Notice d'un nouveau fragment de la «Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne» conservé à la Bibliothèque Bodléienne d'Oxford

The ms. Fr. d. 18 of the Bodleian Library of Oxford is a guardbook containing a collection of heterogeneous materials (mainly letters) from different periods, among which are four vellum manuscript fragments in French (from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) taken from bindings. The aim of this essay is to describe, to study and to analyse the longer and best preserved of these four fragments, namely the one that contains 166 lines of La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne, a chanson de geste in laisses of alexandrines, possibly composed between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. This poem, which forms the first branche of the Old French Crusade Cycle, rewrites the originally indipendent folktale of the swan children in order to attach it to legend of the Swan-Knight Elias, the mythical ancestor of the house of Bouillon. At least three versions of this text are known : Elioxe, which still bears traces of the primitive folktale ; Beatrix, the most widely spread version, in which the tale has been re-elaborated in order to be rattached more easily to the rest of the cycle ; and an hybrid version, called Elioxe-Beatrix, which mixes the first two together. The text of the fragment is very close to the one transmitted by the ms. 3139 of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal in Paris (G), containing the Elioxe-Beatrix version. Our fragment has been copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe. However, it is noteworthy that the language and the versification of the text are quite regular, and that the Insular French linguistic features are very few, which means that the scribe should have faithfully reproduced from the model he copied.