Fairy Tales: Proud Knight, Fair Lady: The Twelve Lais of Marie de France

Proud Knight, Fair Lady: The Twelve Lais of Marie de France
Marie de France, translated by Naomi Lewis, illustrated by Angela Barrett
ISBN: 0670826561
Twelve early-medieval "fairy tales" about knights and maidens and courtly love.
Read April 12, 2016

So these are some of our earliest western fantasy/romance books, y'all.  Marie lived and wrote somewhere in the 1160s-1220s, and she wrote (possibly) quite a lot, most likely under the protection and encouragement of the otherwise unlamented Henry (Plantagenet) the Second.  We don't know who she was, but these Lais reveal a quick mind, good understanding of narrative convention and of interesting subject matters, and a fairly sharp humor.

So what we've got mainly are stories about courtly love.  Usually this is between people who are not married, and what I find interesting here is the utter lack of time spent on moralizing about why and how and when they're wrong and bad for their actions.  The affairs are often described to the audience as wrong, and the lovers often endure horrible suffering for their pains, but the people themselves (unless they are villainous) are held up as good ladies and gentlemen throughout, and in many more of the stories than I would have expected, the love affair itself is considered a courtly and acceptable thing: so long as the lovers remained in the bonds of considerate behavior and didn't flout their love in public or try to have their spouses killed off.  

I'm also interested in the very mundane and realistic portrayals of life which are interspersed with the obviously fantasical and what we would consider fairy-tale.  A good half of the stories have some touch of the fantastic. In Guigemar, we've got a magic boat, a knot and a belt that can only be unfastened by true love's touch, and a magic white hind with antlers (the male deer is the hart, and usually the one with antlers, making this even more interesting).  In Bisclavret we've got a werewolf who is a devoted and loyal knight who is the one betrayed, which is all sorts of unusual.  Lanval is a Galahad figure who feels no urge to love until he sees (what isn't explicitly stated to be, but cannot be anything but) an elven/faery maiden in the forest.  Les Deus Amanz is more like a folktale, but does have a purported magic potion: made by a wise and learned old Duchess no less! Yonec tells of a hostage wife succored (and seduced) by a hawk-knight shapeshifter. And Eliduc has a miraculous Juliet-like death swoon lasting days reversed by the judicious application of magical restorative berries (and the most forgiving and understanding wife EVER).      

The stories themselves are very short, and I think they're shorter still in the original verse format.  This translation puts them into a more modern "short story" narrative format that makes them feel much like the carefully-constructed "stand-alone" stories that are made from ancient myths and religious narratives; the ones that don't actually stand alone, but were often looked at originally in light of the entire cosmology and literary/religious/cultural tradition that the audiences were familiar with.  Likewise here I often get the impression that at least part of the clever commentary is lost to me because I don't know what exactly Marie is skewering, although her skills (and that of the translator) mean that I do know something's up.

It's interesting to read stories that are so good, but from a time when "good stories" required very different things than they do now.  It's odd to me that the characters are mainly nonexistent, or are archetypes: the virtuous young girl, the brave and true knight, the good king, the jealous wife... The plots are likewise fundamentally archetypical: the courtly affair, the doomed love (several of those), the restoration of the fortunes of the virtuous, the rewards of constancy in love.  Active plotting is likewise off the menu: characters don't often set out to do things, but have things either happen to them, or they're presented as dragged along by the hands of fate - especially in the falling-in-love arena, which is presented as an unstoppable and utterly expected and totally unavoidable progression based on being in the same space as the lovely representative of the opposite gender.

What's really most fascinating is that all those things we're told are necessary for a good story, but here are twelve interesting ones (some admittedly moreso than others, but still) that don't have any of that. What do they have instead?  Details in situations, personal grace notes, odd moralistic touches or olive branches towards human nature.  Focus on specific core ideals and motivations: love, jealousy, pique, greed, fear.  A flair for the dramatic: the procession of ever-more-beautiful pairs of girls to the court as Arthur fumes and the council dithers and poor Lanval suffers in self-inflicted silence.  A sense of humor: a wife's bitchy jealous commentary ends her up in a bind of her own making when she talks shit she knows isn't true about twins and adultery.  (And perhaps a not so subtle mockery of readers who might also believe that old canard?  The barb is pointed enough to withstand the additional targets.)  

Anyway; the stories aren't earth-shattering, and for most fairy-tale lovers or romance readers (or anyone who has read the Once and Future King waaaay too many times, these will seem quite familar and enjoyable.  Several of them are interesting and niggling enough that I wonder if anyone has taken them as the germ of an actual novel or fantasy.  It would be a fitting tribute, I think, to a passionate and talented author from so long ago.