Translator's Note
Note.—In recent years, in various small books, a number of mediæval French tales, chiefly the lays, have been rendered accessible to English readers, but no attempt has been made to bring together in a single collection examples of the different types of tales. The translator has tried within a small compass to show something of the range and scope of the Old French short story, and at the same time to choose, as far as might be, tales that had not been previously translated.
Three of those included in the volume have, however, already been done into English. The Two Lovers and Eliduc appeared in Seven Lays of Marie de France, by Edith Rickert, London, 1901; and a metrical translation by William Morris of The Order of Chivalry was printed in the Kelmscott Press edition of Caxton's Order of Chivalry. Of the others, I believe, no complete English version has been made. Condensed renderings, however, of The Order of Chivalry and The Lay of the Bird occur in Way's Selections of Fabliaux and Tales, London, 1796 and 1800. Also Leigh Hunt used the plot of Le Vair Palefroi for his poem The Palfrey; and in Parnell's Hermit an often told story is again repeated, and the anchorite and his divine comrade move, strange figures, through the ordered, eighteenth century landscape.
Many of the Old French tales have been preserved to us in but a single manuscript, with the result we have few critical texts. Such excellent editions as Warnke's Lais of Marie de France are rare, and the translator often encounters difficulties by the way. Some of the readings must perforce be conjectural, and others can but reproduce the ambiguities of the original. At the end of The Gray Palfrey I have omitted altogether a long but incomplete sentence that begins to tell us what happened next between the hero and his uncle. Zorak's text of Melion (Zeitsckrift für Romanische philologie, vol. vi.) unfortunately did not come to my notice until these translations were in press, too late to do more than borrow a few readings where Michel is most unsatisfactory.
A word should be said as to the grouping of the tales. The types are not so distinct but that there is a borderland between the lai and the fabliau in which are found a few examples with the characteristics of each. The Lay of the Bird is a case in point. Gaston Paris, in his Littérature Française au Moyen Age, classes it as a fabliau because the story is not of Celtic but Eastern origin; yet M. de Montaiglon does not admit it to his complete edition of the Fabliaux. Indeed, the enchanted orchard, the talking bird, the sentiments, the praise of love are all in the manner of the courtly poetry. It is therefore, on account of its accessories, here included among the lais.
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