@blackwellbooks Good evening! So exciting to see Reynard out and about in the world at last!
@blackwellbooks The character of the trickster fox, humorously winning through his superior wits, stretches all the way back to Ancient Greece, to Aesop’s fables. Reynard’s essential traits & many of the supporting characters are rooted there, such as Noble the Lion or Isengrim the Wolf. 1/7
@blackwellbooks There’s the fable of the Fox & the Crow, for example, where the cunning fox outwits a crow through bare-whiskered flattery & steals her extremely tasty wedge of cheese. 2/7 
@blackwellbooks Or The Lion, the Bear & the Fox: the two larger beasts bicker over a freshly-hunted fawn & are so distracted & exhausted by their row, the Fox quietly carries away their supper without them even realising. 3/7
@blackwellbooks And The Fox & the Sick Lion – a poorly lion is lounging in a cave, imperiously receiving guests. The fox waits outside but declines to enter, despite the lion’s protestations, observing that whilst everyone happily trots in, nobody ever, ever comes out again. 4/7
@blackwellbooks But the first actual mention of Reynard, however, was in the Ysengrimus (c.1149), a long Latin poem about the wolf Isengrim, composed by Nivard, a monk of Sint-Pieters Abbey in Ghent. Here’s an image from a 13th c version of the text, showing the names Reynardus & Isengrimus. 5/7
@blackwellbooks From then stories of Reynard & his sworn Wolfish enemy, Isengrim, spread across Europe, becoming so popular in France that the word for fox shifts from the old goupil to Reynard. 6/7
@blackwellbooks But the heart of Reynard beats in East Flanders and it’s the great Flemish version from 1250, 'Van den vos Reinaerde' (Of Reynard the Fox), written by another cleric, Willem van Boudelo, on which my retelling is based. 7/7
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