On 15 August 778, Charlemagne's army was returning from a successful expedition against Saracen Spain when its rearguard was ambushed in a remote Pyrenean pass. Out of this skirmish arose a stirring tale of war, which was recorded in the oldest extant epic poem in French. The Song of Roland, written by an unknown poet, tells of Charlemagne's warrior nephew, Lord of the Breton Marches, who valiantly leads his men into battle against the Saracens, but dies in the massacre, defiant to the end. In majestic verses, the battle becomes a symbolic struggle between Christianity and paganism,...

Wace's Roman de Rou relates the origins of Normandy from the time of Rollo (Rou) to the battle of Tinchebray. It was commissioned by Henry II as a way of both celebrating the Norman past and justifying the right of Norman rulers to the throne of England: the accounts it gives of the early life of William the Conqueror and of the battle of Hastings, which occupy a substantial portion of the work, make it a valuable historical document as well as an important work of literature. Wace related the events partly in Alexandrines and partly in the octosyllabic rhyming couplets used by the romance...

The lay was a flourishing genre in the French courts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, related to romance rather as the modern short story is to the novel. Its most famous exponent is arguably Marie de France, but in addition to her twelve lays, a number of others, mainly anonymous, have also come down to us, usually referred to as Breton lays or simply as narrative lays. The eleven anonymous lays presented in this volume show the varied nature of the genre. First brought together as a collection by Prudence Tobin in 1976, they have been freshly edited from the manuscript sources. They...

Eustace the Monk and Fouke Fitz Waryn belong in the great tradition of medieval outlaws, and aspects of their lives, part-fact, part-fiction, find a reflection in the life of that most famous of all outlaws, Robin Hood. Glyn Burgess puts into modern English the two romances of the thirteenth century which relate their deeds, Li Romans de Witasse le Moine and Fouke le Fitz Waryn. He presents the historical reality of their respective "heroes," important but neglected figures: both were born around 1170; both broke with their overlords, the count of Boulogne and King John, at around the same...

St Brendan, also known as Brendan the Navigator and Brendan of Clonfert, was born in County Kerry, Ireland. The Annals of Inisfallen record his birth as being in the year 486, and he is thought to have died in 575. He is best known through the seafaring tale Navigatio sancti Brendani (The Voyage of St Brendan), which has been preserved in a large number of manuscripts and given rise to a wide variety of vernacular versions. In addition, Vita Brendani / Betha Br nainn (The Life of Brendan) has survived in five Latin manuscript versions and two principal Irish ones. A large number of other...

The Brendan Legend: Texts and Versions deals with the vast textual tradition relating to the Irish Saint Brendan, known as 'The Navigator'. Stories about Brendan have been popular in the whole of Western Europe, from the seventh to the twentieth century. The themes of the book are the interrelated problems of the textual and literary embedding of Brendan texts. For the first time researchers in Celtic, German, Latin and Romance languages and literatures have co-operated on the Brendan tradition, and they have mapped the changes in textual traditions according to different circumstances...

42 papers on all aspects of court-orientated culture, ranging from the period of the earliest troubadour, William of Poitiers, in the twelfth century, to the Renaissance and beyond.

The story of Haveloc first appears in the oldest chronicle of the kings of England Britain, Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, and it is found in a substantial number of later accounts of English history. It is unusual in that it seemingly deals with -real- persons and events; but although names for the prototypes of Haveloc and other personages have been put forward, any search for historical evidence has been largely fruitless. The Haveloc story remains a legend, indeed one of the most compelling legends of the Middle Ages. The Anglo-Norman lay of Haveloc survives in only two...

This prose translation of twenty-four lays from the French Middle Ages brings to the general reader as well as to scholars a complement to the twelve well-known lays by Marie de France, the possible creator of the genre. These lays are mostly anonymous, and the majority, but by no means all of them, are, like Marie's lays, centred on a love interest of some kind in a variety of settings. But, unlike Marie's lays, their treatment varies from the courtly and sophisticated to the comic or the tragic, thereby illustrating the range of poems covered by the term lai in twelfth- and...

This prose translation of twenty-four lays from the French Middle Ages brings to the general reader as well as to scholars a complement to the twelve well-known lays by Marie de France, the possible creator of the genre. These lays are mostly anonymous, and the majority, but by no means all of them, are, like Marie's lays, centred on a love interest of some kind in a variety of settings. But, unlike Marie's lays, their treatment varies from the courtly and sophisticated to the comic or the tragic, thereby illustrating the range of poems covered by the term lai in twelfth- and...