They tell us about human beings that undertake journeys through
the wilderness of heath and forests, the otherness of the fairy world,
the oddities of human behaviour. They tell us about nature, friend and
foe to man, sheltering and destructive, a place of exile and restoration,
a place where one gets lost in the meanders of the human mind. They
tell us about queens and paupers, faithless lovers and lovesick suitors,
the generous and the wicked, the bold and the submissive. Deep down,
they tell us about human nature: how it aspires to loyalty, delights in self-sacrifice
but falls into the traps of rash promises, jealousy, and the
thirst for fame.
They tell us about the Otherworld, complete with dragons, gem-paved
castles, cruel kings and lascivious fairies, a world that is but a mirror of
our own, so easy to enter but so hard to forget. Each is unique but they
all pretend to spring from the strings of harper-kings. They descend
from courtly romances written by a French lady, but rich London
merchants loved to hear them told. Nameless copyists wrote them
down in parchment and they have travelled though seven hundred
years. They are the Breton lays in Middle English. They will take you
there and back again, on a journey of poetic exploration.
