Breton lai

A Breton lai, also known as a narrative lay or simply a lay, is a form of medieval French and English romance literature. Lais are short (typically 600–1000 lines), rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. The word "lay" or "lai" is thought to be derived from the Old High German and/or Old Middle German leich, which means play, melody, or song,[1] or as suggested by Jack Zipes in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, the Irish word laid (song).[2]

Take the Fair Face of Woman, and Gently Suspending, With Butterflies, Flowers, and Jewels Attending, Thus Your Fairy is Made of Most Beautiful Things, painting Sophie Gengembre Anderson

Zipes writes that Arthurian legends may have been brought from Wales, Cornwall and Ireland to Brittany; on the continent the songs were performed in various places by harpists, minstrels, storytellers.[3] Zipes reports the earliest recorded lay is Robert Biker's Lai du Cor, dating to the mid- to late-12th century.[3]

The earliest of the Breton lais to survive is probably The Lais of Marie de France, thought to have been composed in the 1170s by Marie de France, a French poet writing in England at Henry II's court between the late 12th and early 13th centuries.[3] From descriptions in Marie's lais, and in several anonymous Old French lais of the 13th century, we know of earlier lais of Celtic origin, perhaps more lyrical in style, sung by Breton minstrels. It is believed that these Breton lyrical lais, none of which has survived, were introduced by a summary narrative setting the scene for a song, and that these summaries became the basis for the narrative lais.

The earliest written Breton lais were composed in a variety of Old French dialects, and some half dozen lais are known to have been composed in Middle English in the 13th and 14th centuries by various English authors.[4]

Breton lais may have inspired Chrétien de Troyes, and likely were responsible for spreading Celtic and fairy-lore into Continental Europe. An example of a 14th-century Breton lai has the king of the fairies carrying away a wife to the land of fairy.[3]

Old French Lais
  • The Lais of Marie de France — twelve canonical lais generally accepted as those of Marie de France.
  • The so-called Anonymous Lais — eleven lais of disputed authorship. While these lais are occasionally interspersed with the Marian lais in Medieval manuscripts, scholars do not agree that these lais were actually written by Marie.
  • Several lais are known only in Old Norse translation, translated into Old Norwegian prose in the thirteenth century, where they were known as the Strengleikar. These are Guruns ljóð, Ricar hinn gamli, Tveggia elskanda strengleikr, and Strandarljóð (the 'Lay of the Beach', composed by 'the Red Lady of Brittany', the surviving account of which gives a detailed description of William the Conqueror's commissioning of what appears to be a lyric lai to commemorate a period spent at Barfleur).[5]

Middle English Lais
Thise olde gentil Bretouns in hir dayes
Of diverse aventures maden layes,
Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge;
Which layes with hir instrumentz they songe,
Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce.[6]

Notes and references
  1. "lay, n.4." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford UP. 21 April 2010.
  2. Zipes, 62
  3. Zipes, Jack, The Oxford Companion to Fairytales. Oxford UP. 2009 62-63
  4. Claire Vial, "The Middle English Breton Lays and the Mists of Origin", in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, eds. Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, Tatjana Silec. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 175-91.
  5. Strengleikar: An Old Norse Translation of Twenty-one Old French Lais, ed. and trans. by Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane, Norrøne tekster, 3 (Oslo: Norsk historisk kjeldeskrift-institutt, 1979).
  6. David Fallows, "Lai", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), retrieved 7 April 2013.
  7. See, for instance, Colette Stévanovitch, "Enquiries into the Textual History of the Seventeenth-Century Sir Lambewell", in Palimpsests and the Literary Imagination of Medieval England, eds. Leo Carruthers, Raeleen Chai-Elsholz, Tatjana Silec. New York: Palgrave, 2011. 193-204.
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