France, founded on an English collection, include
apologues derived not only from classical authors but from the tales
of popular tradition. A great collection made about 1450 by
Steinhoewel, a physician of Ulm, was translated into French, and
became the chief source of later collections, thus appearing in the
remote ancestry of the work of La Fontaine. The aesthetic value of
the mediaeval fables, including those of Marie de France, is small;
the didactic intention was strong, the literary art was feeble.

[Footnote 1: The earlier "Romulus" was the name of the supposed author
of the fables of Phaedrus, while that of Phaedrus was still unknown.]

It is far otherwise with the famous beast-epic, the ROMAN DE RENARD.
The cycle consists of many parts or "branches" connected by a common
theme; originating and obscurely developed in the North, in Picardy,
in Normandy, and the Isle of France, it suddenly appeared in
literature in the middle of the twelfth century, and continued to
receive additions and variations during nearly two hundred years.
The spirit of the _Renard_ poems is essentially bourgeois; the heroes
of the _chansons de geste_ achieve their wondrous deeds by strength
and valour; Renard the fox is powerful by skill and cunning; the
greater beasts--his chief enemy the wolf, and others--are no match
for his ingenuity and endless resources; but he is powerless against
smaller creatures, the cock, the crow, the sparrow. The names of the
personages are either significant names, such as Noble, the lion,
and Chanticleer, the cock, or proper names, such as Isengrin, the
wolf, Bruno, the bear, Tibert, the cat, Bernard, the ass; and as
certain of these proper names are found in the eastern district, it
has been conjectured that a poet of Lotharingia in the tenth century
first told in Latin the wars of fox and wolf, and that through
translations the epic matter, derived originally from popular
tradition, reached the trouveres of the North. While in a certain
degree typical figures, the beasts are at the same time individual;
Renard is not the representative merely of a species; he is Renard,
an individual, with a personality of his own; Isengrin is not merely
a wolf, he is the particular wolf Isengrin; each is an epic individual,
heroic and undying. Classical fable remotely exerted an influence
on certain branches of the Romance; but the vital substance of the
epic is derived from the stores of popular tradition in which mat