Thomas Chestre's
Sir Launfal, written in the late fourteenth century, is preserved in only one early fifteenth-century manuscript: British Library MS Cotton Caligula A. ii. The Launfal narrative can be found in several medieval versions, however, the earliest of which is Marie de France's twelfth-century
Lanval.
Sir Launfal and
Lay le Freine are the only two Middle English Breton Lays which can be traced directly back to Marie de France's collection. Marie claimed that her "lais" were translations of ancient Celtic tales of love and magic which she heard the Bretons sing. Her collection was written for an aristocratic audience and is preserved complete in one mid-thirteenth-century manuscript: British Library MS Harley 978. Selections and fragments of her lays are also preserved in at least four other manuscripts dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Extant translations of Marie de France's
Lanval can be found in Middle English and Old Norse; a Middle Dutch version (now lost) has also been posited.
[1]
When Thomas Chestre composed his version of the narrative, he drew on three earlier texts, two of which survive. The immediate and primary source for Chestre is the 538-line Middle English
Sir Landevale, which is an adaptation from Marie de France. It has been preserved in a number of manuscripts and early printed books. Verbal echoes of
Sir Landevale are pronounced in Chestre's text; in fact, Chestre borrowed whole lines from it. The Old French lay of
Graelent forms the other known source for
Sir Launfal. This anonymous text, or some version of it, appears to be the source for four passages in
Sir Launfal: Guenevere's conflict with Arthur's knights, Launfal's conversation with the mayor's daughter, the episode in which gifts are brought to Launfal's abode, and the disappearance of Gyfre and Blaunchard immediately after Launfal speaks of his fairy-lover.
[2] Most scholars assume that Chestre used at least one other source (now lost) which probably contained the tournament at Carlisle and the Sir Valentyne episode. An analogue of this lengthy episode can be found in Andreas Capellanus's
The Art of Courtly Love (
De Amore).
[3]
The dialect features of Chestre's
Launfal suggest that its scribe may have been Kentish, although the problems presented in the language of the text are considerable.
[4] The scribal hand of the manuscript is clear but the orthography is problematic, and, as A. J. Bliss has commented, it presents "peculiarities" which record the effects of phonological and orthographic changes occurring in language sound and written hand in the early fifteenth century.
[5] Sir Launfal is a tail-rhyme romance and shares the form with at least twenty-three other tail-rhyme romances written in the fourteenth century.
[6] It is, thus, a more popular and less aristocratic poem than the highly crafted
Lanval by Marie de France. A. C. Spearing has recently labelled Chestre's poem "a fascinating disaster."
[7] Chaucer's parody of tail-rhyme romances in the
Tale of Sir Thopas presents a courtly and educated parody of the more popular form.
[8]
Sir Launfal is one of only a few Middle English romances or lays which record the author's name. In line 1039, the author writes, "Thomas Chestre made thys tale." Nothing definitive is known of him. For quite some time, scholars assumed that he was also the author of
Octavian and
Libeaus Desconus, romances which reside on either side of
Sir Launfal in the Cotton Caligula manuscript. The exact relationship of the three tales is highly disputed, and it cannot be assumed that Chestre wrote any except the one he "signed"; however, the three texts bear some correspondence.
[9] The tail-rhyme form coupled with the narrative simplicity and the blunt criticism of the court world suggest that he lived outside the aristocratic world. Bliss assumes that Chestre wrote for a peasant audience, but if we consider how and where the text itself might have been performed, read, or copied into a manuscript, we would likely establish a potentially wider and somewhat more varied audience, perhaps not peasant, but certainly mercantile. Bliss and Donovan criticize the poem for its lack of courtly sophistication. But Spearing offers the more likely view that the poem rather masterfully satirizes a bourgeois mentality. From this point of view the poem becomes a commentary on medieval popular culture.
[10]
The poem, apparently written in the same period as the Peasants' Revolt, treats the court world and wealthy urban society with a certain amount of mockery, although the established order of a powerful, manly, and aristocratic world is affirmed at the beginning of the poem. Arthur's authority is never questioned, less so even than it was in Marie de France's version, but, as in a number of fourteenth-century romances including the very courtly
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the King appears to be inept. Here he has a hasty temper and is quite easily manipulated by Guenevere. Despite the fact that Launfal had been Arthur's faithful steward for ten years, Arthur believes Guenevere when she, seeking revenge against Launfal, claims that Launfal propositioned her. Impetuously and in anger, Arthur swears "by God . . . that Launfal schuld be sclawe" (lines 722-23). Only the intervention of other kindly knights gives Launfal a reprieve of one year to find his fairy-lover. There is also a certain coldness implied in the court's invitation for Launfal to return once he's known to be wealthy again, since they hadn't sought after him before. The poem also includes what Bliss calls an uncourtly and "unpleasant streak of bloodthirstiness" (p. 43). When Launfal defeats Sir Valentyne, he not only slays his downed opponent, he also kills all the lords of Atalye and expresses satisfaction about the slaughter; neither character nor narrator appears concerned about negotiating fourteenth-century chivalric codes governing combat or tournament. Launfal's vengeful response to both the mayor and Guenevere is hardly courtly, although both antagonists deserve punishment. The blinding of Guenevere as a fulfillment of the queen's casual remark, though consistent with folkloric patterns, is severe. In a more courtly narrative, shame might well have been sufficient punishment. The criticism of the court is certainly suggested by the conclusion of the narrative as well. The court does not reward Launfal or give him any restitution for his ordeal; instead, Launfal rides off into the Otherworld with Dame Tryamour. Subsequently, the unmanly or "soft" court is repeatedly challenged by Launfal's spirit which crosses into this world once a year to joust with any man who wants "to kepe hys armes fro the rustus" (1028).
Contributing to the fund of medieval Arthurian material,
Sir Launfal sustains the late Middle Ages' represention of Arthur as a passive figure around whom the active knights revolve. Queen Guenevere, as usual, deceives her husband and is promiscuous with her husband's knights. Although other late medieval writers frequently treated her more sympathetically, Chestre's representation of Guenevere harks back to an earlier period in Arthurian romance when she was frequently despised. As many scholars have noted, her rash oath and her blinding have no known parallels in Arthurian materials, though the gestures of the rash oath and blinding can be found in other narratives influenced by folklore and mythology.
Sir Launfal contains a number of narrative elements which proclaim its connections to folktale tradition: the spendthrift knight, the fairy lover, a journey to the Otherworld, combat with a giant, the magical dwarf-servant, magical gifts, a beauty contest, the offended fay, a secret oath that is broken, and the cyclic return of the mounted warrior's spirit to this world once a year. Such folktale material led B. K. Martin to argue against scholars who tried to read the text through codes of chivalry ("
Sir Launfal and the Folktale,"
Medium Aevum 35 [1966], 199-210). If the Middle English Breton Lay has connections with Celtic folktale, the connections can be easily perceived in
Launfal. Celtic tales often revolve around the motif of an offended fay. In these tales, a mortal man either visits the Otherworld and is chosen by, or wins the love of, a fairy maiden; or the supernatural female figure visits the mortal world and takes him as her human lover. All is well until the mortal disobeys the fay's commands and suffers. Sometimes he loses everything, including his life; sometimes he is restored to his fairy lover.
[11] Numerous medieval texts inscribe tales of fantastic female lovers, perhaps the most familiar of these being the Swan maiden tales with their corollary in the well-known Tchaikovsky ballet, Swan Lake.
[12]
Besides, Chestre's sources, the lays of
Guingamor,
Tydorel, and
Desiré (as well as others) bear striking resemblance to
Sir Launfal. In
Desiré, for example, the lover is guided by a beautiful maiden to meet his fay. The meeting apparently occurs in the mortal world, but Desiré finds the fay lying on a beautiful bed and, chasing after her, seizes her. After they make love, the fay gives Desiré a ring and commands him never to speak of her. He is sent away to another country to fight the King's enemy whom he defeats. On his arrival home, he mentions his beloved fay at confession; she abandons him for a year. She finally relents and, appearing at the King's court, reclaims her lover and carries him off to her Otherworld. The lay of
Desiré introduces other materials into the narrative design, but the correspondence with
Launfal is pronounced.
[13]
In his
Chivalric Romances: Popular Literature in Medieval England, Lee C. Ramsey argues that the conflict between individual and community forms a central meaning in
Sir Launfal and many other medieval lays and romances. On the one hand civili- zation, the community and its conventions, protects and provides; on the other hand, it subjects its citizens to its prejudices and judges their successes and failures within its own assumptions and frame. The narrative of
Launfal, Ramsey claims, expresses a fantasy solution to the tension between community and individual drives and desires: "By a natural extension of the family-romance myth, this could be achieved by rejecting (slaying) the civilization emblemized as father and uniting oneself with it as emblemized by the mother-lover" (p. 147). The giant Sir Valentine embodies the power of civilization to dominate, overwhelm, and subject; the fairy-lover, Dame Tryamour embodies the power of a civilization to comfort, protect and delight.
The poem contains other tensions as well. Issues of generosity, vows and moral obligation (
geis), mercy and sexuality are powerfully present in this poem. The feudal world in which generosity is prized, in which Launfal can earn the high rank of steward because of his largesse, gives way to a courtly world when Arthur marries Guenevere. And when Launfal, former benefactor to the mayor of Caerleon, seeks a haven in the urban world, he is rebuffed. In his "excessive" gift-giving, Launfal is reminiscent of the epic hero whose reputation rests, in part, on his ability to give gifts to his comitatus. But moved into this romance world, the same actions cause misery. Stripped of everything, even his horse, Launfal falls into poverty and despair. Noticeably, he cannot, on his own, achieve his restoration; he is reestablished in wealth by the fairy-lover acting as a
deus ex machina. Whereas Sir Cleges turns to prayer and to God to relieve his poverty, Sir Launfal is simply chosen by the fairy world. This very secular narrative gives no direct explanation for why Launfal is chosen to be the lover of the most beautiful woman alive, although his moral indignation about Guenevere's promiscuity may imply, indirectly, that his ethical standards are rewarded. Since he is praised for his liberality, that too, may be the reason he is rewarded. The lay sets sexual liberality against pecuniary liberality, punishing one and rewarding the other. If Guenevere is the main obstacle, the one who disrupts the manly idealized world pictured in the opening of the lay, Dame Tryamour becomes the agent of salvation by the end of the poem. Exercising mercy, she forgives Launfal for violating the
geis and rides into Arthur's court parading in after her retinue of beautiful ladies. Proving that she is, indeed, the most beautiful woman alive - more beautiful than the indignant queen - she breathes on Guenevere, blinds her, and avenges her beloved Launfal. Unlike most medieval lays and romances, Launfal does not conclude with a reintegration of the hero back into the court world; instead, he rides off into the fairy otherworld as soon as he is restored to Dame Tryamour.