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 atmo- 

 sphere of mediaeval 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 immortal- 

 ised 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 indebted- 

 ness 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 



1 Warnke. Die lais der Marie de France, p. Ixiii. 

 37 



