tall. Within were sizable gold letters written; they listed all the things that were to be seen in the forest.]
Most modern readers will take this passage as pure fantasy and will regard its fairy paraphernalia as a mere plot device—the function of Brocéliande is simply to provide an elaborate chivalric proving ground for the two young heroes. As Jeff Rider puts it, medieval otherworlds “serve as narrative engines whose representatives, messages, or gifts intervene to set a story going, keep it going, or change its direction.”93 In Helen Cooper’s words, “magic is above all a narrative issue, a way of telling a story.”94 To take the fairy machinery of medieval romance as nothing more than a convenient narrative device, however, is to ignore the fact that people in the Middle Ages were themselves far from indifferent to truth claims about fairies. As Arthur Brown showed long ago, the torrent of disparaging epithets—nugae, fallaces, fabulae, figmenta—hurled against Arthurian romances by twelfth-century clerics arose from their very real indignation that such things as “disappearing castles, magic fountains, and enchanted forests” should have been represented as credible.95 If the question mattered to them, perhaps it should also matter to us.
Let us then return to the Forest of Brocéliande. In the Roman de Rou, written at least a hundred years before Claris and Laris, the Norman poet Wace inserts the following amusing aside into an account of the forces gathered by William for his invasion of England:
e cil devers Brecheliant
donc Breton vont sovent fablant,
une forest mult longue e lee
qui en Bretaigne est mult loee.
La fontaine de Berenton
sort d’une part lez le perron;
aler i solent veneor
a Berenton par grant chalor,
et a lor cors l’eve espuisier
e le perron desus moillier;
por ço soleient pluie aveir.
Issi soleit jadis ploveir
en la forest e environ,
mais jo ne sai par quel raison.
La seut l’en des fees veeir
se li Breton nos dient veir
e altres mereveilles plusors;
………………‥
La alai jo merveilles querre,
vi la forest e vi la terre,
merveilles quis, mais nes trouvai,
fol m’en revinc, fol i alai;
fol i alai, fol m’en revinc,
folie quis, por fol me tinc. (3:6374–98)96
[and some [came] from near Brocéliande which the Bretons often tell stories about, a forest, long and broad, which is greatly prized in Brittany. The spring of Barenton flows on one side, beside the great stone. Huntsmen were accustomed to go to Barenton when it was very hot and pour water from their horns and splash it over the great stone; this way they would make it rain. This is the way it rained in the old days in the forest and the surrounding area, but I don’t know what the reason was. People were accustomed to seeing fairies and many other wonders there, if the Bretons are telling us the truth…. I went there to see wonders, I saw the forest and I saw the region; I searched for wonders but I didn’t find any; I came back a fool—I went there a fool; I went there a fool—I came back a fool; I looked for folly—I found myself the fool [my emphasis].]
Wace, then, was a skeptic; he had sought empirical evidence and found it lacking, but the real point is that he did seek it (or represents himself as having done so).
What of his successor Chrétien de Troyes? Chrétien had evidently read this passage in Wace, for Calogrenant is clearly echoing it in the opening scene of Yvain. Reporting his unsuccessful adventures in Brocéliande to King Arthur, Calogrenant concludes:
Ensi alai, ensi reving,
Au revenir por fol me ting;
Si vos ai conté come fos
Ce qu’onques mes conter ne vos. (lines 577–80)97
[Thus I went, thus I returned; on my return I found myself a fool; if I have told my story like a fool I wish that I may never tell it again.]
Calogrenant’s folly, however, is quite different from Wace’s; it is not the folly of a man who has been naive and gullible—pouring water over the stone has, after all, produced the promised effect—but of one who has overreached himself and been shamed in battle with the knight whom his actions conjured up. At the end of the romance, Yvain, desperate to get his indignant lady, Laudine, to see him, threatens to flood her out by exploiting the magical properties of the spring at Barenton:
Puis errerent tant que il virent
La fontainne et plovoir i firent.
Ne cuidiez pas, que je vos mante,
Que si fu fiere la tormante,
Que nus n’an conteroit le disme. (lines 6533–37)
[Then they [Yvain and his lion] traveled until they saw the spring and made it rain there. Don’t imagine that I’m lying to you: the tempest was so severe that no one could tell the tenth of it [my emphasis].]
What are we to make of Chrétien’s disclaimer, “Ne cuidiez pas, que je vos mante”? Is it an ironic joke? Is it a genuine appeal for credence? Is it merely a conventional tic designed to carry his audience along with him at an improbable moment? Whatever we make of it, however, it shows that Chrétien was no less aware than Wace of the contested nature of fairy belief.
There is one other early literary text whose setting is the Forest of Brocéliande, Huon de Méri’s Torneiment Anticrist (1235–40). This is not a true romance but rather an odd mixture of allegorical psychomachia and social satire: Anticrist’s followers, for instance, include not only a character called Pub Crawl [Guersois], whose gang consists of Scotsmen, English, and Normans, but also the gods Pluto and Proserpina, who bear a clear resemblance to Chaucer’s fairy king and queen in The Merchant’s Tale.98 Proserpina is Anticrist’s lover and supplies him with a pennon made from her chemise (lines 570–74), while Pluto bullies Anticrist into fighting the archangel Michael (lines 2918–19). Interestingly, among the butts of Huon de Méri’s satire are the Albigensians (lines 878–96 and 22767–95)—a further sign that fairy beliefs hovered at the edge of heresy. The Torneiment’s opening lines are clearly inspired by Chrétien de Troyes’s account of the visits of Calogrenant and Yvain to Brocéliande; the poet, seeking to discover the truth about the spring of Barenton and its properties (“Kar la verté volei e aprendre / De la perilluse fontaine” [lines 62–63]), finds it just as Chrétien had described (“cum l’a descrit Crestiens” [line 103]). But instead of suppressing its fairy elements like Chrétien, de Méri demonizes them. By pouring water over the stone (not once but twice), he summons both a tremendous storm and the terrifying figure of
