Tricksters: Caxton's Reynard

Yesterday I shared some French and German versions of Reynard in English translation, and I am super-excited today to share the English Reynard published in 1481 by William Caxton, the early English publisher who also gave us the first printed Aesop in English. You can find many different editions of his Reynard online, and a nice user-friendly one to start with is this modern edition edited by N. F. Blake: The History of Reynard the Fox by William Caxton.

This is a publication of the Early English Text Society and it contains a detailed introduction, almost 70 pages long, about the medieval beast epic tradition in general and about Reynard in particular. The story of Reynard itself is slightly over 100 pages, and there are also detailed notes on the text along with a glossary and an index of names. The printing has been modernized and abbreviations have been expanded, but aside from these changes, the text is Caxton's own. You can get a sense of what Caxton's English is like from this opening paragraph (click on the image for a larger view):

You can use Blake's edition together with this lovely version from William Morris: The History of Reynard the Foxe. Morris's version is beautiful to look at, but harder to read, which is why using both Blake and Morris together works very nicely!

For an edition of Caxton with the English spelling and punctuation modernized, there is this very nice edition by Donald B. Sands: The History of Reynard the Fox. 

There is also a very useful introduction, and you can see what the modernized English looks like here (click on the image for a larger view):

And finally here's a fun experiment: a versification of Caxton's English: The History of Reynard the Fox, his friends and his enemies, his crimes, hairbreadth escapes and final triumph; a metrical version of the old English translation by Frederick S. Ellis, with text decorations by none other than Walter Crane!

And here's how this one begins (click for a larger view):

So there you go: multiple versions of Caxton's Reynard: Caxton's spelling, modernized spelling, and a version in verse! Put them all together, and you have a complete Caxton experience, all just a click away at the Internet Archive!