International Marie de France Society

What is a Lay?
Author(s): Matthieu Boyd, Elizabeth W. Poe and Joseph M. Sullivan
Source: Le Cygne , Vol. 1 (Fall 2014), pp. 21-36
Published by: International Marie de France Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26392159

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 What is a Lay?

A roundtable discussion, under the title “What is a Lay?” and sponsored by the International
Marie de France Society, took place at the 46th International Congress on Medieval Studies,
Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, MI), 13 May 2011. Three of the papers given at the
roundtable are printed below (Elizabeth Aubrey, University of Iowa, also took part, with remarks
on the lyric lai as composed and performed in medieval France).
The word lai has two possible etymologies, Celtic or Germanic. It is also worth
remembering that in English we make no terminological distinction between Marie de France’s
lay of Chevrefoil and Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel. We call them both “lays,” but
we do make a generic distinction. They are not the same kind of lays. Likewise, for the Middle
Ages we understand that the word “lay” covers a variety of genres and forms. We might well
wonder, for example, to what extent the Scandinavians who encountered Marie de France’s
poems as part of the ljóða-bók (“book of lays”), translated for the king of Norway around 1225
and now known to us as the Strengleikar, would have considered her compositions as generically
the same as the poems of the Poetic Edda, for which they used the same term: ljóð. The
following chart gives a sense of the complexity of linguistic and generic spheres that are
associated with our keyword “lay.”

“The Lay” in the Middle Ages

Poles of Attraction

Gaelic Middle English Old Norse

laíd lay ljóð

German
Breton AN/OFr
GWERZ narrative leich
Or similar lai
French
Lyric
The map shows literary forms/genres and
Occitan
lai suggests some relationships of
influence/translation; it does not suggest any
lais etymological relationships.

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 Paper I: Celtic Lays

Matthieu Boyd
Fairleigh Dickinson University

The word laid (‘poem, lay, metrical composition’) is familiar to anyone who has studied Old
Irish, however briefly. It occurs in the expression fom-chain loíd luin (‘the song of a blackbird
entertains me’) in the poem about the scribe outdoors.1 It is found in laídshenchas (‘historical
lore in verse’) 2 and eventually gives us the Fenian lays, “ballads” in a relaxed form of the
Classical Modern Irish bardic meters that recount the exploits of Finn mac Cumaill (Finn
McCool) and his band of warriors. The Fenian lays provided some of the raw material for James
Macpherson’s notorious Ossian poems, and until recently they were still performed in the
Western Isles of Scotland. Their connection to the lays of Marie de France is tenuous at best,
though the influence of Fenian material on the Old French lay is, I think, evident in the case of
Melion.3
Laíd is also the basis for the verb laídid (‘exhorts,’ ‘incites (e.g. to battle),’ ‘sings,’
‘recites’). Proinsias Mac Cana has shown that this kind of “formalized incitement” (laíded)
hinges on praise and encouragement, in contrast to another kind (gressacht) that hinges on
taunting and reproach. Hence, in regard to the celebration and memorialization of exploits, the
word laid could be said to have some connotations in common with Marie de France’s genre of
the Breton lay.4 Marie insists that the lays, whose stories she recounts, were originally crafted
“pur remembrance.”
The so-called Breton lay is a transnational, transcultural, and translinguistic genre. The
extant texts belonging to it are in Old French, Old Norse, and Middle English. We have evidence
that in the background there were oral sources in the Breton language. The appeal to a Breton
source, whether plausible or not, is a paradigmatic feature of the genre. When Glyn Burgess and
Leslie Brook embarked on a series of editions and translations of lays composed by authors other
than Marie de France, they chose for their collection the expression “narrative lays” rather than

1
Gerard Murphy, ed. and trans., Early Irish Lyrics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 4-5.
2
Edel Bhreathnach, “Kings, the Kingship of Leinster and the Regnal Poems of laídshenchas Laigen: A
Reflection of Dynastic Politics in Leinster, 650-1150,” in A. P. Smyth, ed., Seanchas: Studies in Early and
Medieval Irish Archaeology, History and Literature in Honour of Francis J. Byrne (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2000), pp. 299-312.
3
Matthieu Boyd, “Melion and the Wolves of Ireland,” Neophilologus, 93.4 (2009), 555-70.
4
Proinsias Mac Cana, “Laíded, gressacht ‘formalized incitement’,” Ériu, 43 (1992), 69-92.
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“Breton lays,” thus defining their material on the basis of form rather than genre.5 They view
their lays as short narrative poems in octosyllabic rhyming couplets, corresponding to the genre
of romance, more or less as the short story corresponds to that of the novel.
Marie de France is usually thought of as the inventor of the Breton lay, in the same
way as Chrétien de Troyes is said to have invented Arthurian romance. This is because she,
unlike any of her contemporaries, describes her decision to translate what she calls “the lays that
I had heard” (Lais, Prologue, v. 33) as a departure from expected practice, which would have
been for her to translate a story from Latin into the vernacular. In her famous Prologue she places
the ancient Bretons on a par with the Classical ancients as worthy of glossing and of
remembrance. The Bretons, she says, composed the lays in order to memorialize the adventures
that took place among them.
When Marie uses the expression “li Bretun,” she is referring to the people who live in
“Bretagne,” i.e. Brittany, Celtic Britain, or both. Her lays are set in Armorica, South Wales,
Cornwall, Cumbria, etc., but not all can be precisely or unambiguously localized, for example,
Yonec; Le Duc says that this lay is situated in Brittany, whereas Kinoshita and Faletra opt for
Wales (both sides have attractive arguments).6 The complexities involved in mapping our terms
“Breton,” “British,” “Welsh,” and “Celtic” onto medieval language (including the Latin
Britones) are best explored in their full complexity elsewhere, but a few points are worth making
here. First, different texts use terms like Bretagne and qualifiers like la Menur (“Lesser” Britain,
typically denoting Brittany) in variable and sometimes inconsistent ways. Secondly, although
scholars sometimes contrast subjugated “Celts” and colonizing “Anglo-Normans,” many
members of William the Conqueror’s invasion force who were subsequently granted land in
Britain were from Brittany. (So Marie may not have been out doing fieldwork, as we sometimes
imagine her doing, but simply listening to acquaintances at court.) The Anglo-Normans were
quick to adopt as their own the British Celtic mythology of descent from Brutus, half-brother of
Romulus and Remus, which explains why “li Bretun” are for them acceptable “ancients.”
Thirdly, Bretagne is not the entirety of the medieval Celtic world, for the Gaelic or Goidelic
Celts, the Irish and the Scots, are not included in it. Furthermore, there was no awareness in

5
Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook, eds and trans, with the collaboration of Amanda Hopkins for Melion,
French Arthurian Literature IV: Eleven Old French Narrative Lays, Arthurian Archives XIV (Cambridge: D.
S. Brewer, 2007).
6
Gwénaël Le Duc, “Les Lais de Marie de France,” in Regards étonnés: de l’expression de l’altéralité à la
construction de l’identité. Mélanges offerts au Professeur Gaël Milin (Brest: Les Amis de Gaël Milin, 2003),
pp. 299-316; Sharon Kinoshita, “Colonial Possessions: Wales and the Anglo-Norman Imaginary in the Lais
of Marie de France,” in Albrecht Classen, ed., Discourses on Love, Marriage, and Transgression in Medieval
and Early Modern Literature (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), pp.
147-62; Michael Faletra, “Chivalric Identity at the Frontier: Marie’s Welsh Lais,” Le Cygne, 4, new series
(2006), 27-44.
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medieval Europe of the “Celts” as such, even among speakers of the Celtic languages themselves
(ironically, the word was only ever used in the Byzantine Empire – interchangeably with “Frank”
and “Norman” – to refer to Occidental crusaders). So we must beware of importing anachronistic
stereotypes or attitudes about the Celts, either from Classical antiquity or from nineteenth-
century Celtic enthusiasts.
Many of the Old French lays have motifs in common with early Irish and Welsh
literature, and this is as close as we can get to a description of the kind of source material Marie
had to work with. Importantly, although the British and Gaelic Celts had many literary and
cultural paradigms in common, and the names of their mythological characters are often
cognate, 7 their literature was not a single shared literature; The nature of Irish influence on
medieval Welsh literature is in fact a highly complex problem,8 something which should always
be acknowledged when we seek a Welsh or Breton analogue but can only find an Irish one.
Among the British Celts, much was shared, but there were still apparently some
differences. We tend to look first of all at Welsh literature because, although the medieval people
of Brittany enjoyed an international reputation as singers and storytellers (the Old Norse
Strengleikar prologue specifies, confidently but perhaps mistakenly, that Marie’s lay-singing
Bretons lived in syðra brætlande er liggr i Frannz “Southern Brit-land, which is in France”,
there is no surviving Breton-language literature from before the fifteenth century. But Marie does
use three Celtic words in her lays, all three being specifically Breton, not Welsh or Cornish. They
are laüstic (from eostic ‘nightingale’), bisclavret (most plausibly from bleiz claffet ‘diseased
wolf’ / bleizclaffet ‘wolf-diseased (one)’9 and the conjunction ha (‘and’) in the alternative title
Guildeluec ha Guilliadun for the lay of Eliduc (v. 22). Old Breton was unquestionably a written
language, used to gloss Latin manuscripts, although Marie’s contemporaries may not have been
aware of this.10 In any case, we do not have Breton-language literature from Marie’s time. Oddly,
though, in lamenting this fact medievalists have shown almost total disregard for the highly
conservative oral tradition of gwerzioù or Breton-language ballads, which have been collected in
abundance since the nineteenth century but have distinct and undeniable connections to material
as old as the Welsh poetry in the thirteenth-century Black Book of Carmarthen. The
distinguished Breton scholar Donatien Laurent has said: “I think we can take it for certain that

7
Alwayn Rees and Brinley Rees, Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1961).
8
John Carey, Ireland and the Grail (Aberystwyth, Celtic Studies Publications, 2007), chapter 9; Patrick
Sims-Williams, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9
William Sayers, “Bisclavret in Marie de France: A Reply,” Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 4 (1982),
77-82.
10
David Dumville, “Writers, Scribes and Readers in Brittany, AD 800-1100: The Evidence of Manuscripts,”
in Helen Fulton, ed., Medieval Celtic Literature and Society (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 49-64.
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this oral, narrative, Breton folk poetry represents the exact extension of the Breton medieval lays,
as if the thread of tradition had never been broken.”11 This is a bold statement, but there is
meaningful support for it, and evidence like the Welsh poem Ysgolan and the Breton Gwerz
Skol(v)an should be old hat to anyone who works in this area.12 If they are not, it is because we
have experienced a failure of interdisciplinary communication that needs to be rectified as soon
as possible.
The performance contexts of the medieval Breton lays and the modern gwerzioù are
obviously different. The medieval performers had an aristocratic audience and may have been
highly trained professionals, whereas, as Constantine (p. 37) has noted, the majority of those
from whom gwerzioù were collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were “female,
rural, poor, often illiterate and monoglot Breton speakers.” This kind of change is a classic
example of what folklorists call “gesunkenes Kulturgut,” and it accounts for major differences in
subject matter. Nevertheless, there are bridges between the oldest surviving literature in Breton,
such as the fifteenth-century prophetic dialogue between King Arthur and Guinglaff, and modern
songs and proverbs, for example on the basis of traceable formulas. 13 And the fact that the
gwerzioù are definitely ballads, i.e. narrative songs, weighs against Mortimer Donovan’s
suggestion, made on the basis of phrases like “l’aventure d’un lai” (Tydorel, v. 1), that in Marie’s
source culture it was customary to perform a lyric song (the lai) with a frame story (the aventure)
to explain the making of the song.14 This is a pattern we find in the Scottish Gaelic song tradition
(to take just one example) and perhaps it also applies to some of the allusive poetry in the Black
Book of Carmarthen, but all the indications are of a robust and longstanding tradition of narrative
song in Brittany.
However, especially as the genre gained in popularity, lays were not only about
Bretagne. The thirteenth-century list of titles of lays in Shrewsbury School manuscript 7 shows
that they could be derived from Irish monastic marvels and the Ulster Cycle of heroic legend, as

11
Donatien Laurent, “Tradition and Innovation in Breton Oral Literature,” in Glanmor Williams and Robert
Owen Jones, eds, The Celts and the Renaissance. Tradition and Innovation. Proceedings of the Eighth
International Congress of Celtic Studies held at Swansea, 19-24 July, 1987 (Cardiff: University of Wales
Press, 1990), pp. 91-99 (98).
12
See Laurent, “Tradition and Innovation in Breton Oral Literature,” and also id., “La gwerz de Skolan et la
légende de Merlin,” Ethnologie Française, 1.3-4 (1971), 19-54, and “Autour du Barzaz Breiz. Ar Falc’hon –
Le Faucon. Texte inventé ou chant recueilli?” Bulletin de la Société archéologique du Finistère, 105 (1977),
333-49. See also Mary-Ann Constantine, Breton Ballads (Aberystwyth: CMCS Publications, 1996), chapter
2.
13
For context, see Hervé Le Bihan, “An Dialog etre Arzur Roe d’an Bretounet ha Guynglaff and its
Connections with Arthurian Tradition,” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 29 (2009), 115-26,
and Boyd, “The Importance of Formulaic Language in the Gwerzioù,” Ollodagos: Actes de la Société Belge
d’Études Celtiques, 25 (2010), 111-63.
14
Mortimer Donovan, The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1969), 47-56.
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well as French, Welsh, and Anglo-Saxon topics. The recent work of Patrick Sims-Williams takes
our understanding of this list to a new level. Other manuscripts show that Germanic and
Mediterranean-centered tales (about Havelok the Dane, Aristotle, Alexander, Narcissus, or
Pyramus and Thisbe) could be couched as lays, and that the term sometimes meant, in the words
of Keith Busby, “nothing more than a brief verse narrative turning on a love-problem.”15
Three lays have special significance in my own research: Yonec, Melion, and Tydorel.
Yonec has extensive parallels in early Irish literature, particularly in the genre of heroic
biography. But the heroic birth-tale element in the lay itself is combined with themes of courtly
love and Christian spirituality and with overtones of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman/Welsh
relations, sowing that Marie “conjoined” her source material as carefully as Chrétien de Troyes
did his.16
My comparison of Bisclavret with Melion shows that we can identify a British Celtic
contribution, giving us Bisclavret, and an Irish contribution on top of that, giving us Melion.17
Engagement with the Celtic countries diversified and deepened over time. Meanwhile, Tydorel is
keyed to Celtic fairylore and to Breton politics of the mid-twelfth century, so it is as Breton as
these lays can be, while at the same time, the story was passed onto Ireland and gave rise to a
corpus of folktales about The Man Who Never Slept.18 The case of Tydorel shows us that the
genre of the Breton lay became not simply a recipient of influence from various traditions, but a
locus of intercultural exchange. Further research is likely to improve our understanding of this
aspect.

15
Patrick Sims-Williams, “Shrewsbury School MS 7 and the Breton Lays,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic
Studies, 60 (2010), 39-80; Keith Busby, Codex and Context, 2 vols (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2002), 466.
16
Boyd, “The Ring, the Sword, the Fancy Dress, and the Posthumous Child: Background to the Element of
Heroic Biography in Marie de France’s Yonec,” Romance Quarterly, 55.3 (2008), 205-30.
17
Boyd, “Melion and the Wolves of Ireland.”
18
Barbara Hillers, “The Man Who Never Slept (MLSIT 4082): A Survey of the Redactions and their
Relation to the Lai de Tydorel,” Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society, 59 (1991), 91-
105.
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 Paper II: The Old Occitan lais

Elizabeth W. Poe
Tulane University

It is clear that by the late twelfth century there were, at least in the French literary tradition, two
different types of lai: the narrative lai and the lyric lai. The assumption has been that the two
have a common origin in the Old Irish (hereafter OI) laíd. The evidence from Old Occitan
(hereafter OOc), however, casts doubt on that hypothesis.

1. The earliest instance of lai(s) in OOc predates the first occurrence of lai in French by at least a
couple of decades [ex. 1]. Thus, any etymology of the Old French (hereafter OF) word needs
to take its OOc equivalent into account.
2. In the earliest examples of lai(s) in the troubadour lyric, the word refers to birdsong [ex. 1], as
it often does also in the lyrics of the trouvères. Thus, we need to consider the possibility that
lai as it is used in the OF lyric shares a common origin with its OOc counterpart.
3. The word as it occurs in OOc has an s in the stem [ex. 2]. Thus, we can practically eliminate
Celtic laid as a possible etymon for OOc lais.
4. The pairing of lai(s) with de Bretagne, so common in OF, is practically non-existent in OOc.
Indeed the expression lais de Bretagna occurs only once in the whole troubadour corpus [ex.
3]. Thus, it would appear that lai(s), as it was understood and cultivated in the South, was
independent of, and not derivative from, the Breton tradition.
5. The range of meanings of OOc lais parallels that of OF lai. These meanings include birdsong
[ex. 1], a musical composition played on a stringed instrument, with or without vocal
accompaniment [ex. 2], a story about love [ex. 2], a song with a circular structure [ex. 4], a
song sharing the form of the canso but having moral content [ex. 5], or a synonym of the
descort. It can also refer to vernacular language [ex. 6]. Thus, if there is a common etymon for
OOc lai(s) and OF lai, it must have a meaning general enough to lend itself to development in
all of the senses just described.
Perhaps we should separate the history of the lyric lai from that of the narrative lai.
The latter almost certainly has Celtic roots and in all likelihood gets its name from OI laíd. The
form laíd could account for lai as we know it from Marie de France and others who composed
narrative lais, even if in many instances the themes treated are not properly speaking Celtic.
Having set aside for the moment the narrative lai as originating in the North of France and
deriving its name from OI laíd, where the lyric lai is concerned, we are still left with an unsolved
etymological problem. If we assume a common etymon for both OOc lais and OF lai, as I think
we must, that term must meet at least three criteria:

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1. It needs to be a word that resembles OI laid closely enough for the two to merge in OF into a
single term.
2. It needs to be a term that could reasonably develop both into lais (with s in the stem) in OOc
and lai (without s) in OF.
3. It needs to have a meaning broad enough to accommodate all of the ramifications that it took
on in OF and OOc literature.
Raynouard lists the term lais twice, first with the meaning ‘lamentation’, ‘plainte’,
‘gémissement’, providing a single example from Peire d’Alvernhe [ex. 7], but without giving the
etymon or offering any comparable instances from OF, then as a separate entry with the meaning
‘lai’, ‘sorte de poésie’ from Latin lessus ‘lamentation.’1 Levy sets the record straight, observing
that Raynouard should not have divided lais into two distinct entries and that the example that he
gives of lais with the meaning of ‘lamentation’ could just as easily, and perhaps more logically,
be understood as ‘songs.’ 2 He further notes that lais exists in some later OOc texts with an
oblique singular in lai (without s).
The only etymology that adequately accounts for OOc lais as well as for OF lai is that
proposed by Richard Baum, who posits that OOc / OF lai(s) comes from Latin laicu(m) ‘lay’, the
opposite of clericu(m). 3 In its most basic acceptation, OOc / OF lai(s) would then indicate
vernacular, non-Latin speech and would be used in much the same way as roman [ex. 8-10]. Like
roman, which evolved especially in OF into a designation of a particular genre, lai in OF came to
denote a specific kind of lyric composition. The homophony in OF between lai from Irish laíd
and lai from Latin laicu(m) may have helped to reinforce its use as a designation of both the lyric
and the narrative lai.
It is interesting that in Occitania, where the lais de Bretagne were always regarded as a
foreign import and were never really cultivated, lai as a designation of a lyric genre did not really
catch on either. In OOc texts that would have been labeled in OF lais de Bretagne were known as
novas, while lyric lais tended to be called descorts.

Examples drawn from Baum, “Les Troubadours et les lais”

1. Hueymais dey esser alegrans

Pus l’aura doussa vey venir
Et auch lays e voutas e chans

1
François Just-Marie Raynouard, Lexique roman ou dictionnaire de la langue des troubadours, 6 vols
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1836-45), IV, 10; IV, 11.
2
Emil Levy, Provenzalisches Supplement-Wörterbuch, 8 vols (Leipzig: Reisland, 1894-1924).

3
Richard Baum, “Les Troubadours et les lais,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 85 (1969), 1-44.

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 Dels auzelhs que·m fan esbaudir. (Marcabru PC 293, 34; date 1130-48)
‘Henceforth I should be happy, since I see the gentle wind coming, and hear the birds’ lays,
chirpings and songs, which make me joyful.’

2. Cant l’efas plora a lui non a sabor,

E pren sa viola e fai .j. lais d’amor. (Daurel et Beton; 3rd quarter of the 12th
century)

‘It displeases him when the child cries, and he takes his fiddle and makes a lais about love.’

3. Ja non volgra q’hom auzis

los dousz chans dels aucellos
mas cill qi son amoros,
qe res tan no m’esbaudis
co·ill aucellet per la plaigna
e·ill bella cui soi aclis:
cella·m plasz mais qe chancos,
volta ne lais de Bretaigna. (Folquet de Marseilla PC 155, 12; end of the 12th
or beginning of the 13th century)

‘I would never want anybody to hear the sweet songs of the birds except those who are in love,
for nothing makes me as happy as the little birds on the plain and the lovely lady toward whom I
am inclined: she pleases me more than canso, volta, or lais de Bretaigna.’

4. Sos bas paratge sobreissitz

Sai que fenira coma lais
E tornera lai don si trais. (Bertran de Born, PC 80, 32; 1184)
‘I know that his vulgar, upstart family will finish like a lais and return where it came from.’

5. Si vols fer lays, deus parlar de Deu e de segle, o de eximpli o de proverbis de laurors
ses feyment d’amor, qui sia axi plazent a Deu co al segle; e deus saber ques deu far e dir ab
contriccio tota via, e ab so novell e plazen, o de esgleya o d’autra manera. E sapies que y ha
mester aytantes cobles com en la canço, et aytantes tornades; e segueix la raho e la manera axi
com eu t’ay dit. (Doctrina de compondre dictatz) (early 13th century)
‘If you want to compose a lays, you must speak of God and the world, or of examples, proverbs,
or eulogies, without pretense of love; that is, of things that are as pleasing to God as to the world.
You should know that it must be done with contrition notwithstanding, and with new and
pleasing music, in ecclesiastical manner or not. The lays has as many stanzas as the canso and as
many tornadas. Pursue the argument and its treatment as I have said.’

6. Assatz ac cascus en so lais

que comtar marritz et estiers,
la donzela e·l cavayers,
can abdui si foron trobat. (Raimon Vidal, So fo e·l temps; ca. 1250)
‘When they found themselves together again, the young lady and the knight had much distress
and other things to recount, each en so lais.’

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7. Vostre coratges s’esclarzis,
Quar n’avetz bon esperansa;
Sobre paguans, gen tafura,
Cavalguatz cenes duptansa;
Premiers penretz Labadol,
E si anatz a dreitura
Tro a Maroc, feiran lais. (Peire d’Alvernhe, PC 323, 7; 1158)
‘You heart lights up, because you have good hope. You ride without fear against pagans, those
rascals. You will take first Labodel and if you go straight to Marocco, they will make lais.’

Examples taken from Baum, Eine neue Etymologie4

8. Perchevaus d’autre part regarde,

Vit un manoir dedens le lai,
Onques en romans ne en lai
N’oï parler de si plaissant …. (G. de Montreuil, Continuation de Perceval;
after 1225)

‘Perceval looked in the other direction and saw a manor in the lake, never in Romance or in any
vernacular had he heard speak of such a pleasing one.’

9. Li nons de cascun estrument

Moustre quell uevre on en doit faire,
Ki des nons set le sens estraire
Ou en latin ou laiement …. (Roman de Carité; late 12th or early 13th
century)

‘The name of each instrument shows what work one does with it, whoever can extract the
meaning from the name whether in Latin or in the vernacular….’

10. Cel cavalier avia dos noms:

Aman era son nom en laic,
Mes on l’apelavan en ebraic
Memucan …. (Le Roman d’Esther; ca. 1320)
‘That knight had two names: Aman was his name in the vernacular, but they called him
Memucan in Hebrew.’5

4
Richard Baum, Eine neue Etymologie von frz. lai und apr. lais (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977).
5
See also Karl Bartsch, “Zwei provenzalische lais,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 1 (1877), 58-78;
Pierre Bec, La Lyrique française au Moyen-Age (XIIe – XIIIe siècles). Vol. I, Études (Poitiers: Picard, 1977);
Sylvie Lefèvre, “‘Lai’, ‘Lai lyrique’, ‘Lai narratif’”, in Dictionnaire des lettres françaises. Le Moyen Age, ed.
Geneviève Hasenohr and Michel Zink (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

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 Paper III: The German-Speaking Countries

Joseph M. Sullivan
University of Oklahoma

To appreciate what medieval German speakers understood as constituting a lay, it is convenient

to address two issues: first, what a lay was in the medieval context of what are now the German-
speaking countries; and, second, what a lay was not in that same medieval German context.
Let us begin then by taking a look at what the lay was understood to be. In the
German-speaking lands, the lay – Old High German leih, Middle High German leich – has a very
long tradition. Indeed, it likely goes back as early as the seventh century, with the actual term
leih well attested in manuscripts from the ninth and, especially, the tenth centuries forward.
While, unfortunately, no actual leihs survive from the Old High German period (roughly 500 to
1050 AD),1 we do get a good idea about their nature from the many places where leih is used as a
gloss for Latin-language, liturgical musical genres. Thus in the ninth century leih is used to gloss
Latin sequentia, and then later, in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, to translate modus.
Although it will likely always remain unclear to what extent the worldly leih came from the
Latin-language, religious forms or, conversely, the Latin-language, religious forms derived from
the leih, it would seem that the religious sequentia and modus, on the one hand, and worldly leih,
on the other, have much in common. Thus, like the Latin-language, religious forms, the Old High
German leih was definitely sung, clearly syllabic, and characterized by a kind of discord. Such
discord is most specifically manifested in the Old High German leih’s probable heterostrophic
nature. Thus, the strophes in a given leih differ in meter and rhyme from one another, making the
leih a virtuoso but discordant form, and a form that is in constant playful conflict with itself.2
On an etymological note, although the leih as a musical genre is attested clearly only in
3
German, the cognates of the word leih in all the Germanic languages hint at this fighting,

1
Old High German is an umbrella term encompassing several related varieties of German that flourished
from about 500 to roughly 1050 AD in the southerly part of the German-speaking lands, i.e. modern northern
France, the Rhineland, Thuringia, Swabia, Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy. The actual
transmission, however, of surviving, written Old High German texts does not start until the second half of the
eighth century.
2
See the seminal study on the Leich by Hermann Apfelböck, Tradition und Gattungsbewußtsein im
deutschen Leich. Ein Beitrag zur Gattungsgeschichte mittelalterlicher musikalischer “Discordia” (Tübingen:
Max Niemeyer, 1991), pp. 58-59 and 75 for the correspondence between leih and sequential and pp. 40-51
and 75-76 for the relationship between leih and modus; see also p. 37 for a characterization of the Old High
German leih as a discordant form.
3
A possible and intriguing exception to this rule is provided by Willem van Affligem’s Middle Dutch
religious biography (written around 1265-1270), the Leven van Sinte Lutgart (i.e. ‘Life of Saint Lutgard’),
itself a translation of Thomas de Cantimpré’s Vita piae Lutgardis from 1246-1248. Here, Middle Dutch leec
[le:k] would seem to refer to the type of sung love poem that German-speaking leich poets will compose in
the Middle High German period (1050-1400 AD): “So quamen si met schoenre scharen / Daer si wel
willecome waren / Want sie daer songen enen leec / Von minnen” [And they came with a splendid retinue

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playing, toying nature. For example, Old Norse leikr means ‘game’, or ‘social game’, and Old
English lâc means ‘dance’, ‘competition’, or ‘fight’.4 One might also think, for instance, of the
Danish toy company Lego, a shortening of modern Danish lege godt, or ‘play well.’
While the leih was definitely a well-known and widely practiced form during the Old
High German period, it is from the next linguistic-literary period – the Middle High German
(roughly 1050-1400 CE) – that we have our first surviving examples of the German-language
lay, Middle High German leich.5 The first of these seem to have been composed about 1190. The
evidence for that dating comes from the late thirteenth-, early-fourteenth-century leich poet Der
von Gliers (i.e. ‘The One from Gliers’), who suggests in one of his own leichs that the great late-
twelfth-century romance writer and minnesinger Hartman von Aue composed a leich, as did the
important minnesinger Friedrich von Hausen, who died in 1190.6 While we have every reason to
take Der von Gliers at his word, leichs from Hartmann and von Hausen unfortunately do not
survive. Indeed, we must wait until the thirteenth century for our first surviving leichs, with the
form gaining its greatest popularity in the mid- to late-thirteenth century and afterwards, when it
becomes especially beloved among Swiss poets, including Hadloub, Heinrich von Sax, Otto zem
Turne, and Rudolf von Rotenburg.7
In its own time, the Middle High German leich was clearly understood as a distinct
genre. Defined most simply, we may understand the Middle High German leich as a long lyric
poem, intended to be sung with instrumentation, and characterized most particularly by its
heterostrophic nature. Its most prevalent themes include love (the Minneleich), dance (the
Tanzleich), and popular theology (the Marienleich, i.e. the ‘Marian leich,’ and the Kreuzleich,
i.e. ‘the crusade leich’).8 Its most celebrated practitioner was Heinrich von Meißen (born mid-
thirteenth century, died 1318), also known as Frauenlob, that is, the ‘praiser of the Lady (or

there where they were thoroughly welcomed, because they sang there a leec about love.] ― Text from
Vroegmiddelnederlands Woordenboek on the De Geïntegreerde Taalbank: Historische Woordenboeken op
Internet, Web, 30 June 2014 <http://gtb.inl.nl/?owner=VMNW>. This English translation and, except as
otherwise noted, all English translations in this study are my own.
4
For Germanic cognates of this category, see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 16 vols
(Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854-1960), vol. 12: columns 611-12, accessible at Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob
Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, Web, 30 June 2014 <http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/>.
5
Middle High German, which designates a primarily literary language that existed roughly between 1050 and
1400 AD, is an umbrella term that encompasses several varieties of written German, themselves based upon
spoken and written varieties that flourished in the more southerly part of the German-speaking lands, i.e.
modern Swabia, Bavaria, Thuringia, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy.
6
See Der von Gliers, Leich “3”, Die schweizer Minnesänger, ed. Karl Bartsch (Frauenfeld: J. Huber, 1886),
pp. 204-05.
7
The chronology of the Middle High German leich and leich poets given here is from Günther Schweikle,
Minnesang (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1989), pp. 150-51.
8
For a concise description of the Middle High German leich as a generic form, see especially Schweikle, pp.
149-53.

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Ladies).’ As a most difficult, virtuoso form, the leich was the jewel in the crown in the
repertoires of poets who composed leichs. Indeed, while many leich poets have surviving
repertoires of multiple poems of various types, for most leich poets, we have only one example
of a leich from their hand.9 This would indicate that most poets who wrote leichs wrote only one.
It is perhaps important to make a couple of observations at this point. First, although
the transmission history makes it clear that the leich was a very widely practiced, highly
developed, and greatly admired form in the Middle High German period, it has received
relatively little attention from researchers. 10 Thus scholarship’s present understanding of the
leich might prove to be incomplete. Second, despite the limited amount of scholarship to date on
the form, the leich’s relationship, or lack thereof, to Romance antecedents seems fairly clear.
Indeed, while the Middle High German leich has much in common, for example, with the
Provençal descorts, including heterostrophy and discordance, there exists, beyond this, little
reason to assume that the leich was influenced by the descorts or any other Romance form.11
Now let us turn our attention to what a lay was not in the medieval German context.
Most importantly, for medieval German speakers a lay was not the Breton, narrative type of lay
in the tradition of Marie de France. As anomalous as it certainly is, medieval German-speakers,
who translated and adapted so many forms, texts, and ideas from the Francophone world, did not
receive the works of Marie de France. Further, there exist almost no acknowledgements by
German authors of the type of narrative, epic lai, referred to in Marie’s corpus and in a number
of mid-and later-twelfth-century Old French epic texts. By way of example, Chrétien de Troyes
refers to arguably this type of lai three times: in his Cligés, where a lai intones from blows that
the hero and an opponent deal to one another’s helmets (v. 4014); in Erec et Enide, where
following Erec’s triumph in the Joie de la cort episode the ladies there compose a “Lai de Joie”
celebrating the hero (vv. 6179-81); and in Yvain, which mentions a lai about Laudine’s father
(vv. 2154-55).12 But when the latter two are translated – and, indeed, expanded – into German by
Hartmann of Aue with his Erec from about 1190 and his Iwein from about 1200, Hartmann elects
to omit Chrétien’s references to the lais.13 In fact, there survives only one text in Middle High

9
Schweikle, p. 150. On this point see also the very nice contribution to leich scholarship by Barbara
Newman, Frauenlob’s Song of Songs, with the Critical Text of Karl Stackmann and a Musical Performance
on CD by the Ensemble Sequentia (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2006), XI. As Newman notes,
Frauenlob’s surviving repertoire is unique in that it includes not one but three leichs.
10
In addition to Apfelböck’s important 1991 study mentioned above, see more recently Andrea Grafetstätter,
Der Leich Walthers von der Vogelweide: Transkriptionen, Kommentare, Analysen (Münster: Lit, 2004).
11
Schweikle, p. 152, and Apfelböck, pp. 181-82.
12
Line references and texts from Chrétien’s romances are from the anthology Chrétien de Troyes, Romans
suivis des Chansons, avec, en appendice, Philomena, ed. Michel Zink (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1994).
13
To my knowledge, the only reworking of a Chrétien romance into a Germanic language that preserves one
of Chrétien’s lai references is the thirteenth-century Old Norse Ívens saga. The saga remarks of the heroine’s
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German that clearly acknowledges the narrative lai of the Old French type. That text is Gottfried
von Straßburg’s Tristan romance from about 1210, where we have not one but rather several
unambiguous references to such narrative lais, especially to the type Marie seems to have had
mind, that is, about tragic lovers. For example, Gottfried refers to Tristan composing the lai of
Tristan, which is arguably reminiscent of the lai Tristram composes at the end of Marie’s
Chevrefoil:14 “er vant ouch zuo der selben zît / den edelen leich Tristanden” [he invented also at
this same time the noble lay of Tristan] (vv. 19200-201).15 And Gottfried describes how Tristan,
to the accompaniment of his harp, sings first a lay about Gurun (vv. 3522-31), then one about
Gralant’s sweetheart (vv. 3584-92), and finally “einen senelîchen leich… / de la cûrtoise Tispe”
[a heart-rending lay of the courteous Thisbe] (vv. 3615-16).16 It is certainly important to remark
here, however, that Gottfried seems to have followed quite faithfully his source text, i.e. Thomas
of Britain’s partially preserved Tristan from the middle of the twelfth century. Thus, we might
reasonably assume that most, if not all, of Gottfried’s references to such “leiche von Britûn” [lais
from Britain/Brittany] (v. 3557) were already present in the version(s) of Thomas he used.17
While we probably cannot know definitively why Gottfried preserves such references
to lais, whereas all other Middle High German writers erase or avoid them, one possibility seems
probable. That possibility revolves around the quite similar pronunciation of Middle High
German leich [le:χ] and Old French lai [le:]. To a German-speaking audience, the leich had
referred – and probably had done so for the better part of a millennium – to something different
and distinct, namely, a sung poem of dissimilar strophes with heterogeneous meter and rhyme
and with diverse subject matter. Thus, the German authors, with the exception of Gottfried,

father that “eru of honum ger hin fegrstu hlóð [my emphasis] er syngja Valir ok Bretar [the most beautiful
lays (my emphasis) are composed about him which the Welsh and Bretons sing]. Old Norse text and English
translation are from Ívens saga, ed. and trans. Marianne E. Kalinke, Arthurian Archives: Norse Romance II:
The Knights of the Round Table, ed. Kalinke (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 62-63.
14
As notes Henrike Lähnemann, “Leich, Lied und Leise: Singen im Tristan,” Impulse und Resonanzen.
Tübinger mediävistische Beiträge zum 80. Geburtstag von Walter Haug, ed. Gisela Vollmann-Profe et al.
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007), p. 179.
15
Middle High German texts and verse-number references for Tristan are from Gottfried von Straßburg,
Tristan, ed. and trans. [German] Rüdiger Krohn, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1980-91).
16
The first two of these clearly seem to be equivalents of the Old French Lai Guiron and Lai de Graelent.
17
For the most comprehensive listing of appearances of the term both in Gottfried, specifically, and in the
Middle High German corpus of courtly texts, in general, see the entry for leich in Georg Friedrich Benecke,
Wilhelm Müller, and Friedrich Zarncke, Mittelhochdeutsches Worterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854-66),
accessible at Mittelhochdeutsche Wörterbücher im Verbund, Web, 30 June 2014 <http://urts55.uni-
trier.de:8080/Projekte/MWV/wbb>.

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arguably would not want to confuse or upset their audiences by mentioning the lai, that is, the
narrative lay, which was something altogether different from the native form.18
As a last general point, it is perhaps useful to observe that although the narrative lai in
the style of Marie does not appear to have directly influenced medieval German literature,19 we
nevertheless have about a dozen texts that somewhat resemble her lais, in that they are novella-
length, deal predominantly with love, and often treat adultery. Among the better known of these
primarily thirteenth-century texts, sometimes called höfische Verserzählungen (‘courtly verse
narratives’), are, for instance, the anonymously authored Moriz von Craûn, Konrad von
Würzburg’s Herzmaere (‘Tale of the Heart’) from around 1260, and Werner der Gartenaere’s
Helmbreht from the second half of the thirteenth century. 20 But whether we should actually
consider these texts as constituting a distinct genre, and, more importantly, to what extent – if
any – they have roots in the Old French lai are questions that we probably cannot answer with
any kind of confidence.

18
The pronunciation of Middle High German leich, initially identical to the pronunciation of Old High
German leih, would have migrated from [le:χ] to [laiχ] in most of the Middle High German areas during the
course of the thirteenth century. By the time this change has become prevalent, however, the practice of
German writers to avoid using the term in the sense of the Old French lai was arguably well established, and
was evidently a trend that a new acoustic distinction in the pronunciation of the Old French and Middle High
German terms could not reverse.
19
This is not to say that none of the stories embedded in Marie’s lais influenced medieval German literature.
While it cannot be proven definitively, it is, for example, quite likely that the plot of Marie’s Lanval
influenced the late-thirteenth century Middle High German Arthurian romance Gauriel von Muntabel by
Konrad von Stoffeln. As with the eponymous hero of Lanval, Gauriel’s story also revolves around his love
affair with a fairy-queen whose existence he may not reveal.
20
Also traditionally included in the corpus of höfische Vererzählungen are Heinrich von dem Türlin’s Der
Mantel (‘The Cloak’), Konrad von Würzburg’s Heinrich von Kempten and his Der Schwannritter (‘The
Swan-Knight’), Rüdiger der Hunchover’s Der Schlegel (‘The Sledgehammer’), and the anonymously
authored Aristoteles und Phyllis, Die Heidin (‘The Heathen Woman’), Tristan als Mönch (‘Tristan as
Monk’), Der Schüler von Paris (‘The Student from Paris’), the Kotzenmaere (‘Tale of the Blanket’), and
Frauentreue (‘The Loyalty of a Lady’). For a concise description of the höfische Vererzāhlung and the texts
mentioned here as belonging to that group, see Joachim Bumke, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im
hohen Mittelealter, 4th ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000), 276-86.

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