Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/259

 REVIEW.

I^E Roman de Renard. Par Lucien Foulet. Bibliotheque de HEcole des Hautes Etudes. Fasc. 211. Pp. 574. Paris (Champion), 19 14.

This important work, dedicated to M. Joseph Bedier and authorised by MM. Alfred Jeanroy and Antoine Thomas, con- tinues worthily the great French tradition of medieval studies, and that none the less because it contravenes the arguments of Gaston Paris and M. Leopold Sudre as to the history of Reynard the Fox. The book may be described shortly as reaction against folklore. Jacob Grimm in his Reinhart Ftichs maintained the theory of an original Beast Epic, unwritten, repeated, known everywhere till civilisation grew up and choked it, then saved from choking by the poets, whose work is more or less truly repre- sented in the extant versions. Against this was raised the other theory, first by Paulin Paris and after him by Miillenhoff, that the medieval poems of the Fox and the Wolf came from literature, from Greek and Indian fables, not directly from the great heart of the people. This was followed by the suggestion of Gaston Paris, taken up and worked out by his pupil M. Sudre — they were not the first or only explorers in this direction, but their essays are the best known — to make out that the poems of Renard and Ysengrim are indebted for a great number of their adventures to popular tales. The position is clearly stated by Gaston Paris in his review of M. Sudre at the beginning of § iii.^ Gaston Paris had been struck, in reading collections of folk-tales, especially Slavonic and Scandinavian, with resemblances to Renard, and in a lecture in

'^ Milanges de litt^rature fran^aise au vioyeti age (1912), p. 379. Originally published mjourttal des Savans, 1894-95.