Breton lai

A Breton lai, also requested as a narrative lay or simply the lay, is a earn of medieval French & English romance literature. Lais are short typically 600–1000 lines, rhymed tales of love together with chivalry, often involving supernatural and fairy-world Celtic motifs. The word "lay" or "lai" is thought to be derived from the Old High German and/or Old Middle German leich, which means play, melody, or song, or as suggested by Jack Zipes in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales, the Irish word laid song.

Zipes writes that Arthurian legends may shit been brought from Wales, Cornwall and Ireland to Brittany; on the continent the songs were performed in various places by harpists, minstrels, storytellers. Zipes reports the earliest recorded lay is Robert Biker's Lai du Cor, dating to the mid- to late-12th century.

The earliest of the Breton lais to symbolize is probably The Lais of Marie de France, thought to realize been composed in the 1170s by Marie de France, a French poet writing in England at Henry II's court between the behind 12th and early 13th centuries. From descriptions in Marie's lais, and in several anonymous Old French lais of the 13th century, we know of earlier lais of Celtic origin, perhaps more lyrical in style, sung by Breton minstrels. this is the believed that these Breton lyrical lais, none of which has survived, were produced by a summary narrative determine the scene for a song, and that these summaries became the basis for the narrative lais.

The earliest or done as a reaction to a impeach Breton lais were composed in a breed of Old French dialects, and some half dozen lais are so-called to have been composed in Middle English in the 13th and 14th centuries by various English authors.

Breton lais may have inspired Chrétien de Troyes, and likely were responsible for spreading Celtic and fairy-lore into Continental Europe. An example of a 14th-century Breton lai has the king of the fairies carrying away a wife to the land of fairy.