Récits arthuriens en moyen néerlandais: ‘Roman van den Riddere metter mouwen’/Le Roman du Chevalier à la manche; ‘Lanceloet en het hert met de witte voet’/Lancelot et le cerf au pied blanc ed. by Baukje Finet-Van der Schaaf (review)

The growing international interest in Middle Dutch Arthurian romance is well served by this French translation of two romances preserved in the Lancelot Compilation. Le Roman du Chevalier à la manche describes how a young orphan makes a name for himself, finds first his mother and then his father, and finally marries the beautiful Clarette, who immediately spotted his potential when she offered him her sleeve upon his arrival at Arthur’s court. The tale of Lancelot et le cerf au pied blanc is a traditional quest with a surprising ending: after Kay’s failed attempt to find the stag whose white foreleg will bring its owner the hand in marriage of a lovely lady, Lancelot obtains the foot. Severely wounded, he is knocked unconscious by an evil knight, who presents the foot at the lady’s court. Gawain rescues Lancelot and sets things right. After the defeat of the evil suitor, Lancelot waives his right to marry the lady, since he is still in love with the queen. This is the second of Baukje Finet-Van der Schaaf’s volumes in the series (her translation of Le Roman de Moriaen appeared in 2009). The line-by-line prose translations read smoothly, and only rarely does the Middle Dutch rendering (in the editions of David F. Johnson and Geert H. M. Claassens, and of W. J. A. Jonckbloet) raise issues of interpretation or translation. A separate Introduction to each story provides a summary and covers topics such as language, sources, and intertextuality, and there are detailed indexes, not only of names, but also of themes and motifs, ‘objets fabriqués’, adventures and customs, and narrative technique. The Introduction to the first story even contains a brief history of Middle Dutch (Arthurian) literature for those new to the field. The inclusion of these two romances in the Lancelot Compilation has deeply influenced the content of all three texts: the compiler shortened existing versions of older tales quite drastically in order to fit them into his chronicle-like framework, based on the Lancelot Grail Cycle. As small fragments of the originals show, the compiler pared down the texts by up to a third, making the narratives somewhat rough and truncated in places: characters can appear abruptly, yet some elements (like the description of the magic bed in the Lancelot tale) are allotted a disproportionate amount of text. The modern French reader would have understood this aspect of the tales better had the editor explained it more clearly. Finet-Van der Schaaf’s ‘notice’ on the Lancelot Compilation (pp. 33–37) mentions the textual differences between the fragments and the compilation text but does not really explore the consequences for the texts as they exist now. In this respect, and with regard to the interpretation of the stories, she could have taken greater advantage of specialist articles by Simon Smith, whose work is mentioned in the ‘Elements de bibliographie’ but whose insights are absent from the Introduction. These are scholarly quibbles, however, and do not diminish the value of this book as a welcome introduction to two fascinating tales.