Proud Knight, Fair Lady
I wanted to read some older medieval literature but didn't have the headspace for Morte D'arthur, so I borrowed this 'Lais' from our library. Its a lovely edition,with beautiful illustrations by Angela Barrett. Even my 4 year old son, who won't look at anything without superheroes in it said, 'Mummy that lady is really beautiful isn't she?", when he saw the cover.
It was a very interesting experience reading these 'Lais". For one thing, as a longtime lover of fairy tales, these were not much like our Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson tradition, which, despite being f=based on folk tales, have a kind of Christian morality imposed on them to make them virtue tales. As with the apocryphal stories of the bible, the 'Lais' have more pathos, drama and magic than I expected.
Divine, courtly love
I think I expected a book of fairy tales put together by a french, medieval nun to be slightly more religious and less romantic. But just about all of the stories are about courtly love in some respect, and just about all of them detail knights and ladies who commence an illicit relationship. In 'Le Fresne', for example, identical twins are separated at birth, with one of the baby girls raised in a convent. Eventually, a rich nobleman convinces her to be his mistress, which she consents to. After several years of living together de facto a marriage is arranged between the noble man and her more obviously well born identical sister. Of course, in the end, the marriage is annulled and the girl not only reunited to her family, but married to her nobleman sugar daddy. Not exactly the stuff that dreams, or Disney movies, are made of.
Lanval
Lanval is set in the time of the mythical Arthurian England, and while we know that many married ladies of that time had 'lovers' with young men at court that were more or less platonic and idealised, Lanval commences a passionate relationship with a woman that is remarkably similar to a modern 'booty call' arrangement. He is not to mention her to anyone, or she will no longer come to meet him. She gives him great wealth and a magic blessing that the more he gives away, the more he gains. Whenever he is safely alone, he may send for her and he will appear, her servant girls preparing for their time together in tents that make glamping look like roughing it. Eventually, he becomes somewhat renowned as the ultimate bachelor, rich, generous, single and apparently uninterested in any of the beautiful ladies at Arthur's court. So, in a scene reminiscent of Potiphar's wife with Jospeh, Arthur's queen ( she is not Guinevere, but simply Queen) tempts him to go to bed with her. When he refuses, she is offended and baits him into saying why he refuses her, at which point he cannot help boasting how far superior his lady is to her. Not only does she accuse him before Arthur and the court, but now his lady will no longer answer his text messages/whispers. It ends with his rescue by the lady herself, revealing that she is not only real, but exceeding even his descriptions of her nobility and loveliness.
Origins of the Lais
The introduction to the Lais are attributed to a certain Marie, of France, any further details do not appear to be known, although scholars believe she drew from Arthurian, Celtic, Scottish, Welsh and Brittany based folklore, as well as the latin classics and the Bible. Elements of the miraculous and some magic realism grace her stories, long before the south american tradition.
