The childhood of the epic hero: A study of the Old French 'Enfances' texts of epic cycles

French epic poetry enjoyed much popularity in the Middle Ages, as it celebrated the brave exploits of a popular hero. Such literature was often identified as belonging to a certain “cycle” of poems that associated the story of great figures of an illustrious family or the events of the Carolingian empire. The main protagonists of these cycles also lived an extraordinary childhood, as demonstrated in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries by the appearance of full-length epic poems entitled Enfances. Due to little investigation concerning the ensemble of enfances poems dedicated exclusively to the childhood of the epic hero and the role they play in both the biographical and genealogical expansion of epic cycles, this dissertation provides an examination of eight such individual enfances texts: Les Enfances Guillaume, Les Enfances Vivien, Les Enfances Garin, Les Enfances Renier, Les Enfances Ogier, Les Enfances Doon, La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, and Les Enfances Godefroi.; The first part of this study offers an overview of the four epic cycles (Cycle of the King, Rebellious Vassal Cycle, Cycle of Guillaume d'Orange, Old French Crusade Cycle) and their composition (Chapter One). Each individual enfances poem of the corpus is then introduced and placed within the larger epic genre (Chapter Two). Motivations for the composition of such enfances poems are then explored by looking to textual evidence confirming the poets' knowledge of cycle building implicit in the literary context of the time (Chapter Three). To broaden the understanding of this “sub-genre” of the Old French epic, the second part of the dissertation looks to the nature of the enfances poems as a literary ensemble. Such an investigation considers the fictional representation of the life stage of childhood (Chapter Four), as well as the common motifs and episodes characteristic of such poems (Chapter Five). The study concludes with a discussion of the characterization of the child hero as a puer senex as it relates to the young hero's extraordinary destiny and selection by God to restore situations to their rightful conclusion (Chapter Six). A final appendix provides plot summaries of the enfances texts of the study.