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The Relationship between The Owl and the Nightingale and Marie de France’s Lais and Fables

1985; University of Western Ontario Libraries; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/esc.1985.0037

1913-4835

Laurel Boone,

Medieval Literature and History

T H E R E L A T IO N S H IP B E T W E E N T H E O W L A N D T H E N I G H T I N G A L E AN D M A R IE D E F R A N C E ’ S L A I S AN D F A B L E S LAUREL BOONE Univer.rity of New Brunswick In late twelfth-century England, only two poets wrote vernacular works of such imagination and skill that they are still read with pleasure: the English writer of The Owl and the Nightingale1 and Marie de France, the AngloNorman author of the Lais2 and Fables.3 The Englishman and Marie probably wrote these works within a period of less than thirty years, and they intended them for virtually the same audience. They used the same literary conventions, they told some of the same stories, and they shared a fascination with the legal procedures that, as associates of their kings’ households, they took the opportunity to observe. Indeed, their spirited imitation of these procedures is their most striking similarity. Analysis of the relationship between O&N and Marie’s Lais and Fables indicates a more homogeneous literary environment than the difference in language suggests. Marie’s Lais can be dated only approximately. Their dedication to Henry II alone and their masculine and religious view of courtly love suggest a date after Queen Eleanor’s removal to Poitiers in 1 1 68. Internal evidence shows that they were written after other romances circulating by 1 1 70, but before Ille et Galeron, whose patron died in 1185. Therefore, it seems likely that Marie wrote her Lais between the early 1170s and the early 1180s.4 The most reliable indication of the date of the Fables is the identity of the man to whom Marie dedicated them. Although she offered them simply to “cunte Willalme” (Epil. 9), Sidney Painter has shown that this “flurs de chevalerie” must have been William of Mandeville, Earl of Essex, a favourite of King Henry and a patron of literature.5 Marie’s claim that she translated the Fables from an English version by King Alfred (Epil. 16-19) suggests a date before 1189 because, by praising and emulating Henry II’s ancestor, Marie shows her esteem for the king. Dedicated to one of King Henry’s favourites and calculated to honour Henry himself, the Fables must have been written before 1189, when both men died. Although O&N cannot be dated precisely, either, it is certainly the latest of these three works. It probably dates from the reign of Richard Coeur de Lion, between 1189 and 1199. The lines “]?at underyat }?e king Henri— / E n g lish Stu dies in C anada, x i, 2, June 1985 Iesus his soule do merci!” and their context (1049-1104) place the poem after 1189, when Henry II, an apt avenger for a wronged nightingale, died. The older manuscript of O&N also contains a chronicle which ends with the accession of Henry III, and thus the poem was probably written before 1216.6 Three pieces of evidence suggest that O&N was written in King Richard’s reign rather than in King John’s. A. G. Cawley’s study of the astrological references in the poem indicates a date after 1186, when a conjunction of Saturn and Mars terrified people in all stations of life. The commotion over this celestial event fuelled a renewed ecclesiastical debate over the validity of astrology, a debate which the Owl and the Nightingale enter (1145-1330). Cawley also demonstrates that all of the disasters the Owl predicts (1145-1216) are Martian or Saturnian, and that some were among the miseries actually blamed on the planetary conjunction. These predictions and the discussion of Christianized astrology show that when O&N was written the events of 1186 were a fairly recent memory.7 At the end of the poem, the Wren intrudes to quiet the dispute, saying: Hwat! wulle 3e bis pes tobreke, An do ban [kinge] swuch schame? 3e! nis he nouber ded ne lame. Hunke schal ¡tide harm & schonde 3ef 3e dob gribbruche on his londe. (1730-34) The...