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Institution ( see List), you should be able to access the LE onĬampus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing The book, which is quite short, is available at the Gutenberg project.Consult the article in its entirety. But, despite these troubles, I enjoyed the book, and arrived in good spirits at the happy ending: This is a work ripe for a fresh look by an enterprising translator of Old French. Bourdillon seemed to be the least egregious offender, but even his version contains its fair share of “honoured wight”s and “gramercy”s, such that I had liefer die than suffer another. All were made about a century ago, and all are afflicted to some degree by maladroit archaisms. I tried out three (by Lang, Mason, and Bourdillon) before settling on the last.

In another, Nicolette stumbles in the forest upon a group of rustics enjoying a pastoral picnic, almost as though the Forest of Arden had been transplanted to France.Ī number of English translations have been made. Joining the fight, he discovers that they fight not with swords, but with crab-apples, cheeses, and mushrooms. In one episode Aucassin finds himself at a castle where the king lies in child-bed and the queen rides forth to battle.

His love, in fact, renders him worthy to be the hero of a medieval romance. In this sense, he is the “foolish boy” his mother decries, but his devotion is so strong that it inspires him to great deeds of another sort, and to heroic virtues of another order. Love has captured Aucassin’s heart, and he prefers his beloved to honour, to wealth, to glory - even to the salvation of his soul. It is a celebration of the medieval ideal of “courteous love”, and a fresh, cleansing wind blows through it. It is a delightful creation, plump with good humour and full of energy. This form has been dubbed a chantefable (literally, a sing-say), and the category has been invented specifically for Aucassin and Nicolette, which is our sole surviving medieval example of what was presumably a genre. What follows is a kind of medieval singspiel, in which verse songs alternate with prose narration. Their love is one for which, naturally, the course does not run smooth, and the basic problem is obvious enough: In the annals of medieval love lore you have your Tristans and your Yseults, you have your Lancelots and Guineveres, your Romeos and your Juliets and your Dantes and your Beatrices - and you have Aucassin and Nicolette? I confess that, until I stumbled upon them recently, I’d never heard of this pair.

Aucassin and Nicolete by Anonymous