Lunette: the trickster hero of Yvain

An essay in which I argue that the handmaiden Lunette is the true hero of  Chrétien de Troyes' 12th century Arthurian romance Yvain: The Knight of the Lion

Lunette, the True Hero of Yvain?

One gets the distinct impression that Lunette, like Dolly Levi, has “always been a woman who arranges things.” If you want your lady wedded, ring retrieved, escape abetted just leave everything to her. She leads Laudine by the nose and Yvain usually obeys her like an obedient Spaniel (or loyal lion.) “Now come and do as I say,” this servant girl tells the knight. And he obeys, because it is clear she knows what she’s doing. Her machinations and manipulations are the central plot device in the romance. Yet, unlike many other characters who operate with tricks and fast-talk, Lunette’s intentions are benevolent. It may be argued that she is working more for Yvain than her mistress, and ultimately she seems to have reasons of her own for what she does. However, there is never reason to doubt that she honestly believes that Yvain’s good, Laudine’s good, and her own success and well-being are intertwined and not at all contradictory. Yvain may do the fighting. Laudine may be the key to happily-ever-after. It is Lunette, though, who decides what should happen and how to push the story in that direction. In the end it is Lunette whose will is done; it is she who triumphs. An astute reader can glimpse just under the surface, like a palimpsest that Chretien de Troye’s work wrote over, a story in which Lunette, not Yvain, is the hero.

    Lunette has many qualities typical of the trickster hero archetype embodied in characters like Odysseus in Greek epic or Loki in the Norse eddas.  These characters use cleverness, evasions, and deception (along with a willingness to exploit the honesty and trust of others) to achieve their goals. Lunette doesn’t just take a page out of their book; she could write the manual. She herself is inscrutable and shows perfect self possession.

Never showing in her face

The happiness she felt in her heart.

While she never unintentionally betrays her own emotions, she is skilled at drawing out confessions from others of their true thoughts and feelings. She reads others intentions and motivations easily. Yvain does not have to tell her outright that he has become smitten with her lady; she quickly understands what he wants.

“We can leave that subject alone,”

She said, “for I see quite well

What those words are meant to mean.”

Her discretion and perspicacity have earned her the role of confidante,

...The lady told her

Everything and she kept things to herself.

It is an excellent position from which to work her will with her words.

She uses truth and lies like tools, making use of whichever the situation calls for. Of course she professes her total honesty, like any good liar:

“and I’ll tell you no lies,

For that would be disloyal”

But in fact she is perfectly willing to mislead and make things up. For example, even though Yvain is hidden in the castle, Lunette tells Laudine that she must go on a journey to seek him and fetch him back. Lunette knows that Laudine needs some time to reconcile herself to the idea. She also knows that it would look bad if Laudine knew how involved she was in Yvain’s escape. The lie perfectly overcomes these obstacles to the outcome Lunette believes is best. Therefore it is justified. And it works. Being a good liar is not so much about always being believed as getting people to go along the path you are making smooth with a few strategic falsehoods. Laudine seems to know that Lunette has a tenuous relationship with the truth. Like other trickster characters, Lunette sometimes has to contend with her own reputation for guile.

“You’ve never spoken so huge a lie,” Laudine says during one conversation, suggesting that she is comparing this lie to the ones she is accustomed to from Lunette. Laudine knows that Lunette lies, but she still trusts her. She doesn’t trust that Lunette is telling the truth. She trusts that Lunette has her back. She trusts that Lunette is right. Laudine accuses her at one point:

“I think you’re trying to trick me,

Trying to trap me with my words.”

Lunette doesn’t bother to deny it. Her defense is

“Well you can be sure I’m right.”

Laudine is willing to be manipulated, because she believes that Lunette’s intention are good and her plans will work out for the best. This trust waivers when Lunette’s advice seems to have been bad, not when she is caught in a lie.

In the middle of the story, there is a false happy ending. Yvain and Laudine are married.                And so the girl has done

Everything she wanted to do.

Mission accomplished! This temporary resolution and the accompanying revelry are for Lunette as much as Yvain and Laudine. Yvain gives Lunette top billing in the all-important recounting of the adventure, being sure to tell

All the goodwill and the help

The girl had given him, steering

His way through the entire story,

Forgetting nothing.

And Lunette is not without some romance in her ending.

I shall only mention a friendship struck,

Entirely in private, no one

To see or hear, between

The moon and the sun.

The very fact that Chretien calls this only a “mention” leaves the reader with the impression that there is much more to tell. But a curtain is drawn over the details, making it all the more suggestive and erotic. The most intimate moment in a book that purports to be about love involves Lunette.

    It is also interesting to note that as part of this false ending, Lunette, who has up until this point been called simply “the girl”, finally is named by the poet. Lunette, like Yvain, has succeeded in making a name for herself.

    This happy ending, however, is more of an interlude. It is like the end of act one of Into the Woods, in which all the characters sing a song about living happily ever after, but the song ends with an ominous “to be continued”. Yvain goes out adventuring and screws everything up by not keeping his promise to Laudine. Instead of returning to his lady and his lordly duties at the appointed time, he completely forgets, forfeiting his lady’s love and the ring she gave him. He makes Lunette a liar in the only way that really matters: she was wrong. Her assurances that Yvaine would be a good protector and husband have been proven false. She has been betrayed as much, if not more, than Laudine. And it is she who actually has the opportunity to express her anger in the poem.

But the girl came forward, and pulled

The ring from his finger, and then

Commended the king to God,

And all the others, except him

Whom she left in deep distress.

Lunette, characteristically, does not indulge in wild rage or grieving. She opts for a pointed snub

As for Yvain, the darkest part of Lunette’s story is just beginning. His faithlessness has called Lunette’s own loyalty into question, leaving her vulnerable to those jealous of her power. When we next see her, Lunette has been imprisoned in a chapel in the forest and awaits a fiery death at the stake. Yvaine, not even recognizing that it is her, complains of his own hard times. He, of course, is under the mistaken impression that he is the sole protagonist, and therefore the only one whose suffering demands attention. Lunette politely sets him straight.

“I quite

Understand how truly you’ve spoken,

But I hardly believes it gives you

The right to say your misfortune

Is greater than mine.

And it’s not.”

Lunette then skillfully ensures that Yvain will be completely committed to helping her. First she reminds him of his debt to her, appealing to his honor. Then she suggests that maybe he’d better not help her, because he might not be up to it, playing on his insecurity. Thus he is not only obligated by duty and friendship, but also compelled by chivalric pride. There follows the most suspenseful episode of the poem. Lunette is just about to be consigned to the flames. It is very clear that she is undeserving of this fate. The other women in the household confirm that she is a force for good, arranging matters in a way that is just. “There will be no one left to speak for us!” they lament. Yvain arrives just in the knick of time to save her from death He proves her worthiness by defeating her accusers. They may have a point when they call her a “miser of truth and spendthrift of lies”, but Yvain’s victory confirms, according to the principles of chivalry, that she never did anything to betray her lady’s trust.

So Lunette is saved, but she and Yvain each still have an important task ahead of them. Appropriately, Yvaine, the martial hero, must win his happy ending with fighting. Meanwhile Lunette, the trickster hero, must win hers with deception. She brings all her powers of persuasion and manipulation to bear, crafting an oath to trick Laudine for her own good.

Lunette accepted that deceptive

Oath. She was careful, administering it,

To omit nothing that might

Turn out to be useful.

Laudine knows what kind of character Lunette is. She realizes very quickly that she’s been had. “You’ve hooked me beautifully, haven’t you?”she says. “You’ve served me remarkably well!” How sarcastic is Laudine being when she says this? Maybe it is a rueful and reluctant admission that Lunette was right all along. This final affirmation that she was right is the last thing Lunette needs to restore her integrity, just as Yvain gets back his integrity along with his lady’s favor and lands.

“And Lunette was vastly relieved.” In literature the plot builds tension and the resolution relieves that tension. The final sigh of relief in the tale is Lunette’s. Was the tension really hers all along? She is without a doubt the character I was most concerned for, the one who kept me turning pages.

The best argument for the story belonging to Lunette is that the happy ending is really hers. “Nothing she’d wanted was denied her,” The one person we know was completely happy with the outcome is Lunette.

Now that she’d fashioned an unbreakable

Peace between generous lord

Yvain and his one true love.

Yvain and Laudine are the objects of this happy ending pronouncement, but Lunette is the subject. In the end, the story is about what she brought to pass.

    Is Lunette the true hero of Yvain? In the story as we have it, penned by Chretien de Troyes, we can at least say that she is the secondary protagonist. But I posit that a story, or maybe many stories, existed in which Lunette was indisputably the hero. The beginning of Yvain describes the ladies of the court coming together and telling stories. Perhaps the ladies and servants at the court where Chetien resided liked to tell stories about a character they identified with, a girl like them who, through her own skillful cunning and after many thrilling tribulations, “got everything that she wanted”. Maybe Chretien de Troyes borrowed some elements from these stories. Lunette’s story lives on as a strong current running through the narrative of Yvain.

Works Cited

Chrétien de Troyes, and Burton Raffel. Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. New Haven: Yale UP:

1987. E-book.

Lost and Foundlings: Abandoned Children in Medieval England

Foundlings, children abandoned by their birth parents and raised by strangers, are common in myth and legend. In The Kindness of Strangers, John Boswell writes of the “ubiquitous founding foundling”, referring to the many founders of nations, religions, and dynasties whose stories included childhood abandonment: Ishmael, Moses, Romulus and Remus, Scyld, Knut. Even the king of the Greek gods, Zeus, was left in foster care as an infant to save him from his murderous father. Medieval romances take up this theme from their ancient precursors, giving heroic destinies and happy endings to children who seem at first to have been bereft of everything.  But the foundling child is hardly a creature of myth, like a fairy or satyr. However fanciful or far-fetched the fates of the protagonists may be, the premise of child abandonment has a firm footing in reality.  “Difficult social problems especially within the family - incest, rape, abandonment, illegitimacy - as well as issues of the larger community - inheritance, exile, orphanage, poverty, violence, social mobility, punishment, rehabilitation, territorial disputes - are subject to analysis and transformation.” (Laskaya and Salisbury 6) These stories are both a mirror and coping mechanism for real hopes and fears that the people who told and read them dealt with in their lives.

Does the frequency of child abandonment in medieval literature align with its occurrence in real life? Or is it, like amnesia, so useful as a plot device, that its common use in fiction belies its actual rarity? Accurate demographic information from the Middle Ages is very difficult to come by, and there would have been wide variation depending on the year and region. However, judging from canonical laws, religious writings addressing the issue, and information about populations at other times but in similar circumstances, the conclusion that parents often gave up their children is unavoidable. We have detailed records, for example, for late 18th century Toulouse, which show that a quarter of all the children born are known to have been abandoned.  In poor areas this number was closer to forty percent.  (Boswell 15) The circumstances in the Middle Ages were similar in that the majority of the population was very poor and there were no reliable means of birth control available. Canonical decrees compiled by Regino of Prum in 906 reiterate pre-existing Roman statutes concerning found children.  The child could be raised as a free member of the household or as a slave. The abandoning parent could reclaim the child if they compensated the finder the cost of the child’s upkeep. Few laws exist from the Middle Ages that place legal penalties on the parent for abandoning or even selling the child. The extant laws mostly deal with whether and when the child can be reclaimed. There is particular sympathy expressed by many clerics for parents who are forced by poverty to part with their children. There seems to be a general acceptance that such abandonment is unfortunate but often necessary. (Boswell)

The children abandoned in the literature, though, are not often from poor families. Their parents are nearly always high born and wealthy. But the motivations of these elite literary birth parents were not unfamiliar to actual medieval lords and ladies.

In Lay le Freine, a mother gives birth to twins. She is of the nobility and can certainly afford to care for them, but she is afraid of being accused of adultery. Ironically, it is she herself who, envious of another woman, promulgated the idea that twins are the result of two different fathers. The idea that anything unusual about a birth suggested sexual immorality on the part of the parents was prevalent. (Laskaya and Salisbury 62)

The impulse to abandon one of a set of twins may also reflect a particular anxiety of the nobility in the Middle Ages about division of inheritance.  We see it expressed also in Yvaine, in which the elder of two sisters wishes to claim the entire inheritance for herself.  There was often such strife between siblings, and families worried that their power would be weakened if they had to divide their estate among too many children. Most noble parents in the early Middle Ages seem to have limited the number of legitimate children they kept to about three. The practice of oblation, offering a child to the service of God in a monastery or convent, was the most common outlet for the superfluous children of the nobility. Formal oblation required the presence of the parents and, in the later Middle Ages, often required a gift to the monastery. However, when a parent wished to dispose of a child discreetly, an anonymous “donation” might be made, as in Lay le Freine, in which the child is left in a tree outside an abbey. (Abandoned children were often left suspended in trees to protect them from being killed by wild animals until they were found.) Children might also be deliberately delivered into the care of a particular religious person, as Degarre was when left at the door of a holy hermit. (Boswell, 253) For several centuries oblation was considered binding on the child, even if they wished to leave once they were grown. However, by the 13th century oblates were given the (at least theoretical) opportunity to leave once they reached adolescence. Such strictures certainly do not seem to have come into play in the stories of Degarre, who left with the hermit’s blessing, or Le Freine, who did have to sneak away from the convent but did so with little difficulty and no repercussions.

At the time the lays were composed, society had implemented some solutions to the problem of dividing estates. “In most of Western Europe between about 1000 and 1200, legal, social, and cultural structures began to incorporate mechanisms to allow the maintenance of estates in the hands of a single heir, thereby greatly reducing the need to limit the number of legitimate children in wealthy households.” (Boswell, 271) The numbers of children in these wealthy households rose (272), but this created another problem. “With no land to inherit and little left to win in battle, the growing throng of cadet nobles in a Europe implementing rules of primogeniture and entailment found themselves restless and redundant, reduced to fighting mock battles in tournaments or joining foreign crusades for land and glory overseas.” (319) While sons were less frequently being handed over to the religious orders, many daughters of the nobility continued to be sent to convents. This caused a shortage in the numbers of noble maidens available for marriage to sons who were not the first born. To this large cohort of frustrated, discontented younger brothers, the world of romances like Yvaine - a literary landscape full of lands and ladies waiting to be won by anyone brave, strong, and worthy enough -must have been extremely appealing.  These young men may have gladly traded places with a literary hero like Degarre, a young man with no family name but plenty of opportunity.

Degarre, like Le Freine and nearly every other literary foundling, was abandoned by a high born parent. Actual illegitimacy, rather than the fear of being accused of it, was the motivation for Degarre’s mother, who was raped by a fairy knight. Fairy knights were obviously not a common feature of life for young women, but rape certainly was. An attempt to avoid the shame and diminished marriage prospects that would accompany a pre-marital loss of virginity was likely a common motivation for giving up a child. Sometimes such illegitimate children were the result of incest. It is telling that Degarre’s mother is afraid that her own father will be believed to be the father of her child. The theme of incest becomes central to the story when Degarre, in the course of his search for his parents, bests his grandfather in combat and unwittingly wins his own mother as a bride. At least he is in good company. Pope Gregory and St. Alban both accidentally marry their mothers (and are themselves the offspring of incestuous relationships), according to medieval literature. “Medieval incest stories are so numerous that it is impossible even to mention them all,” observes Elizabeth Archibald in Incest and the Medieval Imagination. The spectre of unknowing incest is frequently raised by Church jurists and theologians, whose peculiar preoccupation with it seems absurd to our modern sensibilities. Hostensius, in his commentary on canon law concludes, “the exposing of infants might be a great sin because, the [child’s] relatives being in many cases unknown, he could have relations with a sister, or some other relative, and marry her.” (Boswell, 334) Why was there this bizarre preoccupation with accidental incest? One possible explanation is the difficulties created by newly instituted rules imposed by the Church prohibiting a wider range of “consanguinous” unions. Many of the prohibitions did not even depend on actual blood relationship. Some marriages undertaken in good faith were found to violate the broad new guidelines unbeknownst to the husband and wife. Such marriages could be annulled and their offspring declared illegitimate regardless of their age or number, and the parents’ conviction that they had been truly married notwithstanding. Of course this could be disastrous for the patrimony as well as for the future prospects of the individual children. (Boswell)

Yet stories of foundling children were not ultimately about catastrophes like inheritance disputes, illegitimacy, and incest. These stories may begin inauspiciously, but they nearly always have a happy ending. “The single most characteristic feature of high medieval abandonment literature is its hopefulness.” (Boswell 394) For Le Freine every incident after her abandonment is “a nearly steady progression away from isolation and toward connection and legitimacy within the secular community.”( Laskaya and Salisbury 62) The climactic moment of the abandoned child’s story is the anagnorisis, the moment when they are recognized and reunited with their natal family. Thus the foundling child’s story follows perfectly “the general pattern of romance - separation and reunion.” (2) This eventual reunion is made possible by a very real feature of medieval abandonment. Parents did often leave “tokens” and sometimes even instructions with the abandoned child. (Boswell, 126) The purpose of such tokens may have been hope that the child might receive better treatment or the assuaging of guilt, but it is clear that at least in some cases future recognition and reclamation was on the mind of the abandoning parent. The many laws that address the reclaiming of abandoned children suggest that it was not uncommon for parents to later seek them out. The fairy knight instructs Degarre’s mother to leave with him tokens specifically intended to allow him to find them: gloves and broken sword. These tokens also prevent Degarre from tragically reenacting the story of Oedipus. Gloves that will only fit his mother prevent him in the knick of time from consummating an incestuous marriage. His father retained the point of the broken sword. Degarre is prevented from repeating Oedipus’crime of patricide when his father recognizes the sword and produces the point. Of course they fit perfectly. There is swooning and a reunion. Le Freine is recognized when she offers the expensive blanket she had been wrapped in when left as a wedding present to her sister. Her mother, who had abandoned Le Freine expressly to avoid scandal, confesses all when she sees the blanket and Le Freine also produces a ring she was left with. It is typical in these stories for the joy of the recognition and reunion to somehow render irrelevant any previous shame or misfortune.

For joy as everyone knows

Lets sorrow soon be forgotten.

• Yvain, Chretien de Troyes

It is not only the parents and children who are reunited in these stories. Often the children bring their parents together and are made legitimate by a lawful marriage. Degarre urges his father to come to his mother who is “in gret mourning”. This little guilt trip works and his father and mother are wed. Gawain, in an account of his life from the 1100’s, is the illegitimate son of Arthur’s sister Anna and the son of a neighboring ruler who has been taken by their father King Uther as a hostage. He is abandoned as an infant, but “eventually he is reunited with his natal parents, whose irregular liaison is justified, at least in the storyteller’s eyes, by the nobility of their offspring.” (Boswell 371)

Thus, in the end social values are confirmed and the world is set right.  “Plausible social contexts lend the poems an air of realism”(Laskaya and Salisbury 5) and somewhat less plausible happy endings ease anxieties common in the culture and offer hope. Similar stories of recognition and reunion have continued to fill this function. The 1930’s was the height of popularity for the comic strip about little orphan Annie. At that time economic desperation and lack of birth control were forcing many parents to make wrenching decisions like those of their medieval counterparts about whether to support and raise their child. A happy, hopeful fiction about an abandoned child fulfilled a cultural need.  “To question the likelihood of these events is to overlook the real message they convey; the need of the societies that composed them, and of individuals within those societies, to believe that abandonment could result in a better life for their children, a need obviously created by an even more basic necessity - the necessity, in the absence of any other acceptable means of family limitation, of abandoning children” (Boswell 394)  In the 1961 film The Parent Trap, the anagnorisis of separated twin sisters results in the remarriage of their divorced parents. At a time when divorce was increasingly a part of everyone’s life and a major source of cultural anxiety, it was relatable and realistic as a premise. However, as in the stories of Degarre and Gawain, the reuniting of the parents reaffirms traditional values. Abandonment narratives move the audience from a stark reminder of how things are to an idealized world in which everything is as it should be: the worthy find land and love, parents are married, and families are united.

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Works Cited

Archibald, Elizabeth. Incest and the Medieval Imagination.  Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2001. Print.

Boswell, John. The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe

from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York: Pantheon, 1988. Print.

Chrétien de Troyes, and Burton Raffel. Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987.

E-book.

Laskaya, Anne, and Eve Salisbury. The Middle English Breton Lays. Kalamazoo, MI: Published

for TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages) in Association with the U of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan U, 1995. Print.