Le Roman de Merlin en prose: roman publie d'apres le ms. BnF. francais 24394

Abstract

With his shape-shifting, omniscience, and mystique, Merlin is a popular figure with students and scholars of medieval French literature, and this affordable, accessible edition of the thirteenth-century romance, with a facing-page translation into modern French, will be a useful addition to reading lists. It will replace Alexandre Micha's 1979 Droz edition, which has no translation and does not uniformly find favour with critics. Corinne Füg-Pierreville's edition is not without problems, however. On the positive side, she gives in the Introduction a convincing discussion of the attribution of the Merlin to the somewhat shadowy figure of Robert de Boron. Robert is generally credited with composing the verse version of the Merlin, which has survived in only one (incomplete) manuscript; furthermore, this verse text has been broadly accepted as being the original version because of the late entrance of prose into medieval French literary tradition. Attributing a prose version of the Merlin to Robert is therefore rather dubious, although this has not stopped a great number of scholars from doing so, especially those contributing to volumes aimed at students of the Agrégation when the Merlin was a set text for that examination. Füg-Pierreville's persuasive thesis is that this prose version of the Merlin is not authored by Robert de Boron, but is the original version — indeed, for Füg-Pierreville, this is the first ever prose romance in French. Such a claim is not entirely unproblematic, however: the Merlin as it is transmitted by Füg-Pierreville's base manuscript is sandwiched between the first text of the Vulgate cycle (first in terms of the chronology of the events it relates, rather than the chronology of its composition), L'Estoire del saint Graal; and the Vulgate Suite or Suite historique, a portion of narrative peculiar to this cycle, which describes the early years of Arthur's rule. While there is a clear break between the Estoire and the Merlin in Paris, BnF, MS f. fr. 24394, there is nothing to divide the end of the last sentence in Füg-Pierreville's edition from the next sentence in the manuscript — or many other manuscripts of the cycle. Füg-Pierreville gives very little sense in her Introduction of the Merlin's identity as part of a literary cycle; and the rather shocking omission of works by Elspeth Kennedy from her bibliography is symptomatic of this. Indeed, there is little engagement with anglophone scholarship, even when it makes similar arguments to those advanced by Füg-Pierreville. The translation is nicely done, although it can tend to embellish the text. The Old French ‘dist’, for instance, is rendered as ‘intervint’; ‘opina’, ‘menaça’, and ‘déclara’: this certainly makes the translation a colourful read, but perhaps sacrifices the starkness and clarity of the Old French. Footnotes are marked only in the translation, and often give unnecessarily moralizing readings of the episode at hand. This is a useful volume, then, but one whose annotations are to be read with caution. It is another reminder that the Merlin, like its protagonist, appears in a number of manifestations that defy attempts to identify a singular form.