[In the following essay, Bidard details examples of how Reynard's character runs counter to that of the typical medieval hero.]

I would like first to comment on the title of this paper. Reynard the Fox is of course a convenient name to refer to the different foxes appearing in medieval literature between the XIIIth and XVth centuries. It is the name used for instance by Caxton in his 1481 translation and printing. It is also the name most commonly used by modern critics, a name that underlines the link between the British works and the French tradition of the Roman de Renart. Yet, we can find our fox under other names: in Of the Vox and Wolf, written by the mid-XIIIth century, he is called Reneuard, which is quite close to the French name; in the Nonnes Preestes Tale, he becomes Russel, and in the Fables of Henryson, he turns into Lowrence. But in fact, as we shall see, he always remains the same and his different names can be seen as parts of his masks and disguises.

The second point I would like to insist on is the notion of anti-heroism. It may sound somewhat strange, even paradoxical, to speak of Reynard as anti-hero. Most of the time, he is considered as the hero of the fables and the tales in which he appears. Hero is then taken in its wider and weaker meaning, i.e. main protagonist, chief personage. Reynard is described as a manipulator, an instigator, a trickster, and, as such, he is very often called a hero. Moreover, the anti-hero is a modern notion, not to be applied to medieval literature. The anti-hero, in modern fiction, is characterized by absence: absence of heroic qualities, absence of reaction, sometimes even absence of personality. The anti-hero, more often than not, is a shadow, an outsider, a nobody, moving in a world full of absurdity he is quite incapable of either understanding or controlling. If we can say that Reynard is also characterized by a complete absence of heroic qualities, we cannot speak of his absence of reaction. He is no passive witness: on the contrary, he is the one who pulls the strings. Moreover, he perfectly understands and controls the world he lives in and that world is not full of absurdity but fraught with meaning. To draw a comparison between Reynard and modern anti-heroes would be a total absurdity. What I will try to show in this paper is that Reynard is an anti-hero in so far as he gives an inverted image of what a medieval hero was supposed to be. One could even call him a counter-hero.

First a medieval hero was a man and Reynard is an animal. We are always reminded of his animality. The authors constantly allude to his being a four-footed beast, easily recognizable thanks to his pointed ears and nose, his bushy tail and his thick red coat. He always moves in a natural setting: the forest, the field, the farm-yard. In Of the Vox and Wolf, he gets out of the forest. In the Nonnes Preestes Tale, he is lurking in a bed of cabbage. His motivation has nothing psychological or spiritual about it: he is mostly driven by hunger or thirst. In Of the Vox and Wolf, he gets out of the wood because he is hungry and, after eating three hens, he looks for water to quench his thirst.¹

In the Nonnes Preestes Tale² he wants to grab Chauntecleer to have a good meal and it is exactly the same in Henryson's Fables.³ Hunger is his first incentive and hens, ducks, lambs, etc. are his favourite victims. Moreover as an animal, he is supposed to be completely deprived of reason. Henryson, in ‘The taill of Schir Chantecleir and the Foxe’, explains that brutal beasts are irrational, that is to say wanting discretion (13/397-8). So this animality is completely alien to heroism: there can be neither identification with Reynard nor admiration for his feats! On the contrary the teller, and through him the reader, cannot help feeling superior to this irrational beast.

Yet, we should not dwell too much on Reynard's animality because it is partly obliterated on the one hand by his ability to speak and on the other hand by the moral vision of the authors. It is true that Reynard the Fox is presented as an irrational beast, deprived of reason; yet, he is endowed with the power of speech. Not only can he speak but he also knows how to use speech to further his aims. Most of his traps are set into words. The masks he puts on are very often verbal masks. Even in iconography it appears quite clearly. We see Reynard, disguised as a preacher, standing in a pulpit and talking his audience (mainly hens, ducks and geese) into blind submission. The end of his sermon will also be the end of these stupid fowls. Of course, this is just a convention and the other animals can speak too. But Reynard's mastery of words, the subtlety and cleverness of his arrangements tend to make us forget about his animality. This animality is also obliterated by the moral vision adopted by the authors. It is true that many details are given about his physical appearance but these details are just allusions, made in passing and quickly forgotten. They are conventional, based most of the time on the Bestiaries. They do not aim at giving a full-length description of a fox, based on direct observation. As always in medieval works, everything is man-centered and anthropomorphism is never very far. The physical portraits of Reynard are always counterbalanced by moral portraits.

Sometimes physical and moral features are intertwined, highlighting each other. When Russel appears at last in the Nonnes Preestes Tale, he is depicted as ‘A col fox ful of sly iniquitee’ (l. 3215). Sometimes physical features are given a moral significance: the fox neither walks nor runs, he sneaks, he lurks, he slinks, etc., revealing thus his false and treacherous nature. Henryson, in particular, piles up derogatory epithets. Lowrence is ‘false’, ‘fenyeit’, ‘crafty’, ‘cautelous’, etc. The fox is an animal but he is first and foremost an image of man. In the moralitas to the ‘Tale of Schir Chantecleir and the Foxe’, Henryson makes it clear. ‘This fenyeit foxe may well be figurate To flateraris with plesand wordis quhyte With fals mening and mynd maist toxicate’ (19/600-2).

Medieval authors did not start from an objective observation of animals, inferring their conclusions from these observations. They started from their beliefs and conceptions of man and the Universe and applied them to the animal word, trying to establish a network of cross references. They all shared Alan of Lille's opinion: ‘Omnis mundi creatura, Quasi liber et pictura, Nobis est in speculum.’⁴ All the physical, mental and spiritual phenomena are woven together into a huge web of connections. To study Reynard in himself has no interest whatsoever; what matters is to make out the links between the human and the animal world. So, what prevents Reynard from being a hero is not his being an animal, but rather his being false and treacherous. As an image of man, he represents sinful mankind and thus cannot but be condemned. He cannot be held up as an example, he is only exemplary in so far as he shows what must not be done. Of course, the emphasis on morality differs from one work to another, but in the British tradition morality is ever present.

Morality is ever present but morality does not preclude comedy. Even Henryson insists on the necessity of mingling ‘merry’tales with a wise doctrine: too much seriousness leads to boredom and dullness, but the reader will accept the moral lesson more easily if he is entertained by the story (1-2). This ‘comic’aspect of the tales can be considered as the second reason preventing Reynard from being a hero in the medieval sense of the word. A comic character is neither a hero nor an anti-hero. All his characteristics are distorted, exaggerated, to be held up to ridicule. A medieval hero is handsome: tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. He is clever, intelligent, brave, courageous, and courteous. On the contrary the comic character is often ugly or at least plain. Puny little chaps with hooked noses or nutcracker faces alternate with pot-bellied, big-footed fellows. They can be stupid, making blunders, mistaking one thing for another. They can be cowards, quaking with fear, hiding in case of danger. They appear all the more ridiculous as they are always plunged into ludicrous situations. So we could tend to think that Reynard is an anti-hero because his adventures make us laugh. Either in the fables or the tales, we are in the world of comedy, not in the world of romance and heroism. Once again, things are not so clearly divided.

The world in which he moves is a comic world but Reynard himself is seldom a comic character. Physically speaking, he is neither handsome nor ugly: he is a fox. Morally speaking, Reynard is full of defects: proud, selfish, ruthless, and hypocritical, but these defects cannot make us laugh. They are not mere weaknesses but vices and as such they are dangerous and threatening, all the more threatening as he is far from being stupid. He uses his intelligence to lure his victims into his traps. In fact the general tone is the tone of comedy, but Reynard himself rather belongs to the world of drama. He is the villain, the false traitor, cheating and lying to the others. The others: they are the ones who are comical. The comic essentially rises from the situations (the tricks played by Reynard) and the other characters (the victims of his tricks). The word ‘victim’is somewhat misleading because we seldom feel any pity for these victims. On the contrary we laugh at them. They seem to deserve what they get because of their foolishness or stupidity.

In Of the Vox and Wolf for instance, Sigrim the wolf seems to be the perfect laughable victim. He finds the fox, for once, in an awkward predicament: trapped in a bucket at the bottom of a dark, damp and miry well. Sigrim could easily take revenge on Reneuard, but he is so stupid as to believe all the blatant lies made up by the fox. The latter manages to convince him that the bottom of the well is in fact the gate of Paradise: any person in the Middle Ages knew that Paradise must be on top of a high mountain or in a golden island! Reneuard also convinces him of the necessity to confess himself and to cleanse his soul in order to reach this Paradise teeming with sheep and goats. Reneuard even persuades him that he can hear his confession and absolve him from his sins. When, finally, Sigrim takes the place of Reneuard at the bottom of the well, we cannot feel any pity for him (xx-xxiv). Too much is too much. So, once again, we come to a dead end: first we saw how Reynard's animality did not really account for his being an anti-hero; we have just seen how the comic aspect of the tales does not explain anything either. He is not an anti-hero because he is an animal or a comic character. To my mind, he is essentially an anti-hero because, as already said, he gives us an ‘inverted’image of the hero.

We do not have space to examine all the qualities required of a medieval hero, but there is one which sums up and comprehends all the others, i.e. truth. As Arveragus, in the Franklin's Tale, says, ‘Trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe’ (l. 1479). Criseyde, in Troilus and Criseyde, said she found and loved in Troilus ‘Moral vertu, grounded upon trouthe’ (IV l. 1672). Truth had several meanings in the Middle Ages, as it still does. It could be a mere promise, a pledged word: to keep one's truth meant not to break a promise. It could stand for integrity (to be true to one's inmost self) or loyalty (the very bond of dependence that kept feudal society together). On a higher level of course, it could be synonymous with Christian truth. Whatever its meaning, it was in fact the root of all heroic virtues. All the qualities required from a good knight were grounded upon truth: courage, purity, and integrity. The hero had to be true to himself and his quest was not a mere physical adventure but very often a quest to discover his inner self. The hero had to be true to his community and the integrity of the Round Table rests on the truthfulness of its members.

With Reynard truth no longer exists. Reynard is such a manipulator that he succeeds in giving reality to his lies and in building up a false image of truth. I will take two examples which are quite significant. At the beginning of Of the Vox and Wolf, Reneuard eats three hens and tries to catch Chauntecleer who has flown away onto a percher. The fox cannot hide the blood he has shed: this blood is the tangible proof of his crime. So the fox attempts to transform the reality of this blood, trying to convince the cock that he is a charitable and kind-hearted person. The hens were sick and he has let their bad blood in order to cure them. He feigns concern about Chauntecleer's health and is ready to do the same for his sake (xvii, 27-31). The second example is to be found in one of Henryson's Fables: ‘the Taill how this foirsaid Tod maid his Confessioun to Freir Wolf Waitskaith’. Lowrence has just confessed to the wolf and has been condemned not to eat meat before Easter. No sooner has he left the wolf than he meets a kid. The temptation is too great. He takes the kid, plunges it into water and gives it a new name: ‘Ga doun Schir Kid, cum up Schir Salmon agane!’(23, l. 751). In both examples truth is completely falsified. For Reynard truth means what is more profitable for him. He constantly pretends to be the opposite of what he is. He is selfish, but pretends to be charitable and generous. He is ruthless, but pretends to be kind-hearted. He is a liar, but pretends to be sincere and pure.

In all the tales and fables we have two antagonistic movements: on the one hand, the authors try to cast off the veil of appearances to reveal true reality and they invite us to find the sweet kernel of truth under the fiction of the story;⁵ on the other hand, Reynard is eager to disguise reality under as many wrappings as possible. This is the very reason why he cannot be a hero. As Guy Bourquin points out in his article in the present volume, the hero is a person who shows himself, who reveals something to others; Reynard, on the contrary, conceals everything including himself. He is an anti-hero in so far as he represents a disruptive force, the force of darkness, whereas the hero stands in glorious light.

Notes

1. ‘Of the Vox and Wolf’, in A Selection of Latin Stories of the XIIIth and XIVth centuries, ed. T. Wright, London, 1842 (subsequent quotes refer to this edition).

2. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, Oxford: OUP Paperbacks, 1988.

3. Robert Henryson, Poems, ed. Ch. Elliot, Oxford: Clarendon, 1963 (subsequent quotes refer to this edition).

4. Alan of Lille quoted by F.J.E. Raby, Christian-Latin Poetry, 2nd ed. 1953, 355.

5. Jacques Le Goff, La Civilisation de l'Occident Médiéval (Paris, 1964), 420.