With this reprint of Laurence Harf-Lancner’s 1984 Les Fées au Moyen Âge, Honoré Champion has brought back into circulation a truly monumental work of medieval literary scholarship. Discussing the rise and development of the figure of the medieval fairy, Harf-Lancner offers a magisterial survey of the otherworldly agents of pre-modern Western European literature, while also examining Classical precedents and relevant global folklore. Teeming with well-framed studies of narrative incidents and plots, Harf-Lancner’s volume serves both as a deeply engaging argument about the development of fairy figures in both learned and popular medieval culture, and as a repository of summaries and primary-text extracts of much of medieval secular romance.
The subtitle of Harf-Lancner’s volume, “Morgane et Mélusine: La Naissance des Fées,” reveals a key organizing dimension of her argument--namely, that Mélusine (best known as the fairy ancestress of Lusignan who transformed into a serpent after her husband broke a taboo about seeing her on Saturdays) and Morgan la Fée (best known as King Arthur’s ambitious and often conniving, if not malevolent, sister) serve as icons for two fundamental story-types that inflect much of medieval fairy literature. With Mélusine representing fairy figures who seek (invariably only temporarily) to find their place in the world of a hero, while Morgan represents a fairy figure who seeks to draw heroes into an otherworldly locale, Harf-Lancner uses these two prototypes to provide a useful map for understanding the typically feminine and eroticized aspects of fairy figures whose medieval evolution offers profound insights into such vital matters as the integration of oral and literate cultures, and the assimilation of pre-Christian and Christian cultural values.
Harf-Lancner’s opening section, “L’élaboration d’une figure mythique nouvelle,” features a series of chapters devoted to understanding the rise of the medieval fairy. After an opening chapter discussing both the Fates and nymphs as Classical precedents for medieval fairies, Harf-Lancner provides a powerful study of two key medieval types who emerge from the integration of ancient myth and medieval popular culture: “fées marraines” (fairy godmothers, all translations are my own) and “fées amantes” (fairy lovers) (27). These opening chapters, which range across both romances and learned texts, show how such features of fairy culture as prognostication, woodland environments, and blessings at birth blend Classical and medieval elements. Harf-Lancner here also offers a fascinating analysis of the evolution of the terms “fée,” “faer” (to bewitch), and “faé” (enchanted) (59) with respect to fairy literature, showing how ideas of fate, futurity, and supernatural power play parts in the emergence of the new mythical figure (77) of the fairy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Harf-Lancner devotes the second part of the book to the figure of “Mélusine” (79). Building on Josef Kohler’s definition of “contes mélusiniens” (84) as involving an otherworldly being taking on human form and temporarily living as such until a decisive event occurs, Harf-Lancner argues for the crucial importance of tales of this type, which produce a “schéma” (outline) (84) that recurs in a vast array of texts from late-medieval Western Europe. In a vital chapter describing Mélusinian stories, Harf-Lancner highlights as key to the initial encounter a forest frame, the separation of the hero during a hunt, and “radieuse apparition” (radiant phantom) observed by the “héros ébloui” (dazzled hero) (87). Harf-Lancner next discusses the key elements of the Mélusinian tale as involving a “pacte” (92) between the fairy and the hero that, crucially, features “l’interdit” (the prohibition) (94)--an agreement to avoid some action or question, typically with the goal of concealing the fairy’s “origine surnaturelle” (100). Of course, such prohibitions, once invoked, narratively invite “transgression” (102), typically instigated by one individual, known as the “agresseur” (103). Harf-Lancner provides two fascinating outlines of variations of the Mélusinan scheme, discussing both “La Belle et la Bête” (Beauty and the Beast) (114) and the story of the “femmes-cygnes” (Swan-Maidens) (116).
After discussing a wide range of Mélusinian stories in late-medieval Latin literature, particularly Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium (Of Courtiers’ Trifles) and Gervais de Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia (Imperial Recreations), Harf-Lancner moves to the best-known versions of Mélusine’s explicit story--the works of Jean d’Arras and of Coudrette. After exploring the initial relationship of King Elinas of Albania with the fairy Presine, who departs with their three daughters after he breaks the transgression of observing her during her “couches” (labor) (156), Harf-Lancner explores the tragic tale of Mélusine and Raimondin, before closing the chapter by thought-provokingly juxtaposing the clear power of fairies to shore up a sense of special lineage, as seen in Lusignan foundation rhetoric, with the clearly ambivalent status of Mélusine as being connected to a “démoniaque” (177) world, as seen in her often monstrously deformed offspring. Harf-Lancner closes this section with a stimulating study of the story of the “Chevalier au cygne” (Knight of the Swan) as a masculine version based on the same Mélusinian “modèle” (180). Surveying the full range of texts attesting the stories of the Swan Knight and the Swan Children, particularly those from the Old French Crusade Cycle and Jean de Haute Seille’s Latin Dolopathos, Harf-Lancner concludes that Mélusinian stories emphasize the impossibility of maintaining “communication durable” (lasting contact) (197) with the fairy world--even as the stories themselves buttress the land-claims of aristocrats claiming descent from encounters with these exceptional figures.
Harf-Lancner next turns to “Morgane” (199). Arguing that “morganien” (204) stories are grouped by an overarching fairy effort to lure heroes to an otherworldly space, Harf-Lancner explores the use of “l’animal enchanté” (205) to attract the desired hero, whose encounter with the fairy is typically erotic and is linked with disruptions in the typical passing of time. After a chapter focused on the hunt for the “blanc cerf” (white stag) (221), Harf-Lancner discusses a range of “lais féeriques” (243), such as Marie de France’s Lanval and the anonymous Guingamour and Graelent, in which the erotic pursuit of the hero by the fairy is the defining element. Harf-Lancner then explores “La fée Morgue” (Morgan le Fay) (263) herself, offering an excellent survey of Morgan-focused narratives, with special attention paid to the Vulgate Lancelot. Harf-Lancner spends significant time studying the figure of “Ogier le Danois” (279), providing a powerful portrait of one of Morgan’s most famous objects of amorous interest.
Harf-Lancner next provides an absorbing study of “La Damoiselle Chasseresse et la Dame du Lac” (289). After exploring the distinct, but related developments of the characters known as Viviane and Niviene, Harf-Lancner argues that an originally woodland fairy figure ended up being altered (except in the Vulgate Lancelot) by the legacy of the goddess Diana, and also asserts that the Lady of the Lake is especially intriguing in the way her status as the adoptive mother of Lancelot largely removes from her character the erotic components typical of medieval fairy discourse.
After exploring the intense rivalry between Morgan and the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian romance, Harf-Lancner then turns to a number of works, most interestingly Partonopeu de Blois and Claris et Laris, to study the narrative scheme of the “conte morganien” (317). Analyzing Aymon de Varennes’Florimont, Harf-Lancner makes an especially fascinating study of fairy power being threatened by the breaching of the “secret” that serves as the sole support for the fragile connection between two worlds (330): by showing how “ponts” (bridges) (331) open up connections to other worlds but also require maintenance, Harf-Lancner here offers special insights into the key role that prohibitions play in fairy discourse. Harf-Lancner closes the Morgan section with a study of what she asserts is a primitive narrative scheme--namely, “Le géant et la fée” (347). Turning to such works as Chrétien de Troyes’s Erec et Enide, the First and Second Continuation[s] of Perceval, and Renaut de Beaujeu’s Le Bel Inconnu (The Fair Unknown), Harf-Lancner explores stories based on a hero’s penetration into an otherworldly space that features a giant guardian. In this rich chapter, which explores the narrative use of such signals of otherworldly space as the “gué” (ford) (360) and the “paysage merveilleux” (marvelous landscape) that features a fairy-inhabited verdant space evoking “Paradis défendu” (prohibited Paradise) (355), Harf-Lancner excellently analyzes how the process of “rationalisation” (373) often transforms these primitive giants simply into simply somewhat taller knights.
The final part of Harf-Lancner’s book, “Vers l’effacement de la féerie” (Towards the Fading Away of Enchantment) (377), powerfully analyzes the two processes by which the otherworldly fairy was ultimately integrated into medieval culture--namely, “christianisation” (379), according to which fairies simply already are or become Christian, and “rationalisation” (379), according to which presumably originally otherworldly and immortal fairies came to be understood simply as manipulators of “magie noire ou blanche” (379). Harf-Lancner first contrasts the actions of theologians, who typically dismissed fairies as merely pagan, with literary interpreters, who instead forged more complicated strategies of integrating fairies. Focusing on instances where literary fairies insist on their Christian status, Harf-Lancner opens up rich reflections on the ever-ambivalent status of the medieval fairy in Christian literary culture. Harf-Lancner offers an especially intriguing survey of the “satanisation” (392) of fairies in stories, first seen in Gervais of Tilbury, where a fairy wife, after years of avoiding taking the Eucharist, is ultimately constrained to participate and, in so doing, transforms into a flying monster and breaks a church roof, sometimes leaving with one or more children.
In a penultimate chapter devoted to studying the transformation of medieval fairies into “enchanteresses” (411), Harf-Lancner compellingly argues that rationalization is ultimately responsible for the transformation of what were presumably immortal goddesses into mere humans who have simply mastered teachable arts of what turns out simply to be magic. Focusing on figures such as Niviane and Morgan, each of whom in romances infamously acquires knowledge of magic by learning from the erotically interested Merlin, Harf-Lancner shows how “l’art d’être fée” (416) assimilates these otherworldly goddesses into Christian culture by seeing them as practitioners trained in a science of magic that is ultimately based on illusion rather than on true transformation of the natural world. Whereas some beings in the romances, such as the bird-man of Marie de France’s Yonec, remain truly other, the majority of fairy figures, such as Morgan and the Lady of the Lake, emerge merely as experts in magic who can only “revêtir” (cover) nature with “apparence nouvelle,” rather than actually change it. According to Harf-Lancner, whereas there had been for a time calm coexistence between the “féerique” and Christian forms of the “merveilleux” (marvelous) (431), the forces of rationalization and Christianization ultimately reduced the novel figure of the fairy that arose in the twelfth century into a distinctly human figure whose magical leanings, eroticism, and “féminité” (433) point to the more complex early avatar of the fairy who serves as a “figure-clé de l’imaginaire médiéval” (433).
Harf-Lancner’s volume features several images from key manuscripts displaying medieval fairy literature, as well as extensive bibliography up to the mid-1980s era of the book’s original publication. Throughout the monograph, Harf-Lancner provides numerous excerpts of primary texts (most of which tend to be translated into French in footnotes, though readers unconfident in their Old French should note that Harf-Lancner does not translate Old French excerpts). Besides the numerous plot-summaries and analysis of important text, Harf-Lancner also makes this an extraordinarily useful reference work by often providing outlines of key story-types that repeat across medieval literature. Besides scholars of fairy literature, scholars of Arthurian romance will be especially pleased to procure this richly sourced, persuasively argued, and compellingly organized volume for their libraries.