Melion and Biclarel - University of Liverpool

Introduction
practices of the period, she remains nameless. The narrator offers no explanation
as to why, after three years of happy marriage and two children, the lady decides
to be rid of her husband; yet the presentation of events in the text indicates that
it is not Melion’s lycanthropy which triggers her departure. While Melion and his
wife are hunting together, the lady suddenly swoons and declares that she will die
unless she eats meat from a stag they have seen. Melion, distressed, uses the
magic ring to change himself into a wolf and rushes after the stag. The lady
recovers immediately and sets out for Ireland as soon as he has gone, taking with
her the magic ring, without which Melion cannot regain his human form. The
author offers no explanation whatsoever: is her indisposition genuine or a ruse?
Why does she leave? Does she want the ring for her own purposes? Does she care
nothing for their children, left parentless behind?
Thus far, the author has depicted his hero as neither particularly intelligent nor
sensible: the thoughtless terms of the vow and the hero’s subsequent amazement
and grief at the ladies’ response; his immediate acceptance of the mysterious
maiden as suitable wife material; his unquestioning trust in his wife in leaving the
magic ring with her and clearly explaining its importance:
‘Je vos lais ma vie et ma mort:
Il n’i auroit nul reconfort
Se de l’autre touciés n’estoie;
Jamais nul jor hom ne seroie’ (vv. 169-72)
— all these paint a picture of an idealistic, impetuous and naive figure. At the end
of the lay, the restored Melion’s desire to touch his wife with the ring, so that she
herself might be turned into a wolf as punishment (vv. 569-70), reiterates this
childlike, even childish, quality in the hero.
Between these opening and closing scenes, the focus falls on Melion the wolf,
and what a difference there is between man-Melion and wolf-Melion! Indeed, the
author seems intrigued by the knight’s lycanthropy, and the depiction of the wolf-
Melion and his adventures, at almost 370 lines, is longer by some 50 lines than
the whole of Bisclavret. The Melion-poet repeatedly underlines the wolf’s
retention of human mental and emotional powers, but unlike Marie and her
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