Introduction

Manuscript, Editions, Translations

The lay of Lecheor is preserved only in MS S, f. 43r, col. 1 – 43v, col. 1. A fragment of the poem (the first fourteen lines only) is found in the thirteenthcentury Strengleikar collection (MS N). The lay was first edited in 1879 by Gaston Paris, then again in 1969 by Mortimer Donovan in The Breton Lay (pp. 105–09). Nathaniel E. Dubin included an edition of it, along with four other parodic lays, in his 1974 dissertation. The most recent editions are by Prudence M. O’H. Tobin in Les Lais anonymes des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (1976, pp. 354–57) and, with a facing translation in Italian, by Charmaine Lee (1980, pp. 124–31). Tobin's edition was reprinted in 1984 by Walter Pagani with a facing Italian translation (pp. 294–301) and again in 1992 by Alexandre Micha with a facing Modern French translation (pp. 334–41). The lay has also been translated into English by Robert Cook and Mattias Tveitane (1979, pp. 210–11), into Modern French by Danielle Régnier-Bohler (1979, pp. 169–72) and Nathalie Desgrugillers (2003, pp. 107–08), into Dutch by Ludo Jongen and Paul Verhuyck (1985, pp. 35–36) and into Japanese by Tadoa Honda in Lais bretons féeriques au Moyen Age (1998). The Norse fragment was edited in 1850 by Rudolph Keyser and Carl Unger (p. 58) and in 1979 by Cook and Tveitane (pp. 207–09).

Date, Author

Taken together with the author's apparent awareness of the Lais of Marie de France, the appearance of Lecheor in the Strengleikar collection (dating from around 1230) would indicate a date of composition in the last decades of the twelfth or the beginning of the thirteenth century. Tobin suggests that the author came from the north of France, or perhaps from England (p. 348), as the lays in the Strengleikar collection seem to have been based on a lost Anglo-Norman original.