The Middle English Breton Lays and the Mists of Origin

Abstract

Identifying the Breton lays in Middle English as a coherent corpus is a challenge for several reasons because they are rather difficult to distinguish from the romance genre. Very tellingly, in her contribution to the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature dedicated to romance, Rosalind Field does not consider these lays as a separate group; rather, she inscribes most of them within the romance genre. In her analysis, there is no such subcategory as “Middle English Breton lays,” but instead short romances that occasionally resort to “the procedures of the Breton lai,” among which she mentions Sir Orfeo and Sir Launfal.1 Although she refers to features she deems characteristic of the Breton lais, such as “the formal brevity and the allure of Celtic magic,” she regards them as a tradition more than as a prescribed genre.2 My contention is precisely that in this particular case, generic markers consist of a well-informed inscription within a tradition of composition. Roughly speaking, the diversity of approaches— thematic, structural, or cultural3—yields two groups of poems, which vary depending on the critic. On the one hand, one may consider the lays that are undoubtedly of Breton descent, namely Lay Le Freine and Sir Launfal, both translated from lays by Marie de France. Sir Launfal is a palimpsest in its own right, as Colette Stevanovitch’s essay in this volume demonstrates.