MARIE DE FRANCE
also gives her reason for abandoning classical translation, which, as a Latin scholar, she had contemplated making, not only for the use of the less learned, but also, as she tells us, for personal discipline, since "he who would keep himself from sin, should study and learn and undertake difficult tasks. In suchwise he may the more withdraw him and save himself from much sorrow." The twelfth century was a time of extraordinary intellectual activity, and Marie tells us that she suffered from what we are apt to regard as a special evil of our own day the—overcrowding of the literary market. So she wisely turned aside from the Classics and the crowd, and set herself to give literary expression to the old Celtic folk-lore, hitherto perhaps unrecorded save in song.
Of Marie's work that has come down to us we have The Fables, already mentioned, dedicated to Count William, surnamed Longsword, and son of Henry the Second and Fair Rosamond;[1] The Lays, dedicated to the king, Henry the Second, and doubtless read by Fair Rosamond in her retreat at Woodstock; and The Purgatory of St. Patrick, translated from the Latin at the request of an anonymous benefactor. Of these only The Lays need here concern us, as it is in them that our interest lies,
- ↑ Marie thus refers to Count William:—
"Pur amur le cumte Willaume,
Le plus vaillant de cest royaume,
M'entremis de cest livre feire,
E de l'Angleiz en Roman treire."
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