A series of pleasant tales composed from about 1175 to the middle of the 11th century and artificially grouped, this is what has been agreed to call the Roman de Renard. The word "novel", which then designates long organized poems, like the Roman de Brut or the Roman de Trove, applies here to a collection of disparate stories, written independently of each other, at different dates and by different authors; and if it is permissible to speak of a novel, it must be understood in the broader sense of narration in the vulgar language, whatever its nature and extent. As the tales thus collected put the character of Renard in the foreground, it follows that the novel to which it gave its name is nothing other than a collection of stories of which the fox is the hero. If it was possible, from the end of the twelfth century, to conceive of a Fox Novel as a coherent whole, it is because there existed between the tales in which the fox appears an indelible kinship. Apart from a few late epigones, which moreover offer only a derisory reflection of the primitive themes, it is always Fox who leads the game, alone or almost alone against his adversaries, all the animals leagued against him. His name, of Germanic origin, feginhart or Reinhart, does not appear in French before the first traces of our novel, and it is thanks to the rapid and prodigious diffusion of the latter that it was substituted early, in everyday language, for the generic term fox. It is around him that the other characters evolve and, placed at the center of all the adventures, which he often prepares and directs in the direction that suits him, he has quite naturally become the eponymous hero of the animal epic. - [Author]

Chapters: The Manuscript Tradition; Branches of the Renard; Precursors of Roman de Renard; Origin and Sources; Painting the Characters; Parody and Satire; Art and Style; Survival of Renard.

Language: French