ABSTRACT
Whereas much is known about the charismatic Eleanor of Aquitaine, little survives concerning the Marie who wrote her Lays in Anglo-Norman. Even the choice of title (Lays, suggesting music and song) is elusive because Marie uses verbs of speaking and writing to express the making of her stories in verses. Yet we can only hear Marie’s voice echo through the writing of the tale of Guigemar that begins: Oëz, seignurs, ke dit Marie, Ki en sun tens pas ne s’oblie ‘Hear, gentlemen, what Marie says, she who does not want to be forgotten in her own time’ (lines 3-4). Like Marie herself and the sound of her voice, the music remains beyond our grasp. What we can see of her style is poetry, which is narrative verse composed in octosyllabic (eight-syllabled) couplets. Research into her romance sources tells many scholars that Marie wrote her stories in England in the fi rst two decades after c. 1150. The earliest and most reliable manuscript dates from the thirteenth century (Harley 978 in the British Library). This was the period of Angevin rule, a watershed when a secular culture, one that has much in common with our own, began to gain power in society and expression by questioning religious concepts and values. Queen Eleanor, granddaughter of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, was no exception. In the 1160s, when Marie de France was writing her Lays or 12 short stories translated from Breton sources in verse (more or less 500 lines each), somewhere in England, Eleanor was active in court life. It is thought that Eleanor’s interests inspired Marie. The nobles reis ‘noble king’, who is addressed in the prologue to Marie’s story Guigemar, is probably Eleanor’s second husband, Henry II. Marie tells us that E en ki quoer tuz biens racine ‘All good things take root in his heart’ (line 46). The compliment is a double-edged reference to the fact that Henry’s Angevin stock, calling itself Planta-genet, had only recently ‘taken root’ in England.
