The story of Reynard the fox is probably best known in its Old French versions; until this translation appeared, in fact, the only in-print instance of any non-English version of the Reynaerde cycle was Patricia Terry’s translation of the oldest portion of the Old French cycle. The last modern translation of the Middle Dutch Van den vos Reynaerde, done by E. Colledge in 1967, has been long out of print. This new edition and translation is thus very welcome.
Of Reynaert the Fox is the only edition of the Middle Dutch Reynaerde epic intended for an English-speaking audience, which is yet another welcome aspect of the book. Bouwman and Besamusca’s edition is intended for both students and general readers, but academic readers will also find it a very useful edition. To this end they have included a brief outline of Middle Dutch grammar by Mathias Huning and Ulrike Vogl and a full glossary of the Middle Dutch text. The grammar may be too brief for students working on their own, but could easily be used for the basics of Middle Dutch, with the necessary additions from a teacher, in a course using this edition as an introduction to Middle Dutch.
Bouwman’s and Besamusca’s notes to the text are helpful, but there are also some things in the epic that ought to have been treated, or treated more fully, either in the introduction or notes, such as the fact that the priest in the story has a wife and son or the curious relationships between the animals—Reynaerde, for example, refers to Tybeert the cat as his nephew, but this, and the other relationships between the animals, goes without comment.
The translator has kept the translation close to the Middle Dutch original as an aid to students. As Summerfield writes: “Lines have been kept parallel, unless this would result in distorted grammar and style, but any lack of parallelism never extends beyond two or three lines” (41). I noted a few places where I would have preferred a different translation, but this was largely the sort of quibbling that different translators have towards the same text. Summerfield’s translation is accurate and readable, and also should work well to help students with the Middle Dutch.
Bouwman and Besamusca have done a good job in the introduction giving a general cultural and literary setting for the Reynaerde epic, but it is very literary in orientation. Though I agree with them that the medieval beast epics were influenced by literary works like Aesop’s fables, this does not mean, as they seem to assume, that the stories were not also a part of, and influenced by, the folk tradition. The story of Reynaerde, as has also been argued since the nineteenth century, also owes a considerable amount to the folk traditions of medieval Europe. The entire cycle is an elaborate etiological tale about why wolves and bears hate foxes, one that weaves into its story many easily recognizable folktale types about the clever fox and its interactions with other animals.
Although I have noted a few minor problems with their edition, Bouwman and Besamusca have in fact done an excellent job of presenting Van den vos Reynaerde to an English-speaking audience. Van den vos Reynaerde is one of the finest—arguably the finest—of the medieval beast epics: with luck, this edition will help draw to the attention of English-speaking medievalists and folklorists the riches of medieval Dutch literature and folklore.
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[Review length: 572 words • Review posted on April 27, 2010]