Marie de France, Lais
Marie de France is the nom de plume adopted by an anonymous poet active between 1160-1215, thought to have been born in France and to have lived most of her life in England. We know little else about her (or him – even that is uncertain), beyond the fact that the Lais attributed to her are some of the greatest surviving medieval poems. She wrote Breton lais, short rhyming tales of romance and chivalry, usually with a supernatural element. This was a popular genre, parodied by Chaucer in the Franklin’s Tale and amongst the sources of Chrétien’s Arthurian romances.
In all, there are 12 lais written in Old French attributed to Marie. In the prologue to the collection in a 13th-century manuscript, Marie explains her reason for writing them: ‘anyone who has received from God the gift of knowledge and true eloquence has a duty not to remain silent’. Her source material, she says, has been given to her orally, and she has turned it into verse. Though there is a diversity of narratives in the lais, there is one universal theme: the inevitability of suffering associated with love, an aspect of courtly love also explored in romances.
3 of the Lais deal with extramarital love, with a besotted suitor and an unhappily married woman, but Marie gives no indication of disapproval. In Eliduc, however, the unusual situation of a happily married man falling in love with another woman, who declares her love first, but who remains faithful to his wife, subverts the conventions of courtly love. Bisclavret is a story about a werewolf (bisclavret is a Breton term for lycanthropes), whose reluctant transformation into a wolf is made permanent by an unfaithful wife. Beyond their fascinating and prescient subject matter, Lais are superb examples of descriptive art.
