hound Husdent can pick out the hero, who, in the Oxford Folie, must revert to his own
voice to convince the queen to receive him again.
Emmanuèle Baumgartner
[See also: BÉROUL; THOMAS D’ANGLETERRE; TRISTAN ROMANCES]
Hoepffner, Ernest, ed. Folie Tristan de Berne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934.
——, ed. Folie Tristan d’Oxford. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1938.
Walter, Philippe, and D.Lacroix, trans. Tristan et Iseut: les poèmes français, la saga Norroise.
Paris: Livre de poche, 1989, pp. 233–311.
FOLKLORE
. Discipline that involves the study of daily life and material culture, symbolic systems,
rituals, popular religion, folk medicine, judicial customs, performances, songs, tales,
riddles, and many other aspects of life. The study of folklore—which draws on fields as
diverse as literature, history, historical anthropology, ethnobotany, art and music history,
and sociology—has shed considerable light on medieval French culture.
Historical anthropology, for example, has enabled us to undertake the excavation of a
medieval folk culture no longer seen as a jumble of fragments but as an integrated
worldview, acting on its environment through rituals and ceremonies and translating that
experience through myth and legend. It has also stressed the specificity of the diverse
ethnic components, regional cultures, and religious cultures that converged in the French
Middle Ages. Archaeology has provided insights into the medieval rural world that have
established foundations for understanding the relationship of material culture to beliefs.
Examples are Bordenave and Vialle’s study of funerary objects and burial practices in the
rural areas around Albi (1983) and Chapelot and Fossier’s 1980 study of villages that
yielded information on patterns of settlement and human bonding. Linguistics is a kind of
archaeology of words. Personal names and place-names, words for tools, plants, and trade
techniques—all these help document material culture, as well as legends and the mental
processes at work in word associations and word play. Facetious or derogatory surnames,
for instance, are precious indicators of popular invective systems, exclusion patterns, and
animal and plant symbolism.
Iconography is another important source. Its study was long dominated by Christian
readings, but from the 1970s on scholarship illuminated the pagan or folk underpinnings
of medieval sculptures in both ecclesiastical and secular buildings (e.g., Ross and
Sheridan’s work on grotesques and gargoyles and the Krauses’ on misericords, both
1975). French cities, large and small, are richly adorned with symbolic and functional
iconography. The densely coded language of street signs, known mostly through archival
records, had been catalogued since the 19th century but not read with respect to
folkloristics. Gaibenet’s pioneering work (1984) identified images previously thought of
as simply bizarre or amusing. Manuscripts, capitals and portals of churches, corner pillars
of houses, beams, and lintels came alive with a folk world rife with facetious saints,
mythological creatures, wild men, mermaids, the Jack-O’Green, the four outcast sons of
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