The Fox Who Outwitted the Court

Ilinca Petran
Field Correspondent, The Old Continent

Fieldnotes — a reading room in Ghent, deep winter

I met Reynard first on vellum, not in a forest. A facsimile of a Flemish manuscript, its margins crowded with foxes dressed as bishops and wolves led to gallows, and in the text itself a creature so plainly delighted with his own deceit that I found myself, against sense, on his side.

The cycle that carries his name has no single author and no fixed shape. It grew across languages the way a hedgerow grows across a field boundary: the French Roman de Renart, composed and recomposed by unnamed clerks through the twelfth century; the German Reinhart Fuchs, sharper and more bitter in its satire; the Middle Dutch Van den vos Reynaerde, which the scholars attribute, with more confidence than the material usually allows, to a man calling himself Willem. Centuries later Goethe took up the thread again in Reineke Fuchs, proof that the fox had not finished with literature, nor literature with him.

The stories themselves are simple in structure and merciless in effect. Reynard is summoned before Noble the Lion, his king, to answer for crimes against Isengrim the Wolf, Bruin the Bear, Tybert the Cat, and a court full of the offended. He goes. He talks his way free. He is summoned again. He goes again, and talks his way free again, each time leaving some larger animal humiliated, injured, or dead, and each time returning to his den at Maupertuis — the name itself means something like ill-hole, a lair earned by bad behaviour — richer in cunning if not always in goods.

What struck me, reading it through in that cold room, was how little the tales ask you to admire Reynard morally and how much they still make you want him to win. He feigns illness, feigns piety, talks a rooster into closing his eyes to pray and then takes him by the throat mid-sentence, arranges a pilgrimage as cover for further theft, and talks his way out of the noose more than once with nothing but nerve and a fluent tongue. The wolf is strong and stupid; the bear is strong and gullible; the lion is powerful and easily flattered. Only the fox is quick enough to survive a world built by and for the large.

The clerks who wrote these stories down were, most historians agree, aiming past the animals entirely — at bishops, at barons, at the whole machinery of feudal and church authority, which is why the tales read now as satire as much as fable. That the satire survives so well, eight centuries on, while the particular abuses it mocked have mostly been forgotten, says something about how durable a well-made trick is compared to the target it was cut for.

The fox outlasted the joke in another way too. In French, renard eventually displaced the older word goupil as the ordinary term for the animal itself — a folk character so vivid that he renamed his own species. I know of no better evidence that a story has entered a people's bones than that: when the word for the trickster becomes simply the word for the thing.

I left the reading room after dark, and on the walk back through the old quarter I found myself watching the shadows along the canal rather more closely than usual, in case something small and russet was watching back, working out its next appearance before the court.

Ilinca Petran is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Old Continent. Carpathian thresholds: doorways, graves, and the moments in the year when the two are said to be less distinct. She follows transhumance routes and the beliefs that travel with them, and is dry about the vampire question.