INTRODUCTION XV

Reynard the Fox, which represent animals act-
ing and talking with all the duplicity of men.
Accordingly, it is the tendency of recent re-
search to attempt to discover how far and in
what way certain Folk fables were worked up
by the literary artist of the eleventh century, who
was the father of the family of the Reynards.
The question is complicated in various
ways. Many incidents of the Reynard are
mere modifications of A*sopic fable, and might
be only literary renderings of those popular
tales. Thus, Voigt has traced all the incidents
of the Latin Vsengrimus, the firstborn of all the
Reynard family now in existence, to literary
sources, whether A‘sop, or the Physzologus, or to
Peter Alfonsi. But the very medium in which
it is composed proves that the Vsengrimus is a
learned monkish product, and it is not, there-
fore, strange that it should have an entirely
literary origin. No such origin, however, can
be claimed for many of the incidents common
to the Reynard in its popular German, French,
and Flemish forms. To take a_ striking
example, the stratagem by which the Fox
induces the Wolf to fish with his tail through
a hole in the ice occurs nowhere in literature

before the Reynard, and unless actually in-
b