The Lais of Marie de France

In the Lais, interactions between humans and animals are often at the heart of miracles and transformations. In Marie de France’s Catholic world, animals were regarded as separate and inferior to humans because they did not possess souls. However, the superstitious, agrarian society of her Lais was more dependent on animals and open to the possibility that they were agents of magic. In the Lais, animals, with their myriad bodies and tempers, help the characters surpass their human limitations.

The knights in the Lais, would have been dependent on horses for both their work and their status. In French, the word for knight is chevalier, which literally means horseman. Knights seemed more powerful in the four-legged form of a centaur than on two feet. The ability to remain with one’s horse during a joust was a mark of knightly prowess. For example, Milun’s son proves himself the better knight when he manages to stay on his horse and knock Milun off. When the son sees that Milun is aged, he invites him to regain his dignity by presenting him with his horse and apologizing to him. This noble act is a means of reconciliation between father and son.

When Lanval’s fairy enters his trial, she mounts a palfrey, an elegant, lightweight horse. She thus entertains a chivalric appearance and gains the extra height that makes her more visible to the crowd—an act that befits the crusade of proving her unmatched beauty. The horse white and “richly equipped”, but it carries the lady gently (80). The lavishness and superior beauty of the animal are juxtaposed with the ease of the ride, which lends a courtly effortless quality to the fairy’s spectacle. Thus, human and animal features conspire to present the case that she is far more beautiful than the queen.

Animals that enable the humans to surpass their natural limitations include the weasels in Eliduc, which pass over Guilliadun’s apparently dead body. When a servant strikes one of the weasels to death, its partner revives it by placing a red flower in its mouth. When Guildelüec sees this miracle, she strives to copy the weasel’s ingenuity by stealing the flower and placing it in Guilliadun’s mouth. Showing that an animal was responsible for the miracle of reviving a human enables the narrator to testify to the ingenuity of nature and women, who find creative means of overcoming obstacles.

Birds also enable lovers to transgress the limitations of unfortunate marriages and high towers by virtue of their wings and uncommon flight paths. Muldumarec in Yonec flies in a hawk’s disguise to consort with his lady, while Milun uses a swan as his messenger. Birds, which are the messengers of love, can carry amorous sentiments but may also be sacrificed when illicit love is discovered. This is the case with both the hawk in Yonec and the nightingale in Laüstic. The latter even functions as a relic of thwarted love when it is put in a jeweled case and carried around by the brokenhearted knight.

However, not all interactions with animals can be so well controlled by humans. In the case of Bisclavret, he cannot help turning into a werewolf three nights of the week—something that the narrator presents as an unfortunate pathology, given the general nobility of his character. However, when his wife’s lover takes away his clothes, leaving him trapped in his wolf shape, he is able to draw upon the tropes of dog-like loyalty and affection when he begins to kiss the king’s feet and legs. His canine gentleness earns him the king’s respect, and when he displays more wolf-like qualities like lashing out at his wife’s lover and making off with her nose, the king trusts the animal above the humans, reasoning that his victims must have wronged him. Bisclavret’s ability to display both his dog and wolf-like sides leads the king to force the human actors to return Bisclavret’s clothes—an act that enables him to resume his human shape. Here, the lay shows that intelligence and goodness—and their opposites— can assume both human and animal forms. The moral is that one should be like the king, who pays attention to a creature’s behavior when making judgments.

Another animal that serves to teach a moral is the white hind in Guigemar’s story. When a love-immune Guigemar goes hunting and strikes a beautiful white stag between the antlers, “the arrow rebounded, hitting Guigemar in the thigh and going right through the horse’s flesh”, thus provoking a defeat for this peerless knight (44). The stag, with its rebounding power, claims itself “mortally wounded” and curses Guigemar so he will never heal until he finds a woman who “will suffer for your love more pain and anguish than any other woman has ever known,” causing him to suffer similarly for her (44). The action of mutual pain, begun by the animal and Guigemar in the hunt, will be repeated in the human love story. The animal, which innocently inhabited the woods with its fawn, teaches Guigemar the lesson that he cannot attack without retaliation, and that it is nature’s wish that he subdue his heart to love, rather than remain in his proud state of immunity.