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]
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 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
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
Middle English Lais
- 'Sir Orfeo', 'Sir Degaré', 'Sir Gowther', 'Emaré' and 'The Erle of Toulouse', all by anonymous authors
- 'Lay le Freine', a translation of Marie de France's 'Le Fresne'
- 'Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. The Franklin describes his tale thus:
- 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]
- 'Sir Launfal', by Thomas Chestre (a retelling of an earlier Middle English lai, 'Landavale', itself a translation of Marie de France's 'Lanval')[7]
Notes and references
- ^ "lay, n.4." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford UP. 21 April 2010.
- ^ Zipes, 62
- ^ a b c d Zipes, Jack, The Oxford Companion to Fairytales. Oxford UP. 2009 62-63
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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).
- ^ David Fallows, "Lai", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press), retrieved 7 April 2013.
- ^ 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.
External links
- The Lais of Marie de France, in Old French from the University of Manitoba
- Online verse translations by Judith P. Shoaf
- Many of the Anonymous Old French Lais with English translations from the University of Liverpool
- The Franklin's Tale at the Electronic Canterbury Tales
- The Middle English Breton Lays at TEAMS Middle English Texts