It’s not only Isengrim who brings charges against Reynard: Cuwaert the hare says that Reynard promised to teach him the Apostles’ Creed and instead tried to kill him, and Chaunticleer the cock accuses Reynard of murdering his daughter, Coppen. The wolf was in such terrible pain from the tight twist the fox was applying to his balls that he spat blood and shat himself. The fox was then able to withdraw his other paw from the wolf’s mouth. He forced his free paw between the wolf’s legs and gripped the wolf hard by the balls, before twisting them so violently that the wolf howled and cried out with the intense pain. While Isengrim was speaking, the fox was thinking hard about extricating himself. The fox brings a creative flair to his cruelty: As Simpson notes in his introduction, unlike Aesop’s fables, which teach sentimental morals suitable for the classroom, the blackly humorous Reynard stories always make the same point: cleverness trumps brute force. There’s no suspense: we know from the start that Reynard will slip out of every tight corner. These chapters are subdivided into sections with headings like ‘In a very tight corner, Reynard the fox not only escapes hanging, but turns the tables on all his enemies’. The 45 chapters of Reynard the Fox are short, around five or six pages, and have titles like ‘How Bruin the bear fares with Reynard the fox’, ‘The king is terribly angry at these accusations’ and ‘The king forgives the fox everything, and makes him the most powerful lord in all his territory’. The story climaxes in a challenge between Reynard and Isengrim: Reynard, shorn and slathered in olive oil, urinates on his own tail and whips Isengrim in the face with it repeatedly. The second thing we learn is that he doesn’t want to go because he has pissed on the faces of the children of his enemy, Isengrim the wolf. The first thing we learn about Reynard is that he doesn’t want to go. The book opens with the lion, the king of the beasts, calling the animals to court to celebrate the feast of Pentecost. Now James Simpson, a medievalist at Harvard, has translated Caxton’s History of Reynard the Fox into colloquial modern English. It did: there were 23 editions between 14. Most of the 97 books Caxton published on his press in Westminster were works of chivalric literature or religious piety, but he probably found room for the rather nasty Reynard because he thought it would sell. In 1481 William Caxton translated a Flemish version of the epic and printed it as the History of Reynard the Fox. He has endured because we respond to his sense that life is a game, but one that might be won. Reynard is amoral and cynical he doesn’t care about good and evil or right and wrong. But there is something more at work in the Reynard stories than the simple humour of walking, talking animals, and the satirising of political vice. Anthropomorphic creatures always give an opportunity for humans to reflect on their own paradoxical status – half-animal, half-god – and to take delight in a fanciful refinement of the bestial world. The Vox and the Wolf is the only extant Middle English beast fable before Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, written a century or so later. Between the 12th and the 15th centuries there were at least three French versions of these stories, and the fox’s reputation spread to Germany, the Low Countries and England. In these mock epics Reynard and Ysengrimus, a wolf, try to get the better of each other both poems avoid didactic lessons or obvious morals and give their protagonists psychological complexity. The characterisation of foxes as wily had already been established by Aesop, but Reynard himself first appeared in the tenth-century poem Ecbasis Captivi (‘The Escape of the Captive’), and he returned in the 12th-century Ysengrimus. T he word for ‘fox’ in medieval France was goupil – until a set of allegorical tales about a fox called Reynard became so popular that renard started to be used instead.
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