Lai

(Ger. Leich)

The lai proper or lyric lai, as distinct from the narrative lai cultivated by Marie de France in the second half of the 12th century, is an extended song form of the 13th and 14th centuries. Each stanza (if it is in stanzas) has a different form and consequently different music. Starting from extreme freedom of structure in the 13th century, the lai developed in the 14th into a more regular form, typically of 12 stanzas of which the first and last may be related. Its principal 14th-century exponent was Machaut, in whose hands it developed a variety of metre and a control of polyphonic accompaniment which anticipated the later larger forms. Its demise is attributable both to the declining status of monophonic song in the 15th century and to the emergence of the cyclic mass as primary focus for the aspiration to extend musical structures.

lai or lay, a term from Old French meaning a short lyric or narrative poem. The Contes (c. 1175) of Marie de France were narrative lais of Arthurian legend and other subjects from Breton folklore, written in octosyllabic couplets. They provided the model for the so‐called ‘Breton lays’ in English in the 14th century, which include Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and the anonymous Sir Orfeo. Since the 16th century, the term has applied to songs in general, and to short narrative poems, as in T. B. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1842).

1. A lyric form of the troubadours, also called descort.

2. A complex lyric form of the 14th and 15th c. having 24 stanzas paired by rhyme and an overall circular structure.

3. A short narrative form of the late 12th and 13th c. Earlier examples deal with Arthurian material, and many, including the major collection by Marie de France, allude to the origins of the form in Celtic clarsach (harp) melodies. While Marie's lais tend to emphasize the psychological and social problems of love, stressing personal integrity, others exploit folktales of the fairy-mistress type to produce exotic adventure stories. The chastity-test motif is used in two, Robert Biket's Lai du cor and Le Lai du mantel. The former treats Arthur's court with comic disrespect, the latter introduces bitter anti-feminist satire. In the 13th c. the lai becomes a witty narrative, often with a contemporary setting, as in Le Lai de l'ombre [see Jean Renart].

[Philip Bennett]

A medieval narrative or lyric poem which flourished in 12th century France, consisting of couplets of five

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