Marie de France’s Writing on Water: the Etymological Narrativity of the Sea in the Lais

What is it about?

If we were to look for the narrative essence of Marie de France’s lais and for the narrative space they are located in, the likely answer would be that it is the space in between. More specifically, it is the space between genders and gender relations, between the human and the superhuman worlds, but, importantly, also between the human and the natural world. In this last interaction, water and, in particular, the waters of the sea, play an important narrative role with the ambiguities that they bring to the ideas of parting, distance, death, and the idea of the voyage and its capacity to both sever lovers and reconnect those that have been separated. This may have been familiar to Marie, who, in all probability, at least once crossed the watery expanse between the shores of continental Europe and England. The only personal introduction we have from her, 'Marie ai num, si sui de France,' ('My name is Marie, and I am of France,) evidently points to the fact that when she utters it, she is away from 'France.' Thus, the in-betweenness of her lais obviously also lies in the in-betweenness of cultures, languages, and territories from which they originate. The only way to cross the distance between the latter was by embarking on a sea voyage, which is central to the plots of the longest of her lais, Guigemar and Eliduc. Incidentally, the former opens while the latter closes the now accepted sequence of the lais based on their arrangement in Harley MS 978, which may be an additional indication that both meeting and parting are significant motifs in the lais. In this chapter, I argue that of all the four elements, water is the one given special agency by Marie de France in her lais. I also argue that this agency is not only narratively present in them but that the evidence for it may also be found in their logocentric dimension. In the world instructed by Isidore of Seville’s etymologizing, the Latin name of the sea comes from the adjective amarus as its waters are 'bitter' (Etymologies, XIII.xiv.1) and so does the word for 'death' (XI.ii.31), whereas Andreas Capellanus’s De amore derives the word amor from another water-related word, namely the hook (hamar) onto which lovers are caught to suffer like fish. That Marie may have given some thought to the mar- element of her name is, as I argue, not entirely conjectural, even if she may have been aware of its misconstrued etymology linking it with the sea. However, I propose that the presence of this linguistic component is narratively meaningful in the names of quite a few of her characters whose appellations are known to us, such as Guigemar, Meriaduc, and Muldumarec. By coincidence or Marie’s design, they all possess the 'sea component' of 'mar.' Intriguingly, the same element is also noticeable in the words that are of paramount importance to Marie de France’s narratives: given the medieval and poetic inclination to see the original senses in the etymologies of words, the *m-r combination present in amour, merveil, and mort may have been understood to be interrelated. Furthermore, the combination is also present in Breton, where marv is a word denoting 'death.' The chapter’s focus is chiefly on the significance of the above for Guigemar and Eliduc, but given the meaningfulness of water associated with its capacity to introduce change in the Celtic tradition, I also refer to several other occurrences of the aquatic motif in Marie de France’s lais, notably Equitan, Lanval, Milun, and Yonec.

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Photo by Thanh Nguyen on Unsplash

Photo by Thanh Nguyen on Unsplash