Reynard the Fox

Also Known As: Old French Renart; Middle Dutch Reynaert; Middle High German Reinhart; Low German Reinke; Latin Reinardus; from the Germanic personal name Reginhard, Raginohardus, “strong in counsel”
Region/Culture: Pan-European
Mythos: Medieval Mythology, French Mythology, Dutch Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: He wins by talking, turning a summons into a trap, a hearing into a performance and a death sentence into a pilgrimage.
Role in Mythos: He is the standing defendant of the medieval beast epic, the animal whose crimes drag the whole kingdom into court and whose acquittals put the court itself on trial.
Relation to Humans: Human beings wander through his stories as farmers, priests and hangmen, and they are every bit as greedy as the animals and rather slower to notice it. Readers were meant to see their own lords, knights and clergy in the cast, which is why the poems were copied for three centuries and why churches carved him into their own furniture.

Once a year at Pentecost the lion held court, and every animal with a grievance came to stand on the wet grass and say it out loud. Isengrim the wolf spoke first, because the wolf always speaks first, and his catalogue of injuries took some time. A dog complained about a stolen sausage. A rooster arrived with a bier and a dead hen on it. The name at the bottom of every complaint was the same, and the animal it belonged to had not troubled to come.

That is the shape of nearly every Reynard story. He is a talking red fox in a kingdom of talking animals arranged in exactly the ranks of a thirteenth-century court, with Noble the lion on the throne, Bruin the bear and Isengrim the wolf among the great, Tibert the cat, Grimbard the badger, Cuwaert the hare and Belijn the ram filling out the benches. He is charged with theft, fraud, assault and murder. He is guilty of all of it.

He is also a much younger figure than he looks, and the poems never pretended otherwise. His first appearance in writing is Latin, from Flanders, in a mock epic called the Ysengrimus by Nivardus of Ghent, written around 1150 and dated by different scholars anywhere between 1148 and 1152. There the wolf is the hero and the fox is only Reinardus, the tormentor. Within a generation the fox had taken the lead. In the 1170s Pierre de Saint-Cloud began the Old French branches of the Roman de Renart, which eventually ran to roughly thirty separate instalments and something near forty thousand lines by many hands. Heinrich der Glichezare adapted a lost French version into two thousand lines of Middle High German around 1180. Around the middle of the following century a Fleming who signs himself Willem, the man who made Madoc, wrote Van den vos Reynaerde, and that poem became the trunk from which most later versions grew. William Caxton translated it out of Dutch and printed it at Westminster in June 1481. Hans van Ghetelen printed the Low German Reinke de Vos at Lubeck in 1498. Goethe versified the whole thing in hexameters in 1794.

Older material fed into it. The wolf who fishes with his tail through a hole in the ice belongs to folk tale everywhere, and the sick lion cured with the wolf’s flayed skin comes down from Greco-Roman fable. Jacob Grimm argued in 1834, on the evidence of the names, that Franks were telling fox and wolf stories as early as the fourth century, and the animals’ names really are Old High German, the kind of names people were christened with in medieval Lorraine. But the character who ties the tales together, the litigious fox with a lawyer’s memory, is a twelfth-century invention of clerics who knew exactly how a court of law smelled.

His body is a genuine puzzle, because the poets never settled it. He is a red fox with the build of a fox, and then in the same breath he is wearing a habit, kissing a relic, riding a horse, dictating a letter. The switching is not a slip. It happens most to the characters of high rank and least to the peasants, and it happens without any signal to the reader. What survives in stone and wood is the dressed version. Kenneth Varty’s survey of medieval English church art found him everywhere: in pulpits, in bishop’s mitres, in a friar’s robes with a pilgrim’s staff, carved into misericords at Bristol and Beverley where a congregation of geese sits gazing up at him.

That carving is him at his most characteristic. He stands on a low mound in a borrowed habit with his paws spread, preaching patience and peace to a half-circle of geese who have edged closer to hear him better, and one goose is already hanging by the neck from a stick behind his back. The English got a proverb out of it. When the fox preaches, look to your geese.

The summons scenes work the same way, one appetite at a time. Bruin the bear is sent to fetch him and is told there is honey in a half-split oak in a carpenter’s yard, so much honey that no bear could finish it. Bruin gets his snout and forepaws into the crack, the wedges come out, the green wood claps shut, and he leaves most of the skin of his face behind in the tree. Tibert the cat, sent next, is offered a barn floor thick with mice and walks straight into a snare a priest had set for the fox himself. Neither of them is stupid. Both of them are hungry, and the fox never has to invent anything, only to name the thing his visitor already wants.

The trial itself is the masterpiece. Grimbard the badger finally brings him in, the charges are heard, and Reynard is sentenced to hang. On the ladder he asks to make a public confession, and what he confesses is a buried royal treasure and a plot to murder the king, a plot he claims to have foiled out of loyalty. He describes the hiding place with such care that Cuwaert the hare, who knows the ground, confirms the location and hangs himself with it. The king wants the gold. The rope comes off. Reynard asks leave to walk to Rome as a penitent, is given a satchel cut from Bruin’s hide and shoes cut from the wolves, and sets off. He goes as far as Maupertuis, where his family eats the hare. Then he packs Cuwaert’s head into the satchel, tells Belijn the ram it is a letter of such quality that the ram should claim a share of the credit for it, and sends him back to court to deliver it. Belijn does. He is proud of it.

His powers are entirely ordinary and that is the point. He has language, an accurate map of everyone else’s greed, and a burrow with more mouths than any bailiff can watch. He never fights. He knows how a court works better than the court does, and he understands that a procedure designed to establish truth can be steered by anyone willing to supply it with a better story than the truth.

His limits follow from the same equipment. He can only work on somebody who wants something, which is why he never lays a finger on a character with nothing to gain, and he needs an institution around him that still believes in its own forms. When the forms finally fail, at the end of Willem’s poem, the king does not out-argue him. Noble simply looks into the satchel, sees the head, and understands that his court has been made ridiculous. Reynard is outlawed. He has already gone to the wilderness with his family and he is not caught, which is the nearest thing to a verdict the cycle allows. The last of him is in the dictionary. His stories were so popular across France that people took to using his name for the animal instead of the ordinary word, and after a few centuries of that the old word gave up. Goupil is dialect now. The fox is called renard, after him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Reynard the Fox?

Reynard the Fox is the trickster fox at the centre of the medieval European beast epic, a cycle of satirical animal tales written in Latin, French, Dutch, German and English between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. He lives in a kingdom of talking animals modelled on a medieval royal court and spends most of the stories being prosecuted for crimes he committed. He always talks his way out.

Is Reynard the Fox ancient myth or a literary invention?

He is a literary invention of the twelfth century, not an inherited pagan figure. The fox first appears under the name Reinardus in the Latin Ysengrimus of Nivardus of Ghent, written around 1150, and the character was developed by named authors after that, among them Pierre de Saint-Cloud, Heinrich der Glichezare, the Fleming Willem, and William Caxton. Some of the individual episodes are much older folk tale and Greco-Roman fable, but the fox who binds them together is medieval.

What happens in the story of Reynard the Fox?

King Noble the lion summons Reynard to answer a long list of charges. Two messengers, Bruin the bear and Tibert the cat, are maimed by traps the fox baits with honey and mice, and a third, Grimbard the badger, finally brings him in. Sentenced to hang, Reynard invents a buried treasure and a conspiracy against the king, wins his release, then murders Cuwaert the hare and sends the head back to court in a satchel. He is outlawed and escapes.

Why is the French word for fox “renard”?

The Reynard stories were so widely read in medieval France that the fox’s personal name, Renart, began to be used for the animal itself. It displaced the older French word goupil, which came from Latin vulpecula and now survives only as dialect or archaism. Reynard is one of the rare cases of a fictional character’s name replacing the ordinary noun for his own species.

Who are Reynard’s main enemies?

Isengrim the wolf is his chief antagonist across the whole cycle and is usually described as his uncle, a greedy and slow-witted figure who exists mainly to be outwitted. Bruin the bear and Tibert the cat are the two royal messengers he mutilates, and King Noble the lion is the authority he repeatedly makes a fool of. Cuwaert the hare and Belijn the ram are not enemies so much as casualties.