Although their populations have mostly forgotten it, and their politicians hate to admit it, most of the nations of Europe are relatively modern creations. Their borders rarely correspond neatly to linguistic or ethnic boundaries, and both ethnic and linguistic categories are arguable anyway. (When does a dialect, like Scots, turn into a language, like Portuguese?) These uncertainties, which have all too often led to shooting wars and which have by no means vanished from the European political scene, led especially in the 19th century to attempts to reinforce many a shaky sense of national identity by centering that identity on a national epic. Such an epic should be as old as possible, should celebrate the virtues which a particular nation would like to ascribe to itself, and so anchor modern identity in medieval language.

The new German state, coming into being all through the 19th century, thus made a fetish of the "doomed-heroes" Nibelungenlied, rediscovered in 1807. The French had their Chanson de Roland, first edited 1836; Spain had El Cid (1779); Finland had above all its nation-creating Kalevala (1835); and so on. Nations, or sub-national groups, were not above faking an epic to suit, as very definitely with the Frisian Oera Linda Boek (1872), and much more furiously denied (its one manuscript has gone missing, thought to have been burned by Napoleon's troops) the Russian "Lay of the Raid of Igor" (1795). Some would say that Longfellow's "Hiawatha" (1855), very clearly modeled on the Kalevala, was an American attempt to assert old identity likewise.

In this welter of claims and denials, one omission was particularly sensitive: there was no evident candidate for the role of national epic of the Low Countries, or the Netherlands, which is to say (but already the terms and boundaries are confused) what English speakers call Holland and Belgium. The need for this was felt especially strongly in Belgium, a country still split between its Flemish-speaking and French-speaking populations, and one which owed its 19th-century existence—as Joep Leerssen has pointed out in his splendid work National Thought in Europe (2007)—to a riot in Brussels triggered by the performance of an opera with an aria sung to the tune of the Marseillaise.

This need for a Dutch or Flemish identity, with an epic to match, led to one of the stranger episodes of 19th-century philology, the vossenjacht, or "fox-hunt." One medieval work which had never quite dropped out of educated knowledge was, in various forms, the sequence of comic tales about Reynard the fox. Reynard was in some ways very suitable as a small-nation self-image: cunning, resourceful, always using his superior intelligence to outwit the brute strength of his neighbors like Ysengrim the wolf.

The trouble was, the best-known version of the cycle of stories about him was in French, the Roman de Renart. This was almost as unsatisfactory as Beowulf (first edited 1815), which on the face of it was disqualified as the English national epic by never mentioning England, the English, or anyone born in England.

Mere facts, however, have never stopped a philologist fixated on national identity, and Jacob Grimm of Grimms' Fairy-Tales, possibly with his eye already on "proving" that the Dutch were really deutsch, pointed out that the very names of hero and villain, even if preserved in French, could not be French in origin but must be Germanic: Renart from Regin-hart, Ysengrin from Eisen-grim, both typically old Germanic two-element names like Reginald or Isambard. The French, in other words, had hijacked someone else's poem as they had under Napoleon snatched so much of other people's territory. Now, where was the missing, hypothetical epic?

Jill Mann's splendidly accessible edition and translation of Ysengrimus, based on her earlier but little-known edition of 1987, goes a long way to settling the matter in a way which might even have been acceptable to the furious partisans of the 19th century. There probably was an old folktale tradition of fox-and-wolf stories along the lines of the much earlier Fables of Aesop. Ysengrimus is, however, a learned poem, over 6,500 lines long, telling stories of the wolf's constant defeats by the fox and other animals. It's in Latin (alas for the partisans of Germanic language origin). But it was almost certainly written in Ghent, by a Fleming (and so cannot be claimed for France).

It can also be dated with great accuracy to between early 1147 and August 1148. The disaster in its background, which accounts for some of its savagely satirical intention, was the failure of the Second Crusade, preached by Pope Eugenius III in 1145: both French and German armies were all but wiped out. Eugenius was a monk of the Cistercian Order, and in the last book of Ysengrimus the sow Salaura, who has just led the other pigs to devour Ysengrimus, laments that "One feeble monk has overthrown two kingdoms!", and repeats the claim that the pope sent his armies by the land route because he had been bribed to keep them away from Sicily.

But the anonymous author's satire is directed against monks in general—the modern world has forgotten how unpopular monks became in the Middle Ages, from the wealth they accumulated by endowments and their efficiency (being able to read, write, and keep records) as landlords. In episode 7, Ysengrimus is persuaded to enter a monastery himself by the fox's account of the splendid rations available there. He opens up all the wine-barrels in the cellar, and is beaten savagely by the other monks, led by one "more vicious than a tail-bearing Englishman," which of course is saying something. They also put him through a mock-consecration as bishop—for, the author insists, monks who become bishops are as bad as monks who become popes. Look at Anselm of Tournai! Other shepherds shear sheep of their fleeces, but he shears his flock "down to the living flesh."

Jokes (?) about flaying in fact run through Ysengrimus—its humor is much more "Itchy and Scratchy" than "Tom and Jerry." Ysengrimus is skinned by Bruno the bear, and skinned again by the lion. The bloody flesh after his pelt has been ripped off is sarcastically likened to the scarlet robe which a monk-bishop wore over (not under) his monastic habit. But the poor wolf also has his tail frozen to the ice after he's been persuaded to use it as a fishing-line, loses it to an old woman with an axe, is kicked by the horse, charged by the sheep, cuckolded by the fox, and finally eaten by the pigs.

Sic semper tyrannis, the author might have said. But the crazy comedy of the beast-epic gave it an international influence which lasted long after the poem itself had been forgotten, and which made it much more successful long-term than any narrowly national work. The Roman de Renart borrowed from it, and both were followed by medieval versions in Flemish, German, and Italian. Geoffrey Chaucer retold one of its episodes (the fox and the rooster) in "The Nun's Priest's Tale," and although the medieval Scots poet Robert Henryson called his set of beast-fables "The Morall Fabillis of Esope the Phrygian," the best of them are not Aesop at all, but Reynard stories. The author of Ysengrimus "invented a whole literary genre," claims Professor Mann.

Hers is a brilliant edition, exceptionally easy to read, both in Latin and in English, carefully but lightly annotated and introduced. This reviewer cannot help reflecting, sadly, how much better his Latin would be if he had been started off on an edition like this, of a poem like this, instead of that wretched Aeneid.

Tom Shippey is the author of J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Mariner Books).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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