SOURCE: "The Unity and Significance of Marie's 'Prologue'," in Romania, Vol. 96, No. 1, 1975, pp. 83-91.

In the following essay, Mickel offers a line-by-line analysis and reinterpretation of the difficult "Prologue" to Marie de France's Lais.

The importance of Marie's "Prologue" has been recognized by scholars since the earliest studies of the Lais. To early scholars, interested in the origin of the lai as a literary form and in establishing the sources which Marie used, the interpretation of lines 33 to 42 of the "Prologue" was crucial to an understanding of the literary history of the text. Because they did not relate to the problem of the origins of the genre and collection, the first 27 lines received less attention. Although lines 33 to 42 present difficulties of interpretation, the first 27 lines are more obscure from a grammatical and syntactic standpoint and have long presented a problem.

In the past thirty or forty years scholars...