MARIE DE FRANCE
endured. Listen to the words spoken to the knight Guigemar, wounded by a chance arrow as he rides through a wood. "Never shalt thou be healed of thy wound, not even by herb, or root, or leach, or potion, until thou art healed by her who, for love of thee, shall suffer such great pain and sorrow as never woman has suffered before: and thou shalt bear as much for her." Equality in love! Such is the vital note struck amid the artificial and soul-enfeebling atmosphere of mediæval love-poetry! This is the note which Marie set ringing down the centuries whilst her manuscripts lay unused on library shelves. This is Marie's gift to the world, and this it is that gives her stories immortality. Not only do they possess this immortality in themselves, but they have also been immortalised by poets and writers both in days long past and in those more within our ken. All who know her stories will recall Chaucer's indebtedness to incidents and descriptions in them, and coming to our own time, we find Sir Walter Scott taking his ballad of "Lord Thomas and Fair Annie" from the lay of "The Ash Tree," although it is possible, as has been suggested,[1] that his ballad may have been founded on some Scotch folk-song having a common origin with Marie's lay. When her lays were first published in Germany in 1820, Goethe wrote thus: "The mist of years that mysteriously envelops Marie de France makes her poems more exquisite and
- ↑ Warnke. Die lais der Marie de France, p. lxiii.
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