The Lay of Sir Lanval.

Because of trouble with the Picts and Scots, King Arthur is

lodging at Caerleon-on-Usk in Wales. There, at Pentecost, he bestows honors and lands
on all except Sir Lanval, the son of a king in a distant country whom Arthur despises.
Too proud to ask his lord for his due, Lanval remains poor.

Riding unattended in a meadow near a stream, Lanval dismounts because his horse is
trembling. He lets the horse graze while he tries to sleep. Two maidens wearing purple
mantles appear and tell Lanval that their mistress has summoned him. He finds a
beautiful maiden lying on a richly covered bed in a silken pavilion with a golden eagle
on top. She is dressed in white linen with a mantle of ermine trimmed in purple. When
she offers Lanval her love, provided that he tell no one of her existence, he accepts. She
gives him rich clothing and a purse that is never empty. Now wealthy, Lanval redeems
captives, clothes poor minstrels, comforts strangers, and is completely happy. The
beautiful maiden appears whenever he calls her.

At a party in the royal orchard, Lanval ignores the queen and thirty of her most beautiful
maidens because they look like kitchen wenches to him. Calling Lanval to her, the
queen offers him her love. Lanval refuses, saying that he will not betray his lord.
Angrily, the queen retorts that Lanval must despise women, but Lanval tells her that his
love is richer than any other and that the meanest of his loves maidens excels the queen
in goodness and beauty. The queen flees, weeping, to her chamber.

When Arthur returns, the queen tells him that Lanval had sought her love and that she
had refused him. At her refusal, she declares, Lanval reviled her and said that his love is
set on a lady whose meanest wench is fairer than the queen. Arthur swears that he will
burn or hang Lanval if he cannot deny his boast before his peers.

Because he has revealed his ladys existence, Lanval loses contact with her. He wants to
die, but instead he is compelled to appear before the court of barons. The barons say that
they will look at Lanvals lady and decide if she is more beautiful than the queen. If she
is, there will be no trial. Because Lanval cannot produce her, the barons prepare to pass
judgment on him. At that moment, two beautiful maidens, followed by two even more
beautiful maidens, appear and announce that their lady is approaching. They are so
beautiful that many say the queen has already lost. Soon Lanvals lady appears, riding a
white horse and wearing white with a purple mantle. Every man marvels at her beauty
and cares no more for mortal women. She says that Lanval has never craved the love of
the queen but that he had spoken hastily. The barons are overcome by her beauty, and
Arthur suggests that she stay a while at court. She declines and, together with Lanval,
she rides away forever, perhaps to Avalon.
Lanval

Lanval (lahn-VAHL), a knight from Brittany in the service of King Arthur of England.
Lanval is overlooked when lavish gifts are bestowed by the king. Saddened, as well as
alienated from the other knights, who are jealous of his physical beauty and chivalric
prowess, he is magically visited by a beautiful and wealthy maiden. With the enchanted
damsel as his secret invisible lover, Lanval is able to live in luxury. Accused of
homosexuality by Arthurs queen, whose advances he had spurned, Lanval is saved
from the Round Tables harsh judgment when the maiden herself appears in King
Arthurs court and bears her lover off on horseback to the idyllic island of Avalon

"Lanval" could be called a "largesse fable" since so much of its plot turns on the
importance of this courtly virtue. In a premonetary economy, gift-giving is the
"economy" and takes the place of paychecks, pension plans, bonuses, financial aid and
stock options. Those who demonstrate "largesse" are praised because they guarantee
the well-being of those around them, but Lanval's fate, when Arthur inexplicably
ignores him, also demonstrates the fate of generous people when their incomes dry up.
As the Tudor poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, wrote: "The spending hand had better have a
'taker-in' as good." (In the 15th-century Middle English version, "Sir Launfal"'s poverty
is explained by the queen's hatred of him because he is aware of her adulterous nature.)
The other noteworthy aspect of "Lanval" is its use of the world of faerie as a kind of
perfected courtly culture. The faeries do everything mortal nobles do, but they do it
right. Both Lanval and the faerie maiden are wish-fulfillment fantasies for the men and
women of Marie's court. He gets protected and financed by the woman he loves, and
she gets to choose the man she loves with the utter certainty she controls the
relationship. What's not to like?
Some issues:
1) Once again, Marie's attitude toward envy and slander suggest that they are the norm,
and that excellence of character or talent naturally attracts them. Is she merely
describing what the world looks like to a woman who writes in the twelfth century?
2) The court of Arthur has been used as the setting for a huge cycle of tales that already
was well-developed and several hundred years old when Marie encountered "Lanval."
Typically, Arthurian characters go through en evolution over time: when introduced,
they're heroes/heroines and can do no wrong; in later tales, they acquire mortal failings
and encounter crises they can't resolve; finally, they encounter the new "hero/heroine"
and fall into crime or (worse) buffonery. When Gawain began his "career" in the oldest
Welsh versions of his tales, he was a sun god whose strength doubled from morning to
noon and waned toward evening. In Old French he became merely a darned good
warrior, but in late Middle English he was discovered to be a murderer and his newly
introduced younger brother Gareth was the son who could do no wrong and who
avoided his company. What is there about this cycle that appeals to audiences, and how
is it that Arthur and his queen (not named here, later "Guenivere") fall into it? Does this
reflect some sort of crisis in our sense of ourselves?
 3) The plot of "Lanval" obviously reverses one of the oldest conventions in romance--
the maiden rescues the knight rather than vice versa. What might make this attractive
to Marie and how does her presentation of it take advantage of the lai's unique features
to make it plausible?
4) The crux of the plot might be found in Marie's offhand comment that the faerie
maiden "was entirely at [Lanval's] command" (75). Is she? Why would Marie say that
if it were not so?
5) The queen's ill-judged profession of love for Lanval provokes his profession of
loyalty and a sharp rebuke for her betrayal of her lord's trust. Stung, the queen strikes
back with a charge that Lanval is homosexual and a threat to her husband's salvation.
Lanval escalates the quarrel by insulting her status and beauty. How do these charges
and counter-charges affect the plot, and why are they so violent?
6) Compare carefully the story the queen tells the king and the charge the king brings
against Lanval (77). What's really getting to the king here and how can you explain
what he leaves out?
7) The trial is a good example of 12th-century feudal justice. The king's seeking his
vassal's advice and consent to the proceedings, knights who pledge to guarantee
Lanval's presence, the Count of Cornwall's summation of the case, and the construction
of a suitable "trial" or test of Lanval's words' truth all could come straight from a legal
brief from the reign of Henry II. What does that tell you about Marie's sense of her
culture's core values, especially given the outcome of the trial? Were you telling a tale
about lovers at Goucher, how might you construct a similar conclusion and how would
it turn out?
8) Finally, the question of questions, but one people rarely ask of this tale: why does the
faerie maiden not keep her word and abandon Lanval for breaking his oath of secrecy?
For information on Marie, you might want to look at the International Marie de France
Society web site at: http://saturn.vcu.edu/~cmarecha/ it's loaded with relevant scholarly
information as well as both French and English translations of her complete works.
Near the bottom of the home page there are introductions to and some article-length
"notes" on specific tales, including "Lanval" and the later Middle English poem, "Sir
Launfal."

Form and Content

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Marie de France is the earliest French woman poet whose name is known today. Her
major work, The Lais of Marie de France, consists of twelve poems that range in length
from 118 to 1,184 lines. Although these poems were composed over a number of years,
Marie decided at some point to collect the lais into a single book. She added a fifty-six-
line prologue dedicating the volume to a noble king whom she never names. For more
than a century, scholars have attempted to determine this kings identityand even the
land that he ruledbut the matter remains a mystery. One leading possibility is that
Maries noble king was Henry II, the English ruler who came to the throne in 1154.
Like Marie, Henry was of French descent but lived in England, where a large number of
the Lais were set.

The word lai (plural lais) that Marie adopts for her poems is a French borrowing of the
Provenal term for ballad. Originally, lais were short, lyric poems sung to the
accompaniment of a stringed instrument. By Maries time, however, the term lais had
expanded to include nonmusical poems intended to be read, either privately or as part of
a court entertainment. In Maries Lais, references to such figures as the Roman poet
Ovid, the medieval grammarian Priscian, and the legendary Babylonian queen
Semiramis make it clear that these works were intended for a highly educated audience.
Marie herself appears to have been quite learned. She knew both Latin and English and
attained a wide reputation for her poetry during her own lifetime.

The Lais of Marie de France were written in Old French with rhyming couplets of
eight-syllable lines. Each of the poems presents a romantic crisis that leads the central
characters to an adventure. Some stories, such as Equitan, attempt to teach a moral
lesson; most are pure entertainment. A few of the lais, including Chaitivel and The
Two Lovers, end tragically. The majority of the poems, however, represent love as
ultimately triumphant over obstacles arising during the course of the story.

Marie de France was a pioneer in womens literature not because she limited herself to
issues of concern to women but because she achieved prominence in a genre that would
long remain dominated by men. Throughout the entire Middle Ages, Marie was the only
woman author of romantic tales to achieve a status equal to that of Chrtien de Troyes,
Guillaume de Lorris, Jean (Clopinel) de Meung, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Wolfram
von Eschenbach.

As a result of both the conventions of medieval romance and the culture of her time,
Marie often gave more attention to the male characters in her poems than to the female
characters. With the exception of Le Fresne (Ash Tree) and La Codre (Hazel Tree),
whose names are central to the plot of the story, few women in Maries Lais are even
named. Most women simply have titles, such as Meriaducs sister and Eliducs
wife, that define their position in terms of their male relatives. Even Guinevere, who
appears as a minor character in Lanval, is called simply the queen. Nevertheless,
Maries success in her genre prepared the way for such later women authors as
Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), whose Heptamron was based upon the structure
of the Decameron (1348-1353; English translation, 1702), by Giovanni Boccaccio
 (1313-1375). Moreover, Maries aristocratic and intellectual poetry anticipated the later
works of such authors as Anna, Comtesse de Noailles (1876-1933) and Catherine Pozzi
(1882-1934).

Critical Overview
(Masterpieces of Women's Literature)

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The Lais of Marie de France are important both as folklore and as literature. As Marie
herself says at several points, most of her stories originated in the oral legends of the
Bretons. As a result, poems such as Lanval contain many plot elements found in oral
traditions all over the world. Like Elsa in the Germanic legend of Lohengrin or Psyche
in the Greco-Roman legend of Cupid and Psyche, the hero Lanval temporarily loses his
beloved by breaking his promise. Like Potifars wife in the Old Testament or Anubis
wife in the Egyptian tale of Anubis and Bata, Guinevere falsely claims that a man
molested her when he had actually refused her advances. In Eliduc, the king of
Englands daughter is restored to life in a manner almost identical to that by which both
the healer Asclepius and the seer Polyeidus were said to have revived Minos son
Glaucus in Greek mythology.

By recording the legends of the Bretons, Marie preserved these tales at a time when oral
traditions throughout Europe were being obliterated by a rapidly expanding literary
culture. Even as Marie was preserving these stories, however, she was also reshaping
them, giving them a distinctly literary form. She added geographical names and a touch
of the archaism that she found in such chronicles as Geoffrey of Monmouths Historia
Regum Britanniae (c. 1135; History of the Kings of Britain) and Geoffreys
Gaimars Estoire des Engleis (c. 1150; History of the English). In Chevrefoil, she
adapted the familiar legend of Tristan, the same story that would later be treated by such
authors as Broul (c. 1200) and Gottfried von Strassburg (c. 1210).

Like Chrtien de Troyes in the late twelfth century and the other writers of medieval
romance, Marie combined supernatural elements with heroic exploits. Her character
Guigemar, like Galahad and Parzifal before him, boards an enchanted ship that carries
him to a distant land. Bisclavret is transformed into a werewolf, and Yonecs father
becomes a hawk. The hero of The Two Lovers uses a magic potion that greatly
increases his strength. In addition to these supernatural details, Marie also borrowed a
number of unrealistic situations from the romantic tradition. In many of her stories, her
hero and heroine fall in love without ever having met: The mere report that a woman is
beautiful or that a man is noble is enough to stimulate the deepest affections. Spouses,
parents, and other impediments to the marriage of the central characters conveniently
die or vanish from the story at the appropriate moment so that the lovers may be united.

Beneath this layer of fantasy and wish fulfillment, however, Maries poems reflect many
values that would have been familiar to her aristocratic audience. Nearly all Maries
heroes are either kings or noblemen. Nearly all of her heroines are kings daughters or
ladies of the court. In every case, the characters adhere to the complex set of social
conventions that came to be known as courtoisie (courtesy). Medieval authors
represented courtesy through such traits as generosity, fidelity, valor, and romantic love.
Discourtesy is usually introduced by Marie only to be punished quickly and severely.
Equitan, for example, is killed by the same plan that he had intended for his steward.
Bisclavrets wife and her lover are banished because they have plotted against the hero.
Guigemar kills Meriaduc for the discourtesy that he displayed to the heros beloved.
Situations such as these helped to reinforce the values of Maries aristocratic audience
and encouraged readers to identify with the noble figures depicted in her poems.

While the central characters of Maries Lais thus generally follow the code of behavior
known as courtly love, this does not mean that they are constrained by every precept of
that code. For example, lovers are occasionally unfaithful or even treacherous. Eliduc,
although married, takes a lover when he is sent into exile. The heroine of Chaitivel
has four lovers, all of whom she loves equally. Moreover, the knights in Maries poems
rarely suffer the prolonged period of languishing that was common in courtly
romances. The female figures in Lais are neither as disdainful as the heroines of many
romances nor pure, unattainable women such as Beatrice in the La divina commedia (c.
1320; The Divine Comedy) of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). To the contrary, Maries
heroines are usually amorous women who succumb to their lovers shortly after their
first meeting. In part, this departure from the romantic tradition is attributable to the
short length of the lai, which did not permit Marie to describe long periods of
unfulfilled passion. In part, too, it was attributable to the age in which Marie was
writing, a time when all the conventions of courtly love had not yet been firmly
established.

One of the most important values shared by Maries original audience was the view
expressed in Equitan that honorable love can exist only between social equals. While
it is true that Marie continues this discussion by saying that a man who is poor and
honorable is of far greater worth than a king who is discourteous, strict social
boundaries still separated the two classes. Humble individuals, Marie notes, will come
to disaster if they search for love above their station. In fact, all the central characters in
Maries poems are aristocrats. Unlike such literary forms as the fabliau, the lai was a
type of poem written about the nobility for the nobility. It dealt with characters who had
sufficient wealth and leisure to devote to such activities as falconry, tournaments,
courtship, and listening to ballads.

The values of Maries social class also help to explain her emphasis upon male
characters, often at the expense of women. Since Marie herself was a woman author, the
reader might expect the heroines of her stories to be prominent. In fact, this rarely
occurs. While most of Maries heroes have names, most of her female characters are
referred to only by their titles. In Guigemar, the hero concludes (incorrectly) that a
woman whom he sees cannot really be his beloved since all women look rather the
same. In Eliduc, the heros wife humbly retires to a convent so that her husband will
be able to marry his lover. These situations reflect the conventions of the literary genre
that Marie had adopted and the aristocratic values of the late twelfth century. There is no
way of knowing whether they also reflect the feelings of the author herself.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that Marie gives roughly the same attention to the
romantic plights of her male and female characters. She portrays women as highly
creative, even as the guiding forces in several stories. In The Two Lovers, for
example, it is the female character who suggests that the hero travel to Salerno to
acquire the magic potion. In Milun, a noblewoman rather than the hero develops the
plan by which her pregnancy is kept a secret.

Probably connected with the court of the Anglo-Norman king Henry II of England,
Marie de France is credited with the creation of the lai, or lay, as a literary genre. Her
lays are Celtic stories she had heard recounted and sung in the Breton language and that
she chose to preserve in written verse form in the Anglo-Norman dialect of Old French.
They are narratives with frequent lyrical and moral overtones and occasional brief
intrusions by the author to express her own opinions. Their popular appeal to readers,
both in Maries time and today, has gained for their author recognition as the first
important female literary figure of the Western world.

Familiar with the classical and vernacular literature circulating in Britain and Western
Europe during the second half of the twelfth century, Marie de France synthesizes in her
verse tales the narrative tradition of northern France and the courtly love lyrics of the
southern troubadours. Knightly activities and adventures such as hunting parties,
tournament jousts, mercenary military engagements, and the wielding of weapons,
which were the essence of Old French chansons de geste and the medieval romances,
figure prominently in the Lais. These events are never gratuitous; rather, they occur
because they have a direct effect on the central love relationship, for each of
Maries lais is, above all, a love story. Each lai presents a different scenario that offers a
new perspective on the subject.

In her depiction of love and its intricacies, Marie uses a number of literary themes. One
of the most popular motifs is that of the mal marie (mismatched wife). In the first
story, Guigemars lover is married to a wealthy old man who, because of jealousy, has
locked her away. The reader is not surprised that the wife falls instantly in love with the
handsome wounded knight. Similarly, Yonecs mother is married to an old man who had
taken her as his wife for the purposes of begetting an heir. The reader, medieval or
modern, is sympathetic to her illicit affair with the bird/man. Mismarriage is also
implied in the lais of Lastic and Milun, although mismarriage is not essential to the
plot of either. Reversal of this theme, the mismatched husband, appears in The Lay of
Equitan and The Lay of Bisclavret.

Lack of self-control is illustrated in several of the stories. In The Lay of the Two Lovers,
the young lover, overconfident of his strength, will not stop to drink his energizing
potion while attempting to ascend the mountain with his bride-to-be in his arms, and he
dies of the physical strain. In three of the tales, overindulgence in sexual pleasure on the
part of adulterous lovers results in detection of the affairs by the cuckolded husbands,
leading to the separation or even the deaths of the lovers. In contrast, the patience and
composure of Le Fresne, Milun, and Eliducs first wife bring about happiness for all
concerned.

All twelve stories rest on the premise that love brings with it suffering in the form of
physical and emotional distress. In The Lay of Guigemar, Marie de France declares,
Love is an invisible wound within the body, and, since it has its source in nature, it is a
long-lasting ill. In the first story, love is symbolized by the rebounding arrow that
strikes Guigemar in the thigh. In The Lay of Yonec, it is the lack of love that keeps the
young wife awake. Separation from the beloved is the worst of all the woes sustained by
the lovers in The Lais of Marie de France. Their anguished longing is portrayed with
poignancy and delicate lyricism. Several of the estranged couples are reunited, but some
must endure permanent despair.

Supernatural elements, particularly those characteristic of Celtic legend, are present in

several of the Lais. Since much of the natural world was as yet unexplained in the
twelfth century, the medieval mind easily accepted the possibility of human
transformation into wolves or birds, visits from otherworldly beings, animals that talk,
magic potions, and magic boats that sail without a crew. Whenever paranormal activity
occurs in the Lais, it always moves the story forward; such activity is not portrayed with
the intention of dismaying the reader.

The author of the twelve lais presents a composite picture of love that is strikingly more
modern than the concept of courtly love established by the Provenal troubadours. For
Marie de France, true love can exist only between equalspersons of the same age,
social status, and education. Moreover, both members of a couple must possess the
same courtly qualities as each other, and they must be completely loyal to each other.
Although never overtly expressed, it is implicit in the stories that God condones such
love, even when, through circumstances, the love is necessarily illicit or adulterous. As
in the well-known legend of Tristan and Isolde, true love in the Lais is a product of
destiny, and the love is eternal.

Symmetry and balance are evident in the structure and style of the Lais. In the only
manuscript containing all twelve stories, long tales are followed by short ones; the
opening and closing tales, both extended ones, end with the triumph of love in this life,
whereas the two middle tales end with the union of the lovers in death. In one story a
lonely knight is loved by an otherworldly female; in another story, an imprisoned lady is
visited by a supernatural bird/man lover. The Lais are replete with polarities of vices
and virtues: cupidity and charity, deceit and loyalty, generosity and greed, excess and
moderation, egotism and altruism.

Obviously, moral lessons can be inferred from such narratives. In her prologue to the
tales, Marie discusses ancient texts that, on close scrutiny, reveal subtle truths. It is clear
in the prologue, however, that the authors primary purpose is to relate interesting
stories and, by doing so, preserve them and her own name for posterity. She insists that
her tales are not fictitious, and she frequently lends them veracity by including precise
geographical locations and by associating events with specific dates in the Church
calendar. Her concise writing is occasionally punctuated with analytical or descriptive
 passages vital to proper comprehension of the narrative. Unlike many medieval texts,
Marie de Frances lais contain no obscurities. They are the products of a gifted young
writer and consummate storyteller; they will doubtless continue to delight readers
everywhere, just as they did in the twelfth century.

Context
(Masterpieces of Women's Literature)

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Marie de France was a pioneer in womens literature not because she limited herself to
issues of concern to women but because she achieved prominence in a genre that would
long remain dominated by men. Throughout the entire Middle Ages, Marie was the only
woman author of romantic tales to achieve a status equal to that of Chrtien de Troyes,
Guillaume de Lorris, Jean (Clopinel) de Meung, Gottfried von Strassburg, and Wolfram
von Eschenbach.

As a result of both the conventions of medieval romance and the culture of her time,
Marie often gave more attention to the male characters in her poems than to the female
characters. With the exception of Le Fresne (Ash Tree) and La Codre (Hazel Tree),
whose names are central to the plot of the story, few women in Maries Lais are even
named. Most women simply have titles, such as Meriaducs sister and Eliducs
wife, that define their position in terms of their male relatives. Even Guinevere, who
appears as a minor character in Lanval, is called simply the queen. Nevertheless,
Maries success in her genre prepared the way for such later women authors as
Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549), whose Heptamron was based upon the structure
of the Decameron (1348-1353; English translation, 1702), by Giovanni Boccaccio
(1313-1375). Moreover, Maries aristocratic and intellectual poetry anticipated the later
works of such authors as Anna, Comtesse de Noailles (1876-1933) and Catherine Pozzi
(1882-1934).