I will try to draw the family tree of Reynard’s British descendants and compare them to their Dutch counterparts. They ‘would be surprised to learn,’ wrote Varty ( 1999), the English Reynard specialist, ‘that he was once the leading character in a book meant for adults which became a best-seller in the fifteenth century and remained popular for more than 200 years, a book characterized by violence, murder, adultery, rape and corruption in high places’ (p. Even if they do, they will probably not know him through the original Reynard story, but through one of the illustrated adaptations for children. Although Western European literature is still haunted by this trickster fox figure, only a few people will know him by name. Footnote 1 He often vanishes in the repository of the oral tradition of folklore, or is drowned out by the tradition of written folklore developed around characters like Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver and Don Quixote. Fox ( 1970), it is surprising that Reynard the Fox is seldom mentioned by name in scholarly writing on classical figures in children’s literature. Tod ( 1912) and Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr.
Being the forefather of famous descendants like Beatrix Potter’s Mr.
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