Marie de France
Author of The Lais of Marie de France
About the Author
Works by Marie de France
Saint Patrick's Purgatory: A Poem by Marie De France (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies) (1993) 20 copies
Guingamor Lanval Tyolet le Bisclaveret. Four Lais Rendered into English Prose from the French of Marie de France and Others. (1970) 17 copies, 1 review
Le lai du Chèvrefeuille 2 copies
Eliduc — Author — 2 copies
Oeuvres complẗes de Marie de France, Fables : texte original en ancien franȧis, manuscrit Harley 978 du British Museum (2007) 1 copy
Seven of her Lays 1 copy
Bidclavret (The Werewolf) 1 copy
L'espurgatoire Seint Patriz of Marie De France: An Old-French Poem of the Twelfth Century (2021) 1 copy
Los Lais 1 copy
Die Lais der Marie de France 1 copy
Poésies 1 copy
Strengleikar eller Songbok 1 copy
Medieval Fables 1 copy
The Peasant & the Beetle 1 copy
十二の恋の物語―マリー・ド・フランスのレー 1 copy
Associated Works
The Canterbury Tales [Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.] (2005) — Contributor — 676 copies, 5 reviews
Tristan Et Iseut/ Tristan and Isolde (Petits Classiques Larousse) (French Edition) (2007) — Contributor — 12 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Marie de France
- Birthdate
- 12th Century
- Date of death
- 12th Century
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- poet
short story writer
translator - Short biography
- Not much is known about Marie de France except that she is the first identifiable female writer in French. Her name was signed to a number of "lais" or short verse tales, a collection of moral fables containing elements of satire, and some translations of Latin texts into French, as well as the poem/novel, The Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick. She was one of the most creative and effective storytellers of the Middle Ages. She's called Marie de France after a line in one of her published works: "Marie ai num, si sui de France" ("My name is Marie and I am from France."). Some historians believe she was a daughter of King Louis VII or the Comte de Meulan. Alternatively, she may have been an illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, and thus a half-sister of King Henry II of England. She appears to have lived part of her life in England.
- Nationality
- France
- Associated Place (for map)
- France
Members
Reviews
It's easy to find flaws in the lais by Marie de France. They weren't born from her own imagination, but were already well-known folktales that she 'merely' put into rhymes -so much for creativity! They date back to 12th century England, and so are written in an obscure Anglo-Norman quite difficult to get if you can't read modern French (I personally can, and it made a whole difference when accessing meanings and comparing translations!). They were supposed to be sang, so their musicality has show more obviously been completely lost when put on paper now to be read. They can, also, be a tat repetitive as they all deal with courtly love facing all sorts of obstacles. Having said that...
Having said that, I truly enjoyed such short collection.
First, because if their poetry might now be alien to most of us (again: the language barrier if you don't read French, and/ or their lost rhyming musicality) they remain nevertheless strikingly mystifying as romantic tales. I especially love their intricate intertwining of reality and fantasy and where a werewolf avenges a deceived lover; fairies fall in love with mortal men; or, again, knight turn into bird to access their beloved. If you love the magic of Celtic legends and the fantasy world reminiscent of European paganism, then this will definitely be up your street.
Then, and perhaps above all, because they were written by a woman and so offer a female perspective in matters dealing with romance, love, lust and sex which has been cruelly lacking in later literature dominated by male authors. Needless to say: if you think women were coy and disempowered, merely to be sat there and be pretty when it comes to intimate relationships and initiating seduction, then you're in for a surprise! Gallantry and the etiquette coming with chivalry have (sadly and indeed) acquired a bad press over the years, with many ignoramuses not hesitating to label such behaviours as being but "benevolent sexism". Reading Marie de France (thank goodness!) is a great reminder that such demeaning views are nothing but b@llocks.
All in all then, this might now read like little vignettes akin to prose and not rhyming, musical poetry as it was first intended to be. Regardless, it doesn't matter as these enthralling tales form an enchanting mix of realism and fantasy, where the best and the worse of human nature are put on display in the name of love. The window offered into the female psyche of the time is just the cherry on the cake, making them even more striking and relevant in our era which seems to have lost the plot when it comes to romance... let alone idea of female empowerment as it is! show less
Having said that, I truly enjoyed such short collection.
First, because if their poetry might now be alien to most of us (again: the language barrier if you don't read French, and/ or their lost rhyming musicality) they remain nevertheless strikingly mystifying as romantic tales. I especially love their intricate intertwining of reality and fantasy and where a werewolf avenges a deceived lover; fairies fall in love with mortal men; or, again, knight turn into bird to access their beloved. If you love the magic of Celtic legends and the fantasy world reminiscent of European paganism, then this will definitely be up your street.
Then, and perhaps above all, because they were written by a woman and so offer a female perspective in matters dealing with romance, love, lust and sex which has been cruelly lacking in later literature dominated by male authors. Needless to say: if you think women were coy and disempowered, merely to be sat there and be pretty when it comes to intimate relationships and initiating seduction, then you're in for a surprise! Gallantry and the etiquette coming with chivalry have (sadly and indeed) acquired a bad press over the years, with many ignoramuses not hesitating to label such behaviours as being but "benevolent sexism". Reading Marie de France (thank goodness!) is a great reminder that such demeaning views are nothing but b@llocks.
All in all then, this might now read like little vignettes akin to prose and not rhyming, musical poetry as it was first intended to be. Regardless, it doesn't matter as these enthralling tales form an enchanting mix of realism and fantasy, where the best and the worse of human nature are put on display in the name of love. The window offered into the female psyche of the time is just the cherry on the cake, making them even more striking and relevant in our era which seems to have lost the plot when it comes to romance... let alone idea of female empowerment as it is! show less
To be clear: I read the David Slavitt translation which is available free http://www.aupress.ca/index.php/books/120228
The style is really easy to read and has a good rhythm to it, with only a few weird words. The stories are solidly entertaining - like well written folktales - and my first read in the chivalric style. What stood out to me most is how almost every story feels like it features adultery from men who are, of course, highly chivalrous and virtuous. It's hard to tell what level of show more humour it's operating on sometimes when the guy says "oh let's go back and murder your husband" or (ending description/spoiler for the last tale, but it's such an incredible ending)the chivalrous guy conveniently doesn't mention to his new lover that he's married, takes her on a ship back to France from Albion, when a storm hits and one of his entourage says "this is a sign, this happened because you've done wrong" he MURDERS THE GUY while his lover faints in confusion. He thinks she's died, lays her to rest in a holy place, wife discovers and manages to revive her. Lover still claims he's virtuous despite acknowledging the deception. Wife is then like "oh this is chill, just let me become an abbess by giving me some land and you can marry her", he does, they get married, they live happily, then at the end THEY BOTH TAKE HOLY ORDERS, THE LOVER IN THE SAME ABBEY AS THE WIFE! AND THEY TRADE LETTERS AND ARE ALL VERY HAPPY. it's fucking great i love it
I would say this book has enhanced my understanding of chivalry as about a bunch of dudes who are horny all the time. Thank you show less
The style is really easy to read and has a good rhythm to it, with only a few weird words. The stories are solidly entertaining - like well written folktales - and my first read in the chivalric style. What stood out to me most is how almost every story feels like it features adultery from men who are, of course, highly chivalrous and virtuous. It's hard to tell what level of show more humour it's operating on sometimes when the guy says "oh let's go back and murder your husband" or (ending description/spoiler for the last tale, but it's such an incredible ending)
I would say this book has enhanced my understanding of chivalry as about a bunch of dudes who are horny all the time. Thank you show less
I've finished the "Lays" and have the two stories that were not by Marie de France to read, but thought I would get some impressions down before I finish them.
The Lays were originally folk-songs which Marie heard from Breton minstrels, and she frequently praises the music to which they were set, which is obviously lost to us. Her source material is therefore similar to that of the more well-known Chrétien de Troyes, and many of his themes of courtly love and questing are dealt with here, show more although in a less literary style. This is actually quite charming: there is a sweet naïveté about the Lays that would be lost under a more polished hand.
Set mainly in northern France, but with forays into the England and Wales of King Arthur, there are a lot of folklore motifs: the fair maiden sequestered in a tower, to be freed by her gallant lover; mistaken identities; the fairy lady whose love will be lost if she is spoken of; noble children abandoned at birth, fostered by peasants, who inevitably return to claim their inheritance, and so on. There are also Arthurian motifs: the Ship of Solomon; the knight wounded in the "thigh"; swords of destiny; beautiful fairy ladies visiting the court. Much that is familiar now to us later readers, but this is one of the earliest tellings that has come down to us.
I particularly enjoyed The Lay of the Were-Wolf, which if it did not influence later French tradition, is certainly representative of that country's fascination with this fearful monster. Interesting, then, that the werewolf is a rather sympathetic and noble character.
Adultery is probably the most common theme in the Lays and, while Eugene Mason's introduction gave some background as to why this should be so, I still found the attitudes rather confusing. Some of the cuckolded husbands were nasty pieces of work who might possibly be getting their comeuppence, but mainly they did not seem deserving of the contempt heaped upon them. At the same time the lovers would keep their affairs secret to avoid the shame that would be their lot if discovered, so there was clearly some sense of wrongdoing for the original audience. I think there's some cultural divide that I haven't bridged.
Overall, enjoyable little vignettes of early medieval courtly life. show less
The Lays were originally folk-songs which Marie heard from Breton minstrels, and she frequently praises the music to which they were set, which is obviously lost to us. Her source material is therefore similar to that of the more well-known Chrétien de Troyes, and many of his themes of courtly love and questing are dealt with here, show more although in a less literary style. This is actually quite charming: there is a sweet naïveté about the Lays that would be lost under a more polished hand.
Set mainly in northern France, but with forays into the England and Wales of King Arthur, there are a lot of folklore motifs: the fair maiden sequestered in a tower, to be freed by her gallant lover; mistaken identities; the fairy lady whose love will be lost if she is spoken of; noble children abandoned at birth, fostered by peasants, who inevitably return to claim their inheritance, and so on. There are also Arthurian motifs: the Ship of Solomon; the knight wounded in the "thigh"; swords of destiny; beautiful fairy ladies visiting the court. Much that is familiar now to us later readers, but this is one of the earliest tellings that has come down to us.
I particularly enjoyed The Lay of the Were-Wolf, which if it did not influence later French tradition, is certainly representative of that country's fascination with this fearful monster. Interesting, then, that the werewolf is a rather sympathetic and noble character.
Adultery is probably the most common theme in the Lays and, while Eugene Mason's introduction gave some background as to why this should be so, I still found the attitudes rather confusing. Some of the cuckolded husbands were nasty pieces of work who might possibly be getting their comeuppence, but mainly they did not seem deserving of the contempt heaped upon them. At the same time the lovers would keep their affairs secret to avoid the shame that would be their lot if discovered, so there was clearly some sense of wrongdoing for the original audience. I think there's some cultural divide that I haven't bridged.
Overall, enjoyable little vignettes of early medieval courtly life. show less
Marie de France is considered the first woman known to write francophone verse. Who she was is not really clear (it is not even clear if she is called Marie - even if her lais say so or that she was a woman really). But the current scholarship holds that she was a woman and has some ideas of who she may have been ranging from the French Henry II sister to the countess of Boulogne and Marie de Meulan. Based on her writing, she was born in France but spent a lot of time in England (which does show more not narrow the field of possibility as much as you would expect). Depending on how old a book about her is, you can see different claims about what she actually wrote - the lais collected here seem to always be considered hers but the Fables (translated or composed), "The Legend of the Purgatory of St. Patrick" and the newly tentatively attributed "The Life of Saint Audrey" had not always been connected to the author of the Lais. And I was thinking that we have a problem in our times with shared names of authors...
But what is a lai? In the case of Marie, a lai is a short (for some version of short) narrative poem, written in eight-syllable verse. They are an old French form, known and popular before Marie and they are a cousin to the longer romances to come later (which are more collections of adventures than single works). Just like the romances, they deal with heroes and what happens to them although with them being much shorter, they are more stories of things happening to people than of people going on adventures. The shortest of these 12 poems is 118 lines; the longest is 1,184 lines.
The order of the collection is not always clear - there are a lot of partial manuscripts, the order in the surviving ones seems to be almost random so in a lot of cases the editors decide how to order them when they are published. The editors of the Penguin edition used the order of the Harley manuscript (which also contains the prologue) and made a decision to translate the poems in prose.
That may sound weird but it is not unusual - most of the narrative poems, from Antiquity to nowadays, had seen prose translations. And the translations actually read like tales so even if I would have preferred a verse translation (and I may decide to chase one of those at some point), I liked the flow of the stories. Plus when you do not need to try to keep the rhythm, you have more freedom in words and expressions choices that actually fit the poem you are translating.
The poems themselves were not what I expected. There are damsels in distress and heroes but... there are also a lot of people cheating on their spouses and thinking about cheating (and not always being punished about it, especially if the husband was much older than the bride). There is a tale about a werewolf. There was a lot of implied sex (including a maiden who got liked so much by a man that she got pregnant). There are a lot of happy ends and most of the people who do good things get awarded for them but that did not always happen. The heroes usually got the girl but not all of them got to keep her. As with most of the medieval writing I had ever seen, there were usually the moral lessons to be learned by the tales but some of them may not be what you would expect in the 12th century. But there are also tales which end up in a way you hoped they won't ("Les Deux Amants" for example).
I picked up the book because of two of the lais connected to the Arthurian myths: "Lanval" and "Chevrefoil".
"Chevrefoil", which happens to retell an episode of the Tristan and Iseult mythology and is the shortest of the 12 lais, was a bit underwhelming besides the lyrical part somewhere in the middle of it which used the honeysuckle and hazel symbiosis as a metaphor for the love between the two lovers and spent some time expanding on that (thus the title of the lai meaning "Honeysuckle").
"Lanval" went into a direction I did not expect it to go. The knight Lanval gets in love with a fairy lady and because of that he refuses the advances of King Arthur's queen thus getting her very angry at him. When she cannot produce his lover (because she had broken the promise never to mention her), he gets in a real trouble - until he gets taken to Avalon at the end. Apparently this story was very popular and got retold a lot so I suspect I will meet Lanval again while exploring the Arthurian myths development. The poem mentions the Round Table explicitly as well - showing that it had become part of the Arthurian myths by the time the lai was written.
But I am happy that I read all of them and I will probably be returning to them (in a different translation) - I am curious to see how these work in verse even if the prose translation was pretty good.
One more note on the edition: the introduction is very useful for putting things in context, giving you some pointers on what to look for in specific poems... and telling you how the lais end, even when the end is surprising. Which is fine if you know the stories but very annoying if you don't. But it is helpful as a guide before you read them so... I am not sure if I would say to leave it for the end or not - I wish the editors (who are also the translators and wrote the introduction) had split it into two parts - leaving the text analysis and the spoilers for the endings for for the end of the book. But that's a common problem with introductions. show less
But what is a lai? In the case of Marie, a lai is a short (for some version of short) narrative poem, written in eight-syllable verse. They are an old French form, known and popular before Marie and they are a cousin to the longer romances to come later (which are more collections of adventures than single works). Just like the romances, they deal with heroes and what happens to them although with them being much shorter, they are more stories of things happening to people than of people going on adventures. The shortest of these 12 poems is 118 lines; the longest is 1,184 lines.
The order of the collection is not always clear - there are a lot of partial manuscripts, the order in the surviving ones seems to be almost random so in a lot of cases the editors decide how to order them when they are published. The editors of the Penguin edition used the order of the Harley manuscript (which also contains the prologue) and made a decision to translate the poems in prose.
That may sound weird but it is not unusual - most of the narrative poems, from Antiquity to nowadays, had seen prose translations. And the translations actually read like tales so even if I would have preferred a verse translation (and I may decide to chase one of those at some point), I liked the flow of the stories. Plus when you do not need to try to keep the rhythm, you have more freedom in words and expressions choices that actually fit the poem you are translating.
The poems themselves were not what I expected. There are damsels in distress and heroes but... there are also a lot of people cheating on their spouses and thinking about cheating (and not always being punished about it, especially if the husband was much older than the bride). There is a tale about a werewolf. There was a lot of implied sex (including a maiden who got liked so much by a man that she got pregnant). There are a lot of happy ends and most of the people who do good things get awarded for them but that did not always happen. The heroes usually got the girl but not all of them got to keep her. As with most of the medieval writing I had ever seen, there were usually the moral lessons to be learned by the tales but some of them may not be what you would expect in the 12th century. But there are also tales which end up in a way you hoped they won't ("Les Deux Amants" for example).
I picked up the book because of two of the lais connected to the Arthurian myths: "Lanval" and "Chevrefoil".
"Chevrefoil", which happens to retell an episode of the Tristan and Iseult mythology and is the shortest of the 12 lais, was a bit underwhelming besides the lyrical part somewhere in the middle of it which used the honeysuckle and hazel symbiosis as a metaphor for the love between the two lovers and spent some time expanding on that (thus the title of the lai meaning "Honeysuckle").
"Lanval" went into a direction I did not expect it to go. The knight Lanval gets in love with a fairy lady and because of that he refuses the advances of King Arthur's queen thus getting her very angry at him. When she cannot produce his lover (because she had broken the promise never to mention her), he gets in a real trouble - until he gets taken to Avalon at the end. Apparently this story was very popular and got retold a lot so I suspect I will meet Lanval again while exploring the Arthurian myths development. The poem mentions the Round Table explicitly as well - showing that it had become part of the Arthurian myths by the time the lai was written.
But I am happy that I read all of them and I will probably be returning to them (in a different translation) - I am curious to see how these work in verse even if the prose translation was pretty good.
One more note on the edition: the introduction is very useful for putting things in context, giving you some pointers on what to look for in specific poems... and telling you how the lais end, even when the end is surprising. Which is fine if you know the stories but very annoying if you don't. But it is helpful as a guide before you read them so... I am not sure if I would say to leave it for the end or not - I wish the editors (who are also the translators and wrote the introduction) had split it into two parts - leaving the text analysis and the spoilers for the endings for for the end of the book. But that's a common problem with introductions. show less
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