Marie de France - Breton Lais

Breton Lais

Breton lais were certainly in existence before Marie de France chose to recast the themes she heard from Breton minstrels into poetic narratives in Anglo-Norman verse, but she may have been the first to present a "new genre of the lai in narrative form." The lais of Marie de France had a huge impact on the literary world. They were considered a new type of literary technique derived from classical rhetoric and imbued with such detail that they became a new form of art. Marie may have filled her detailed poems with imagery so that her audience would easily remember them. Her lais range in length from 118 (Chevrefoil) to 1,184 lines (Eliduc), frequently describe courtly love entangled in love triangles involving loss and adventure, and "often take up aspects of the merveilleux, and at times intrusions from the fairy world." The setting for Marie's lais is the Celtic world, embracing England, Wales, Ireland, Brittany and Normandy

Only five manuscripts containing some or all of Marie’s lais now exist, and the only one to include the general prologue and all twelve lais is British Library MS Harley 978. This may be contrasted with the twenty-five manuscripts with Marie's Fables, perhaps reflecting their relative popularity in the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, Marie's lais have received much more critical attention in recent times.