Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Terry Patricia
Title : Renard the Fox The misadventures of an epic hero
Year : 1983

Link download : Terry_Patricia_-_Renard_the_Fox.zip

Introduction. By the middle of the thirteenth century in France, the common word for fox, goupil, had been replaced by the name of the fox whose adventures are related here. Nothing could better demonstrate the popular appeal of the Roman de Renart and its anti-establishment attitudes. The authors were anything but pedantic; nor were they out to write the simple tales for children extracted from their work by later bowdlerizers. They attacked, with gusto and a subterranean idealism, the government of their country, its legal system, its Church, the formalities of feudalism, the hollow protection offered the underprivileged, and the unredeemed brutality of peasants. They put us on the side of a revolutionary individual who is, however, no social reformer but a murderer and a thief. These writers have their own renardie, craftiness and guile, and take full advantage of the fact that at a masquerade, if the rhymes are good enough, almost anything can be said. Unlike the fables from which the animal characters partly derive, the Roman de Renart has no overt moral purpose. No doubt it is intended to be instructive, but the more it exposes the complex weaknesses that constitute the very fabric of the society it depicts, the more it makes them an occasion for enjoyment. When the characters are clothed in real fur and real feathers, not only is their experience of life, insofar as it resembles our own, an entertainment, but there is further charm in those moments when we are reminded, by a gesture of wing or tail, that they are animals. ...