl., notes, pres. Laurence Harf-Lancner, Lettres gothiques (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990).
See Laura Hibbard Loomis, “Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the Auchinleck Manuscript,” Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 14–33. The manuscript contains, among other texts, Lay Le Freine, Sir Orfeo, Sir Degaré, and several romances.
Steele Nowlin, “Between Precedent and Possibility: Liminality, Historicity, and Narrative in Chaucer’s ‘The Franklin’s Tale,’” Studies in Philology 103.1 (Winter 2006): 47–67.
See Kathryn Hume, “Why Chaucer Calls ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ a Breton Lai,” Philological Quarterly 51.2 (1972): 365–79.
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© 2011 Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, and Tatjana Silec
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Vial, C. (2011). The Middle English Breton Lays and the Mists of Origin. In: Carruthers, L., Chai-Elsholz, R., Silec, T. (eds) Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118805_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118805_10
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