LeFresne's Model for Twinning in the Lais of Marie de France

To illustrate, I offer here a twostaged reading of Le Fresne's twins, each part twinned with another lay in the collection, in the first case, Lanval, in the second, Chievrefoil.1 The division in two parts corresponds to differing views of twins in the human imagination, seen as duality (a competition of opposites) on the one hand, and dualism (or complementarity to form a whole), on the other.2 These two views suggest the mind at work making sense of twins as a puzzle or contradiction: they are two and yet a unit, the same and its other. The multiple twins that appear in Le Fresne begin to suggest how stories and common materials migrate between characters, cross over and create twins, both in Marie's collection and beyond its borders.3 Le Fresne's initial situation resembles that in a number of lays: characters in close proximity to each other appear identical until some event in the plot allows them to achieve distinction through difference.