Reynard the Fox
Based on Wikipedia: Reynard the Fox
A fox once became so famous that he replaced the very word for fox.
In medieval France, people called foxes "goupil," derived from the Latin vulpēcula. But the tales of Reynard the Fox became so wildly popular over centuries that French speakers simply started calling all foxes "renard" instead. The character had eaten the species' original name. Today, if you want to say "fox" in French, you say renard—you're still invoking a trickster from eight-hundred-year-old beast fables every time you do.
This linguistic takeover tells you something important about these stories. They weren't just entertainment. They burrowed so deeply into European consciousness that they reshaped how people thought and spoke.
The Trickster's World
Reynard the Fox is a literary cycle—a sprawling collection of interconnected tales written across several centuries by dozens of authors in Dutch, English, French, and German. The earliest surviving versions date from the second half of the twelfth century, and new Reynard stories kept appearing well into the Early Modern period, spread through cheap printed booklets called chapbooks.
The premise is deceptively simple. Reynard is an anthropomorphic red fox—he walks, talks, schemes, and swindles like a human, but he's unmistakably vulpine. He lives in a world populated entirely by talking animals: King Noble the Lion holds court, Bruin the Bear serves as a bumbling official, Tibert the Cat lurks about, and Chanticleer the Cock struts and crows. Each animal embodies recognizable human types while retaining their animal natures.
Reynard's defining trait is his cunning. He lies, cheats, steals, and manipulates his way through every situation. His primary victim is his uncle Isengrim the Wolf, who perpetually falls for Reynard's schemes and perpetually seeks revenge. Their endless conflict drives much of the cycle's plot.
But here's what made these stories revolutionary: Reynard usually wins. And his victims are almost always authority figures.
Satire With Teeth
Medieval readers understood exactly what they were reading. The animal court wasn't just a cute conceit—it was a mirror held up to their own society, and the reflection was unflattering.
King Noble the Lion presides over a royal court that operates just like a real medieval court, complete with formal procedures, feast days, and the kind of ceremonial pomp that masked petty squabbling and corruption. The bear, the wolf, and other powerful animals represent the nobility and clergy—and they're consistently portrayed as greedy, hypocritical, and easily fooled.
When Reynard deceives Bruin the Bear by telling him about a cache of honey (bears love honey, after all), then leads him into a trap where villagers beat him nearly to death, medieval audiences knew they were watching a peasant outwit an aristocrat. When Reynard manipulates religious language, feigning piety and making false confessions, they recognized the satire of corrupt churchmen.
The Catholic Church, interestingly, tried to co-opt this subversive material. They used images of the "preaching fox" from Reynard literature as propaganda against the Lollards—a proto-Protestant movement the Church considered heretical. The message was supposed to be "beware false preachers who are really foxes in disguise." But the imagery cut both ways. A clever audience might wonder whether their own priests resembled Reynard more than they'd like to admit.
Legal Drama for the Masses
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Reynard cycle is how it functioned as popular legal education.
In many of the tales, Reynard has been summoned to King Noble's court to face charges. Isengrim accuses him of crimes. Witnesses testify. Arguments are made. The king renders judgment—or tries to, because Reynard invariably talks his way out of trouble through clever legal maneuvering and outright deception.
Medieval law was complex and largely incomprehensible to ordinary people. Legal proceedings happened in Latin or formal languages, following procedures that seemed arbitrary and mystifying. The Reynard stories translated these opaque systems into accessible entertainment. Readers could follow the legal arguments, understand the concepts, laugh at the absurdities, and recognize how wealth and cleverness often trumped actual justice.
The court in these tales operates exactly as real medieval courts did. The king heard cases only on specific designated dates, and all disputes were processed together. This wasn't worldbuilding for flavor—it was showing readers how their own legal system worked, wrapped in fur and feathers.
The Character Problem
Because so many different authors contributed to the Reynard cycle over such a long span of time, the characters aren't entirely consistent. Reynard in one tale might be a lovable rogue; in another, he's genuinely vicious. Isengrim sometimes seems like a justified victim seeking redress; other times he's a violent brute who deserves everything he gets.
The authors took remarkable liberties with their material. In some versions, Reynard is married to a vixen named Hermeline, who plays little active role. But in certain tales, when Reynard is believed dead, Hermeline remarries—and Reynard adds her to his revenge list when he returns. The same character can appear sympathetic or despicable depending on which manuscript you're reading.
There's a particularly strange feature of these stories that modern readers find jarring: characters sometimes shift between animal and human form without warning or explanation. A fox might suddenly have hands to wield a weapon, then be back on four paws in the next scene. Scholars have noticed that characters of elite status tend to be the ones who shift forms, while peasant characters remain more consistently animal-like. This may reflect medieval ideas about the transformative power of nobility, or it may simply be narrative convenience that different authors handled differently.
Names That Lasted
The characters' names come from Old High German, and most were common personal names in medieval Lorraine, the region where the stories likely originated. But several of these names escaped the pages and entered broader culture.
Reynard himself comes from "Reginhard" or "Raginohardus," meaning "strong in counsel"—appropriate for a character whose greatest weapon is his persuasive tongue.
Tibert the Cat became the basis for "Tybalt" in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. When Mercutio calls Tybalt the "Prince of Cats," he's making a direct reference to the Reynard cycle that Shakespeare's audience would have recognized. Tybalt's quick temper and fighting prowess in the play echo the cat character's reputation in the medieval tales.
Martin the Ape had a son named Moneke in some versions. Some scholars believe this is the origin of our word "monkey"—a diminutive that spread from the Reynard stories into common usage.
And then there's "Bruin," which became a general term for bears in English. When we call a bear a "bruin" today, we're still speaking the language of medieval beast fables.
Origins in Folklore and Classical Tradition
The fox has been cast as a trickster in European folklore since ancient times, but the specific character of Reynard seems to have crystallized in Lorraine, a region that straddles modern-day France and Germany. From there, his stories spread outward to the Low Countries, across France, and into German-speaking territories.
Some nineteenth-century scholars believed they could trace Reynard to an actual person: "a certain Reinard of Lorraine, famous for his vulpine qualities in the ninth century." This is almost certainly apocryphal—medieval people loved to find historical origins for legendary figures—but it speaks to how real Reynard seemed to readers. He felt like someone who must have existed.
Jacob Grimm, the fairy-tale collector, argued in 1834 that stories of the fox and wolf were known to Frankish peoples as early as the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Whether or not this is literally true, it indicates that the Reynard tales drew on very deep wells of folk tradition. These weren't literary inventions from scratch—they were crystallizations of oral storytelling that had been circulating for generations before anyone wrote them down.
The stories also absorbed elements from classical sources, particularly Aesop's fables. Aesop's fox was already a trickster, already cunning, already untrustworthy. The medieval authors inherited this characterization and elaborated it into something much more complex—a full protagonist with relationships, grudges, a home, and a history.
The Major Texts
The earliest extensive Reynard text in a vernacular language is the Old French "Roman de Renart," written by Pierre de Saint-Cloud around 1170. Pierre established the typical setting: the royal court, the summoning of Reynard to face charges, the parade of animal witnesses, the endless schemes and counter-schemes.
Pierre opens his work by explicitly positioning it within the larger tradition of epic poetry, courtly romance, and fabliaux (bawdy comic tales). He knew he was writing in dialogue with other literary forms, and he expected his readers to catch the references and enjoy the parody.
The word "Roman" in "Roman de Renart" means "romance," but not in the modern sense of love stories. Medieval romance was a fictional telling of a character's adventures, usually involving a call to action from an outside force and a series of trials to overcome. Think of King Arthur's knights questing for the Holy Grail—that's the romance genre. By casting a scheming fox as the hero of a romance, Pierre was doing something deliberately absurd and funny.
A crucial Latin predecessor is "Ysengrimus," written around 1148 to 1153 by a poet called Nivardus. This long mock-epic focuses on Isengrim the Wolf but includes extensive Reynard material. It's more learned and literary than the vernacular tales that followed, aimed at an educated clerical audience. But it clearly draws on popular folk traditions—Nivardus wasn't inventing these characters from nothing.
Around 1180, a German author named Heinrich der Glïchezäre wrote "Reinhard Fuchs" in Middle High German, bringing the stories to German-speaking audiences. His version became influential in its own right, spawning further German adaptations.
Perhaps the most important version for later transmission was the Middle Dutch "Van den vos Reynaerde" (Of Reynaert the Fox), written in the mid-thirteenth century by a poet who identifies himself only as Willem. This text, composed in rhyming couplets, became the foundation for most later adaptations in Dutch, German, and English. When William Caxton printed "The Historie of Reynart the Foxe" in English in 1481, he was translating from Willem's Dutch version.
Printing Changes Everything
The invention of the printing press transformed Reynard from a literary curiosity into a genuine phenomenon.
In 1498, a printer named Hans van Ghetelen published "Reinke de Vos" in Low German from his shop in Lübeck. This version was subsequently translated into Latin and other languages, making the tales accessible across Europe. Suddenly, you didn't need to find a manuscript or hear the stories performed—you could buy a printed book.
The chapbook format was particularly important. Chapbooks were cheap, small-format printed works sold by traveling peddlers. They brought literature to people who couldn't afford proper bound books. Reynard's adventures circulated widely in this format throughout the Early Modern period, reaching audiences far beyond the courts and monasteries where medieval manuscripts had lived.
An interesting scholarly detail: because so many different printers produced so many different editions, the textual history of Reynard is incredibly complicated. Pages have been lost, variants have multiplied, and it's often impossible to establish a clear line of transmission. The stories themselves resist tidy categorization—they sprawl and duplicate and contradict each other, much like their protagonist's schemes.
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Beyond
Geoffrey Chaucer knew the Reynard material well. In "The Nun's Priest's Tale" from the Canterbury Tales, a fox named "Rossel" appears alongside an ass called "Brunel"—clear references to Reynard and his associates. The tale involves a vain rooster (a version of Chanticleer) who is nearly eaten by the flattering fox, and it operates in the same satirical mode as the continental beast fables.
Chaucer also mentions "Renard" briefly in "The Legend of Good Women," demonstrating that his readers would recognize the name without explanation.
Shakespeare's debt to the tradition is most visible in Romeo and Juliet, where Tybalt's name and his designation as "Prince of Cats" come directly from the Reynard cycle. Ben Jonson went further: his play "Volpone" (Italian for "fox") is deeply indebted to Reynard, translating the trickster fox into a Venetian magnifico who feigns illness to swindle legacy hunters.
Scottish poet Robert Henryson produced a sophisticated treatment in his "Morall Fabillis" in the 1480s, in sections called "The Talking of the Tod" (tod being Scots for fox). Henryson's version adds moral weight to the tales, using them as vehicles for ethical instruction while maintaining their entertainment value.
Goethe's Hexameters
The Reynard tradition reached a peculiar pinnacle in 1794, when Johann Wolfgang von Goethe—the giant of German literature, author of Faust—published "Reinecke Fuchs," an epic poem in twelve parts written in classical hexameters.
Goethe based his version on an eighteenth-century edition that derived from the 1498 "Reinke de Vos." He was attracted to the material's satirical potential and its roots in folk tradition. Writing in the formal meter of Homer's epics, Goethe created an ironic contrast between elevated form and low subject matter—a scheming fox becomes the protagonist of classical epic, complete with all the grandiose machinery of the genre.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche later used Reynard as an example in "The Twilight of the Idols" (1889), citing the fox as a type of the dialectician—someone who wins through argument and manipulation rather than direct force.
Luxembourg's National Epic
In 1872, a Luxembourgish author named Michel Rodange published "Renert," adapting Goethe's fox epic to a specifically Luxembourgish setting. The full original title, "Renert oder de Fuuß am Frack an a Ma'nsgrëßt," gives you a sense of the work's character—it's written entirely in Luxembourgish, the Germanic language of the Grand Duchy.
Rodange wrote in the aftermath of the Luxembourg Crisis of 1867, when the small country had barely avoided being absorbed by France or Prussia. His Reynard became a vehicle for social criticism and national reflection. The animal society in which Renert lives mirrors Luxembourg's own social structures, with different characters speaking in distinct regional dialects that reflect actual linguistic variations within the country.
This detail about dialect is particularly clever. Luxembourg is a tiny nation where several Germanic and Romance varieties have historically coexisted. By having his fox and companions speak in recognizably different regional accents, Rodange created a linguistic portrait of his country while maintaining the beast-fable tradition's satirical distance.
Into the Twentieth Century
The Russian-French animator Ladislas Starevich produced "The Tale of the Fox" in 1937, using stop-motion puppet animation to bring Reynard to life. It remains a remarkable technical achievement and one of the most sustained cinematic treatments of the material.
Composer Igor Stravinsky wrote a chamber opera-ballet called "Renard" in 1916, though it wasn't performed until 1922. Stravinsky's piece draws on Russian folk traditions of fox trickery, showing how the European Reynard archetype connects to broader trickster-fox traditions across cultures.
In 1962, the documentary "Black Fox: The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film uses the Reynard fable as a structural parallel to Hitler's career—the cunning fox who rises through manipulation and deceit. It's a grim application of material that had traditionally been comic, but it demonstrates how persistently the Reynard archetype has resonated.
Disney's animated Robin Hood from 1973 casts the legendary English outlaw as a fox, drawing visual and thematic inspiration from Reynard. Robin's cunning, his peasant-hero status, his conflicts with bumbling authority figures—all echo the medieval beast fables.
Why Readers Identify With the Fox
There's something revealing about how readers across centuries have responded to Reynard. By any moral accounting, he's a villain. He lies constantly. He betrays those who trust him. He commits violence and fraud. His victims often don't deserve what happens to them.
Yet readers root for him. They laugh at his schemes. They feel satisfaction when he escapes punishment.
Part of this is the storytelling itself—the tales are crafted to make Reynard's cleverness appealing and his victims' downfalls comedic. But something deeper seems to be at work. Reynard wins against power. He beats the strong using only his wits. In a world where ordinary people had little control over the forces that governed their lives—kings, nobles, clergy, courts—Reynard offered a fantasy of the underdog triumphant.
The use of animals makes this easier to accept. If the tales featured human characters, the moral ambiguity would be more troubling. A human trickster who destroys his victims might feel like a genuine villain. But a fox? Foxes are supposed to be cunning. We expect it from them. The animal form creates just enough distance to let readers enjoy transgression without fully endorsing it.
Scholars have noted that this dynamic carries across centuries. Medieval peasants reading about Reynard outwitting the wolf recognized something of their own situations. Modern readers facing bureaucracies and institutions still find the appeal. The specific targets change, but the underlying fantasy remains: somewhere, somehow, the clever little guy beats the system.
The Castle Called Maupertuis
Reynard has a home base in the tales: his castle, Maupertuis. The name means something like "evil hole" or "bad passage" in Old French—an appropriate lair for a trickster. Whenever Reynard needs to retreat from his enemies, Maupertuis provides refuge. Its winding passages and hidden chambers make it nearly impregnable.
Some of the tales feature Reynard's funeral, where his enemies gather to deliver eulogies full of false grief and insincere piety. Of course, Reynard turns out to be alive—or returns from apparent death—and exacts revenge on those who celebrated his demise too enthusiastically. The funeral scenes are particularly sharp satires of religious hypocrisy and social performance.
A Literary Genre All Its Own
Scholars classify the Reynard tales as "beast epic"—narrative works featuring anthropomorphic animals in roles that parallel human society. It's a genre that includes Aesop's fables, but the Reynard cycle expands the format dramatically. These aren't brief moral lessons; they're sprawling adventure narratives with recurring characters, ongoing conflicts, and political subtexts.
Individual tales resist simple classification. A single story might blend elements of courtly romance, legal drama, religious satire, and slapstick comedy. The authors borrowed freely from whatever traditions served their purposes. References to relics, pilgrimage, confession, and the Crusades appear throughout, grounding the animal world in recognizable medieval Christian culture while simultaneously mocking it.
Some scholars see direct political commentary in specific tales, arguing that certain episodes respond to identifiable historical events. Others are more cautious, noting that the stories are told in ways that make such associations easy to propose but difficult to prove. The ambiguity may be intentional—satire is safer when its targets can be denied.
The Fox Adapts
Because Reynard stories were told across such a wide geographic range, the fox himself adapted to local conditions. In versions set in snowy landscapes, he has white fur. In desert settings, yellow. In the original forest tales, the classic red. His appearance serves as camouflage, fitting him to whatever environment the storyteller imagined.
This adaptability extends beyond fur color. Each regional version of the tales incorporates local details, local concerns, local targets for satire. The Luxembourgish Renert speaks in Luxembourgish dialects; the English versions reflect English social structures; the German treatments engage with German literary traditions. Reynard is a vehicle that can carry many different loads.
This is perhaps why he survived so long. Unlike characters tied to specific times and places, Reynard represents something more abstract: the triumph of cunning over power, the small defeating the large through wit rather than force. That archetype travels well. It applies wherever people feel overmatched by systems they can't directly challenge.
The Trickster Endures
In the contemporary fantasy television series "The Magicians" (2015-2020), adapted from Lev Grossman's novels, a character called Reynard the Fox appears as a pagan trickster god. This modern Reynard has little in common with the medieval character beyond the name and the association with cunning—he's become something closer to Loki than to the scheming fox of beast fable.
But the name persists. The archetype persists. Even when stripped of its specific medieval context, "Reynard the Fox" still signifies something—cleverness, deception, the outsider who manipulates systems to his advantage.
Eight centuries after Pierre de Saint-Cloud first set Reynard's adventures in writing, people still speak his name. In French, they can't avoid it. Every time someone in Paris or Lyon or Marseille refers to the red-furred animal that hunts mice and raids chicken coops, they're invoking a medieval trickster who was so compelling he replaced reality with fiction.
The fox stole the word for fox. He would have appreciated the irony.