Abstract
This article complements K. Sarah-Jane Murray's "The Ring and the Sword: Reading Marie de France's Yonec in Light of the Vie de Saint Alexis," published in Romance Quarterly (winter 2006). Compelling analogues from Celtic sources improve the background of textual and cultural affinities against which the lai of Yonec is set, with a view to asking what kind of a story it is. The lai is both a celebration of courtly love and Christian spirituality as well as a heroic birth-tale of an internationally recognized type. The cumulative weight of the evidence suggests that the element of heroic biography has been either derived from or inspired by Celtic tradition. Yonec seems to be the result of conjointure ‘conjoining’ of material from Mediterranean-centered and Celtic traditions, like that which characterizes Chrétien de Troyes's Erec et Enide. The ring-and-sword pairing in Yonec is one place where the consequences of such conjointure are apparent.
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