Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/262

 2 34 Review.

in another form in xiv. ; and xiv. is later than iii. Now xiv. has an additional incident. After the Fox's success, the Wolf tries to imitate him ; he too will pretend to be dead, and lays himself out stiff on the road, since that is the way the Fox has won his herrings. He is, of course, detected and beaten by the carters. M. Sudre {p. 176) refers to similar folk-tales; he thinks they are adaptations of the original simple story which had only the exploit of the Fox. But is it not possible \\\'3X Renart xiv. and these other stories may have got the true original plot? After all, there is no very great subtlety in the Fox's herring-game ; it seems a better joke when Wolf the Pantaloon tries to imitate the victorious knave and is baffled. And this is the plot of Big Clans and Little Claus, and of Unibos the joke is that the dull avaricious person is led to imitate superficially the device of the clever one. Students of folklore will see the possibility that Renart xiv., though later in date, may have copied a better folk-tale than iii.

The great value of M. Foulet's book lies outside the province of folklore, and consists in his proof of the literary relation between the French rhyming Renart and the Latin Ysengri??itis.

Yseugrimus was discovered by Jacob Grimm, and by him named Reinardus Vttlpes. It is a long poem in Latin elegiacs. The shorter Latin poem which Grimm printed in his Reinhart Fiichs is now known to be an abridgment, and Ysengriniiis now denotes the longer poem — edited first by Mone, 1832, then by Voigt, 1884. Ysengrimus was composed by Nivard, a Fleming, about 1 1 50 ; it is thus earlier than the extant French Renart, earlier than the High Dutch and Low Dutch rhyming histories van den vos Reinaerde. M. Foulet makes it probable that Ysengrifnus is the model of Retiart. His reasoning is strong. Both books are made up of separate adventures ; the sequence is casual in both and in both it is the same (p. 124). Obviously they cannot be independent. The older theory, represented by M. Sudre, was that Ysengrimus drew from the estoire the traditional legend of Reynard the Fox, which may have been rhymed in older French poems now lost. The weakness of M. Sudre's study of Renart is that he never declares fully what he makes of Ysetigrimus ; M. Foulet's closer examination was needed in order to clear up this doubtful matter by showing what the problems are.