Breton lai

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

ABreton lai,also known as anarrative layor simply alay,is a form of medievalFrenchand Englishromance literature.Lais are short (typically 600–1000 lines),rhymedtales of love andchivalry,often involving supernatural and fairy-worldCelticmotifs. The word "lay" or "lai" is thought to be derived from theOld High Germanand/orOld Middle Germanleich,which means play, melody, or song,or as suggested byJack ZipesinThe Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales,the Irish wordlaid(song).

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

The earliest of the Breton lais to survive is probablyThe Lais of Marie de France,thought to have been composed in the 1170s byMarie de France,a French poet writing in England at Henry II's court between the late 12th and early 13th centuries.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 byBretonminstrels.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 ofOld Frenchdialects, and some half dozen lais are known to have been composed inMiddle Englishin the 13th and 14th centuries by various English authors.

Breton lais may have inspiredChrétien de Troyes,and likely were responsible for spreading Celtic andfairy-loreinto Continental Europe. An example of a 14th-century Breton lai has the king of thefairiescarrying away a wife to the land of fairy.

Old French Lais

• The Lais of Marie de France— twelve canonical lais generally accepted as those of Marie de France.
• The so-calledAnonymous 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 intoOld Norwegianprose in the thirteenth century, where they were known as theStrengleikar.These areGuruns ljóð,Ricar hinn gamli,Tveggia elskanda strengleikr,andStrandarljóð(the 'Lay of the Beach', composed by 'the Red Lady of Brittany', the surviving account of which gives a detailed description ofWilliam the Conqueror's commissioning of what appears to be a lyric lai to commemorate a period spent atBarfleur).

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'
• 'The Franklin's Tale' from theCanterbury TalesbyGeoffrey 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.

• 'Sir Launfal', byThomas Chestre(a retelling of an earlier Middle English lai, 'Landavale', itself a translation of Marie de France's 'Lanval')

External links

• The Lais of Marie de France,in Old French from theUniversity of Manitoba
• Online verse translationsby Judith P. Shoaf
• Many of theAnonymous Old French Laiswith English translations from theUniversity of Liverpool
• The Franklin's Taleat the Electronic Canterbury Tales
• The Middle English Breton Laysat TEAMS Middle English Texts