Introduction

Manuscript, Editions, Translations

The lay of Doon is preserved only in MS S, f. 33r, col. 1 – 34v, col. 2. A Norse translation of the lay is found in the thirteenth-century Strengleikar collection (MS N, pp. 51–54). The lay was first edited by Gaston Paris in 1879 (pp. 61–64). Although included in Peter Holmes's 1952 University of Strasbourg thesis, it was not published again until 1976 when it was edited by Prudence M. O’H. Tobin in Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (pp. 324–31). Tobin's text was reprinted in 1984 by Walter Pagani with a facing Italian translation (pp. 260–75) and again in 1992 by Alexandre Micha with a facing Modern French translation (pp. 294–311). Doon has also been translated into Modern French by Danielle Régnier-Bohler (1985, pp. 151–57) and Nathalie Desgrugillers (2003, pp. 95– 100), into Dutch by Ludo Jongen and Paul Verhuyck (1985, pp. 84–86), into Spanish by Isabel de Riquer (1987, pp. 119–24) and into Japanese by Yukiko Sakashita in Lais bretons féeriques au Moyen Age (1998). There is a partial translation into English by Andrew Joynes in his Medieval Ghost Stories (pp. 138–41). The Norse translation was edited in 1850 by Rudolph Keyser and Carl Unger (pp. 51–54) and again in 1979, with an English translation, by Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane (pp. 150–57).

Date, Author

It is reasonable to assume that the lay of Doon was composed after the Lais of Marie de France, and a version of it must have existed before the Strengleikar collection, dating from around 1230, was assembled. Tobin (p. 320) dates the composition of Doon plausibly to the end of the twelfth or the first part of the thirteenth century, but probably after 1200. The author does not name himself, but the geography of the poem, taken together with its Norman features and the fact that the Strengleikar collection appears to have been based on one or more Anglo- Norman manuscripts, suggest that the author was writing somewhere in Britain.