Marie de France: Fables
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Authors
Marie
Spiegel, Harriet
Issue Date
1987
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Type
Book, Whole
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Abstract
A careful and enjoyable bilingual verse presentation of the earliest (c. 1160-90) extant collection of fables in the vernacular of Western Europe. Rhymed couplets of iambic tetrameter generally work well for Spiegel. Her helpful introduction is higher on Marie than I am after a reading of the first half of the 103 fables. I find some compositions of story elements strange and some epimythia askew. Half of the 103 are Aesopic, especially #1-40 (from Romulus Nilantii); one-third are human. Marie says Aesop translated his Latin from a Greek original! Different: the mouse gets free in The Mouse and the Frog (39); the hares wish only to emigrate (85); the stag makes no comment on his legs (93); the dog has a chain and a collar, not a rubbed neck (97); and the shepherd lies about the wolf with his eyes, not his hands or tongue (109). The Sow and the Wolf (83), new to me, has a good moral and good morality. All of the animals' deities in Marie are feminine. There is some yellow highlighting in the introduction. There are nice, but small, black-and-white illuminations with most of the fables.
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Citation
Publisher
University of Toronto Press
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DOI
Identifier
1028 (Access ID)