NOTE.--In recent years, in various small books, a number of mediaeval
French tales, chiefly the lays, have been rendered accessible to English
readers, but no attempt has been made to bring together in a single
collection examples of the different types of tales. The translator has
tried within a small compass to show something of the range and scope of
the Old French short story, and at the same time to choose, as far as
might be, tales that had not been previously translated.
Three of those included in the volume have, however, already been done
into English. _The Two Lovers_ and _Eliduc_ appeared in _Seven Lays
of Marie de France_, by Edith Rickert, London, 1901; and a metrical
translation by William Morris of _The Order of Chivalry_ was printed
in the Kelmscott Press edition of Caxton's _Order of Chivalry_. Of the
others, I believe, no complete English version has been made. Condensed
renderings, however, of _The Order of Chivalry_ and _The Lay of the
Bird_ occur in Way's Selections of Fabliaux and Tales, London, 1796 and
1800. Also Leigh Hunt used the plot of _Le Vair Palefroi_ for his poem
_The Palfrey_; and in Parnell's _Hermit_ an often told story is again
repeated, and the anchorite and his divine comrade move, strange
figures, through the ordered, eighteenth century landscape.
Many of the Old French tales have been preserved to us in but a single
manuscript, with the result we have few critical texts. Such excellent
editions as Warnke's _Lais of Marie de France_ are rare, and the
translator often encounters difficulties by the way. Some of the
readings must perforce be conjectural, and others can but reproduce
the ambiguities of the original. At the end of _The Gray Palfrey_
I have omitted altogether a long but incomplete sentence that begins
to tell us what happened next between the hero and his uncle. Zorak's
text of _Melion_ (_Zeitsckrift fuer Romanische philologie_, vol. vi.)
unfortunately did not come to my notice until these translations were
in press, too late to do more than borrow a few readings where Michel
is most unsatisfactory.
A word should be said as to the grouping of the tales. The types are not
so distinct but that there is a borderland between the _lai_ and the
_fabliau_ in which are found a few examples with the characteristics of
each. _The Lay of the Bird_ is a case in point. Gaston Paris, in his
_Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age_, classes it as a _fabliau_ because
the story is not of Celtic but Eastern origin; yet M. de Montaiglon does
not admit it to his complete edition of the _Fabliaux_. Indeed, the
enchanted orchard, the talking bird, the sentiments, the praise of love
are all in the manner of the courtly poetry. It is therefore, on account
of its accessories, here included among the _lais_.
* * * * *
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