General Introduction

What is a Narrative Lay?

Broadly speaking, the Old French narrative lay is related to romance rather as the modern short story is to the novel. It flourished alongside romance in the latter half of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The genre is often referred to as the ‘Breton lay’, the designation Breton being based on the perception that the lay originated in Brittany. In addition, the setting of the poem is often located in that region and some of the characters have names of Breton origin. However, we prefer the expression ‘narrative lay’, as it distinguishes the extant poems from any musical or sung element which may originally have appertained to the lay. The present collection includes around one third of the extant corpus of Old French lays and it is our wish that the lays edited and translated here should be considered as part of a wider tradition than is covered by the term ‘Breton’.

Marie de France is normally considered to be the author who first successfully composed narrative lays, and certainly, in the twelve poems credited to her, she established what we would consider to be the norms in respect of subject-matter and tone, and she set a standard which others may have found difficult to match. But determining notional limits as to what does or does not constitute a lay is difficult, partly because medieval writers and scribes were, especially as time passed, apt to use words designating short, verse narratives (lai, conte, dit, etc.) rather loosely. The whole notion of defining a medieval genre is a modern one, and it is possible only with hindsight. In reality, any genre defines itself whilst it is being created and used, as happens in the case of the modern novel. Poets writing lays would probably have had only a general notion of what constituted this type of narrative, based on their awareness of subject-matter, setting, theme or tone in similar poems already known to them, particularly, no doubt, those of Marie de France. Lays normally project the courtly world of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, and its preoccupations with love, knighthood, tournaments, status, marriage, adventure, hunting, etc., in a setting often making free use of the supernatural, and with an easy mix of the ‘real’ world and the fairy world.