Article Outline
Beast Epic, sequence of stories, often in the form of a long narrative poem, with animals as the central characters. Similar to the fable, the beast epic depicts animals thinking and acting like human beings. But the two types of tales have an essential difference. While the fable typically manipulates beasts to illustrate moral lessons, the beast epic generally uses animals to satirize society and the follies of humankind (see Satire). Modern versions of one of the best-known beast epics, the Reynard cycle, continue to appear in many countries.
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Forerunners of the Beast Epic
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The exact origin of the beast epic is uncertain. The main character of most of the earliest examples is the trickster Reynard the Fox, a character who remained a mainstay throughout the history of the genre. The story of Reynard appears to have come from a fable by ancient Greek writer Aesop. In Aesop’s version of the story, King Noble, a lion, is sick and asks the beasts at his court to offer their advice about a cure. The fox is absent, giving the wolf a chance to defame the fox before the king. However, the fox arrives in time to hear part of the wolf’s attack. Then the conniving fox tells the king that he has found a cure: It requires skinning the wolf and wrappring the lion in his hide. The flaying is promptly carried out, and the fox mocks the wolf for his downfall. In this early example, all the essentials of the European beast epic are present: the stupidity of the wolf, the cunning of the fox, and the selfishness of the animals in their relations with one another.
The first appearance of the fox story in western European literature is a brief Latin poem by 9th-century historian Paul the Deacon in which many elements of Aesop’s version remain, but a bear is substituted for the wolf.
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The Beast Epic in Western Europe
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The many modern versions of the Reynard story almost all originated in northern France, western Germany, and the Low Countries (a region of Europe comprising Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). The genre flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries.
The earliest vernacular (non-Latin) versions of the beast epic date between 1170 and 1180. The version by German writer Heinrich der Glichezaere, called Reinhard der Fuchs (1180?; Reynard the Fox, 1840), survives only in fragments, but a reworked version dated about 1320 still exists. Reinhard clearly owes its subject matter to early forms of the most famous and influential version of the story, the French Roman de Renart.
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