Family Drama in the Middle English Breton Lays

Family Drama in the Middle English Breton Lays Tom Shippey he thought that the twelve lais of Marie de France are integrated by some controlling pattern, are variations on a theme, are Ttransformations of some deep-structure metanarrative—there are as many formulations of the thought as there have been scholars wishful to formulate it—is so widespread as to be almost convincing. For eighty years her poems have been seen as couplets, quadruplets, congruent triangles, their organizing principle reducible to chart or diagram.1 Needless to say, no scholar’s analysis has carried complete conviction to any other scholar, but the thought is so often found as to suggest that there must be some reason behind it. The argument that there is some underlying pattern has furthermore been extended to (some of) the anonymous Old French lais, with G.V. Smithers arguing more than fifty years ago that three story-patterns may be detected in Breton lais, both the anonymous ones and those of Marie, and to some extent in Middle English examples as well, while all three relate to each other and are clearly derived (as the label “Breton lai” suggests) from some Celtic and probably mythic original.2 Pattern I, in which a mortal acquires a fairy lover, is exemplified by Marie’s Lanval and the anonymous Graelent and Guingamor, the first translated into Middle English as Sir Landevale, this latter further used, along with Graelent, by the author of the Middle English Sir Launfal. Marie’s Yonec and the anonymous Tydorel and Desiré exhibit pattern II, in which liaison between fairy and mortal produces a son. In Smithers’s pattern III the birth of a son leads to father-son conflict, as in Marie’s Milun, the anonymous Doon, and the Middle English Sir Degaré and Sir Gowther. In tracing out the connections between all these stories 1 I list many examples of this habit in an earlier article, “Breton Lais and Modern Fantasies,” in Studies in Medieval English Romance: Some New Approaches, ed. D. S. Brewer (Cambridge: Brewer, 1988) 69-91. 2 See Smithers, “Story-patterns in some Breton lays,” Medium Ævum 22 (1953): 61-92. 418 Tom Shippey Smithers is especially astute in noting narrative lacunas and gaps, often caused in his view by “inept modification of a basic story-pattern” (79). So far, one may say, so good. But analyses such as those cited are always to some extent selective. Smithers for instance accommodates three of the eight Middle English poems self-described as “Breton lays” to his schema, and mentions Sir Orfeo as a not inappropriate fourth, while a fifth is clearly a variant of Marie’s Le Fresne: but he dismisses the remaining three, including the most famous of them all, Chaucer’s “Franklin’s Tale,” as “not relevant to this study” (92). There is a strong argument for such a procedure, in that almost no one has ever been persuaded that the twenty Old French poems self-labeled as lais, apart from Marie’s twelve,3 really match the label, the Lai du Lecheor, for instance, attacking the very basis of all Marie’s lais, and most of the others, in denying that there is such a thing as love, and insisting that it is all just (to put it politely) concealed sexual desire. Keith Busby and his colleague Glyn S. Burgess sum up in the introduction to their translation of Marie: The simplest and most plausible explanation of this is that medieval literary termi- nology is at best rather flexible, and that whereas the word lai may have had the specific meaning of the Marie-type Breton lai in the twelfth century, its semantic field became enlarged in the thirteenth to cover other sorts of short courtly verse narrative.4 This certainly was the case in France. Still, one may wonder whether the medieval English authors who deliberately labeled their poems as “Breton layes” were just hoping for an easy popularity, a kind of “brand recognition”; or whether they had some lurking sense, perhaps not entirely conscious, of what was and was not appropriate to the genre they claimed to be working in. In the article cited in note 1 above, I suggested twenty years ago that there was something to be learned by comparing Marie’s collection of poems with a set of modern fantasy novels for young adults, and by relating both groups of texts to Derek Brewer’s argument that a surprising amount of surviving literature from all periods should be 3 The twenty are listed in Glyn S. Burgess, The Old French Narrative Lay: an Analytical Bibliography (Cambridge: Brewer, 1995). 4 “Introduction” to The Lais of Marie de France, trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Keith Busby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 35. .

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