. The twenty-six “branches” of the Roman de Renart were composed by some twenty authors of varying talent between ca. 1174 and 1250. This episodic narrative in octosyllabic verse has come down to us in thirteen major manuscripts. Ceaselessly modified by oral and written transmission, it is a fluid work that reflects the constant interaction of language, imagination, and reality—so much so that its component parts are difficult to date with precision. It is possible to identify three principal collections, differing in organization, content, and length. To designate the parts of each collection, the term branche is used. Each episode grows from the main Renardian trunk like the branch of a tree, and one can sense here a bit of mischievous fun, for until its use in the Renart, the comparison had been found in religious and moral literature to designate the good qualities flowing from a cardinal virtue or the vices from a mortal sin.
The earliest branches (II and Va; ca. 1175) show the trickster Renart the fox impelled by an all-devouring hunger, both physical and sexual, triumphing over such opponents as Tibert the cat, Chantecler the rooster, and Tiecelin the crow. They also narrate Renart’s rape of the she-wolf Hersent, the cause of the enmity between Renart and Isengrin the wolf. Branches I and la recount the consequences of these actions, whereby Renart is summoned to judgment at the court of Noble the lion. Branch IV (ca. 1177) tells the delightful tale of Renart and Isengrin in the well. Other early branches, composed 1180–90, develop the themes of these first branches into a lighthearted parody of contemporary society. Seven branches composed between 1190 and 1205 round out the beast epic; similar in spirit but introducing new episodes, they present a full picture of contemporary peasant society. A series of ten later branches (1205–50) is inferior in inspiration, full of contradictions, and tending toward heavy-handed satire.
Renart is the man-beast of unbridled violence and sexuality; like the bear and the wolf, he symbolizes the destructive forces at work in creation; he incarnates the primitive forces of nature, which, goaded by voracious physical and sexual appetites, violate and mutilate both animals and men. Beyond these mythemes, one finds, in the movement from orality to textuality, a folktale structure, as in the episodes with Tibert the cat. But the cultured clerics who first wrote down these tales, only a few of whom—Pierre de Saint-Cloud, Richard de Lison, the Priest of La Croix-en-Brie—we know by name, have also drawn from French and Latin literary sources (Aesop’s fables in prose and verse, Ecbasis captivi, and especially Ysengrimus). Renart has close ties to the Tristan material, which likewise uses division into branches and whose hero, also a trickster, is in the same triangular relationship with Iseut and his uncle Mark as Renart is with Hersent and his uncle Isengrin. In Branch XIII, the animals search for Renart in the castle in a scene reminiscent of Chrétien’s Yvain; in other branches, they go on pilgrimage to the hen Pinte’s tomb as they do to Muldumarec’s in Marie de France’s Yonec; and the fox and the wolf wage war on one another like the feudal barons of the chansons de geste; Branch IX ends in an apocalypse of the chivalric world reminiscent of the Mort Artu.
Rewriting is also present within the Roman de Renart, both in a single branch that exists in multiple versions and between branches, through repetition of formulae and motifs or structure: Branch XII is grafted on Branch XV, Branch VII on IV, with a subtle play of variations, inversions, and amplifications. Moreover, the Roman de Renart was rewritten through the centuries: in Rutebeuf’s Renart le bétourné, in the 13th-century Couronnement de Renart, in Jacquemart Gielée’s Renart le nouvel (late 13th c.), in the Priest of Troyes’s Renart le contrefait (1319–28), in Jean Tenessax’s Livre de maistre Renart (15th c.), as well as in modern adaptations.
An animal behaving like a man, Renart plays a wide variety of roles, changing his name (to Galopin or Chuflet) and his color (red, yellow, black); he is a genius at ruse and metamorphosis who makes a mockery of all taboos, seeking adventure like a knight-errant, compelled ever onward by his insatiable desires. What creates the charm of the work and of its central character is the constant interplay between the animal and the human worlds, as the former, increasingly anthropomorphic, apes the feudal world. The animals mimic human gestures—they speak, ride horses, assault castles, pray to God—in metaphors that the reader accepts without ever losing sight of their underlying animal nature. Renart’s world is one of physical joy, of nonintellectual relaxation, of the triumph of instinct. A joyful work paradoxically abounding in death, injury, and mutilation, the Roman de Renart depicts a cruel universe where action is motivated by hunger and danger. But the reader senses a feeling of physical, moral, and religious liberation, and the laughter, both satiric and parodic, is also the anarchic and amoral expression of the feast of fools. It is a desacralized universe that holds all conduct to be folly and rests finally on the reality of nature, as does Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose. The greatest value in Renart’s world is life, and to survive is to triumph.
Dufournet, Jean, ed. and trans. Le roman de Renart. 2 vols. Paris: Flammarion, 1985. [Modern French translation.]
Fukumoto, Naoyuki, Naboru Harano, and Satoru Suzuki, eds. Le roman de Renart édité d’après les manuscrits C et M. 2 vols. Tokyo: France Tosho, 1983–85.
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Scheidegger, Jean. Le roman de Renart ou le texte de la dérision. Geneva: Droz, 1989.
Subrenat, Jean, and M.de Combarieu du Gres. Le roman de Renart: index des thèmes et des personnages. Aix-en-Provence: CUER MA, 1987.
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