'There and Back Again', The Middle English Breton Lays, a Journey Through Uncertainties

International audienceThey tell us about human beings that undertake journeys through the wilderness of heath and forests, the otherness of the fairy world, the oddities of human behaviour.They tell us about nature, friend and foe to man, sheltering and destructive, a place of exile and restoration, a place where one gets lost in the meanders of the human mind.They tell us about queens and paupers, faithless lovers and lovesick suitors, the generous and the wicked, the bold and the submissive.Deep down, they tell us about human nature: how it aspires to loyalty, delights in self-sacrifice but falls into the traps of rash promises, jealousy, and the thirst for fame. They tell us about the Otherworld, complete with dragons, gem-paved castles, cruel kings and lascivious fairies, a world that is but a mirror of our own, so easy to enter but so hard to forget.Each is unique but they all pretend to spring from the strings of harper-kings.They descend from courtly romances composed by a French lady, but rich London merchants loved to hear them told. Nameless copyists wrote them down in parchment and they have travelled though seven hundred years.They are the Breton lays in Middle English. They will take you there and back again, in a journey of poetic exploration.Si les lais de Marie de France sont appréciés du public francophone, seuls les spécialistes connaissent l’existence d’un corpus semblable dans la littérature anglaise des 14e et 15e siècles : cet ouvrage porte à la connaissance du plus grand nombre une sélection des lais bretons en moyen anglais, courts poèmes narratifs où l’aventure chevaleresque de la romance médiévale se redessine et se questionne à l’ombre de l’Autre monde celtique