User:Maescam/Reynard the Fox

Lead
The original copies were written in Old French but have since been translated into many different languages.However, the tales of Reynard come from all across Europe and each retelling has details that are specific to that area. The tales no matter where they take place are designed to represent the society around them and include the structures of society around them such as a noble court. While the authors take many liberties with the story telling, not all of the satire is meant to be rude or malice in intent.

Article body
Characters

The characters of Reynard the Fox were based off of the medieval hierarchy and are treated as human throughout the tales. Though since there are multiple authors they are often slight changes to the characters personalities. Throughout the stories these characters often switch between human and animal form and often without notice. The characters that we see switching between human and animal form are often those of elite status, however the characters that don't change tend to be peasants. Often the readers will find themselves being able to empathize with Reynard. They find that the situations he is in are not often that different from their own lives and this carries across the decades. The most common usage of animals as characters in tales has made it so the stories that touch on morally gray areas are easier to understand and accept.


 * Reynard the Fox
 * Since Reynard has been written about in many different times and places across the world it is not uncommon to see changes in his appearance to fit the natural surroundings of his story. His fur is often used as a camouflage meaning if the story was written in a snowy landscape he will have white fur, or yellow fur for desert areas, in the wooded areas of forest he is depicted in red.

In Medieval European Folklore and Literature

From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there are around twenty-six different tales of Reynard the Fox. While there might have been more that were written these are the ones that survive to present day. Many of these are written by different authors and anonymous authors, so there was not just one person writing the tales .One specific section of these tale entitled Roman de Renart which fits into the genre of romance. Roman de Renart gets it start using the history of fables that have been written since the time of Aesop. However, there is no genre that fully covers one tale as they often span over many in one tale. The tales often told stories of thing that were happening in society. The topics discussed in the tales are things that we see happening in the actual such as “relics, pilgrimage, confession, crusade” .It is widely thought that there is no real social connection from the tales to what was happening in society at the time. There is a growing camp of people who say there is a societal connection and even political statements being made.There are many different connections that can be made between things happening in society at the time to the tales. Often the tales put the hard to understand laws into common language and made it so people could enjoy and laugh at the stories of Reynard. The animals in the tale held court in the same way as it was in medieval society. The king would only hear the cases on one specified date and all the disputes between the characters would be heard at once. This same process was used during the time of medieval society .The connections between society and the tales fall into many of the themes of the tales. The differing versions all follow one specific theme of Raynard's fight with Yesengrin who is Reynard constant foe throughout the the stories. One of the main themes of the stories is violence. Like the tales in general there are two views on whether the violence is simply just animals being animals or if it is ment to connect to the violence that people were experiencing with the different wars going on at the same time.

Van den vos Reinaerde and Reinaert Historie (referred to as R I and R II respectively1) are two poems written by two different authors with R II being a continuation of R I. With different writers comes different variations. This can best be seen with Reynard himself. While describing the same character the Reynard from R I has many different character traits of that in R II .While a finished and completed poem by itself Van den vos Reinaerde does not have a set ending.

The romance genre of the middle ages is not what we think of the romance genre of today. The romance genre in the middle ages is a fiction telling of a characters’ life .The protagonist of the romance genre often have an adventure or a call to action this need is almost always there because of an outside force .During the 13th century French was seen as a standard language and many works during the middle ages were written in french, including reynard the fox. Romance was a very popular genre at the time and many popular works from the middle ages fall into the romance genre.

Early Modern Tradition

With the invention of the printing press the tales of Reynard the fox became more popular  and started to get translated and recreated in many different languages. The tales of Reynard don’t follow the typical sense of reprinting as there is no clear chronological way in which the stories are told and they also have only slight changes. Many of the original pages to these stories have been lost to time so it is difficult to tell what the exact literary changes are. There aren’t many literary changes to the works with the exception of the typical changes that are seen from the early days of the printing press .There are also slight changes to the wording that show modernization of the uses and differing orders of the words at times.While the changes might appear to be mistakes there they are not thought of as mistakes and are often kept in the modernization of the tales. There haven't been many attempts to better the works in during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but they are not seen as often.The reason that the changes to the tales during the fifteenth century are not seen as a mistake is because at that time there were people specified to work in printing and the beliefs of the printers would not have made that many mistakes. In the early modern editions of Reynard the Fox the characteristics of the animals were based on things that the middle class reader wanted to see.