The Evolution of Marie de France's Lanval

Since the early fourteenth century, scholars, playwrights and screenplay writers have translated and reinterpreted Marie de France's Lanval. This lai in is the second most frequently translated throughout the medieval era and it continues to be reimagined and retold. All of the translations and reimagined renditions of the Lanval story have in common a strange tonality of otherworldly attraction, unusual gender dynamics, a curious new age aura, and elements of proto-feminism especially in terms of female agency, empowerment and eroticism. While some of these motifs seem to reflect more modern understandings of gender dynamics and conceptualizations of women, a critical analysis of Marie's original text in combination with an exploration of Celtic sources reveals that these motifs were always already present. These elements, stemming from Celtic oral traditions and finding their way across the often unnavigable barriers of time, culture, language, re-adaptation, and genre, establish Marie's Lanval as timeless.