Reynard the Fox
[1] The trickster fox, Reynard, lives in a society of other talking animals (lion, bear, wolf, donkey, etc), making the stories a beast epic.
[5] The common usage of animals as characters in tales has made it so the stories that touch on morally gray areas are easier to understand and accept.
[10] The specific character of Reynard is thought to have originated in Lorraine folklore, from where it spread to France, Germany, and the Low Countries.
[11][need quotation to verify] Alternatively, a 19th-century edition of a retelling of the Reynard fable states definitively with "no doubt whatever that it is of German origin" and relates a conjecture associating the central character with "a certain Reinard of Lorraine, famous for his vulpine qualities in the ninth century".
[12] Joseph Jacobs, while seeing an origin in Lorraine, traces classical, German, and "ancient northern folk-lore" elements within the Reynard stories.
[13] Jacob Grimm in his Reinhart Fuchs (Berlin, 1834) provided evidence for the supposition on etymological grounds that "stories of the Fox and Wolf were known to the Franks as early as the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries".
Reynard has been summoned to the court of king Noble (or Leo), the lion, to answer charges brought against him by Isengrim the wolf.
Other anthropomorphic animals, including Bruin the bear, Baldwin the ass, and Tibert (Tybalt) the cat, all attempt one stratagem or another.
The stories typically involve satire, whose usual butts are the aristocracy and the clergy, making Reynard a peasant-hero character.
Isengrim, alternate French spelling: Ysengrin, is Reynard's most frequent antagonist and foil, and generally ends up outwitted, though he occasionally gets revenge.
Cloud opens his work on the fox by situating it within the larger tradition of epic poetry, the fabliaux and Arthurian romance:
Seigneurs, oï avez maint conte Que maint conterre vous raconte Conment Paris ravi Elaine, Le mal qu'il en ot et la paine, De Tristan que la Chievre fist Qui assez bellement en dist Et fabliaus et chançons de geste Romanz d'Yvain et de sa beste Maint autre conte par la terre.
Mais onques n'oïstes la guerre Qui tant fu dure de gran fin, Entre Renart et Ysengrin.
How Paris took Helen, The evil and the pain he felt Of Tristan that la Chevre Spoke rather beautifully about; And fabliaux and epics; Of the Romance of Yvain and his beast And many others told in this land But never have you heard about the war That was difficult and lengthy Between Reynard and Isengrim
A mid-13th-century Middle Dutch version of the story by Willem die Madoc maecte (Van den vos Reynaerde, Of Reynaert the Fox), is also made up of rhymed verses (the same AA BB scheme).
[21] Willem's work became one of the standard versions of the legend, and was the foundation for most later adaptations in Dutch, German, and English, including those of William Caxton, Goethe, and F. S.
In 1481, the English William Caxton printed The Historie of Reynart the Foxe, which was translated from Van den vos Reynaerde.
[11] Also in the 1480s, the Scottish poet Robert Henryson devised a highly sophisticated development of Reynardian material as part of his Morall Fabillis in the sections known as The Talking of the Tod.
In 1498, Hans van Ghetelen, a printer of Incunabula in Lübeck, printed a Low German version called Reinke de Vos.
[22] With the invention of the printing press, the tales of Reynard the fox became more popular and started to be translated and recreated in many different languages.
[23] In the early modern editions of Reynard the Fox, the characteristics of the animals were based on literary topoi, appealing to the middle class reader.
Goethe adapted the Reynard material from the edition by Johann Christoph Gottsched (1752), based on the 1498 Reynke de vos.
[29] In the SyFy fantasy television show The Magicians (which aired from December 2015 to April 2020) there is a Pagan trickster god played by Mackenzie Astin named Reynard the Fox.
