Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/291

Rh by what the writer justly terms the "idyllic" treatment of the loves of hero and heroine. To quote the words of the preface, the authors of these romances "brodent tous sur le thème des 'Enfances,' non pas heroiques, comme dans l'épopée, mais sentimentales. C'est la peinture d'un amour ingénu, qui nait et se développe dans deux jeunes coeurs, l'histoire des fiançailles d'enfants, qui se sourient et se tendent les mains de l'age le plus tendre. C'est donc là un thème idyllique qui évoque en nous le réve de l'âge d'or, la nostalgie du paradis perdu, où règne l'innocence que le désir lui-même ne flétrit pas."

The romances selected are Floire et Blancheflore, Aucassin et Nicolette, Galeran de Bretagne, L'Escoufle, and Guillaume de Palerme. Mme. Lot-Borodine confines her treatment of the romances to an examination of the possible sources of the several poems, an analysis of the story, and a study of the psychology of the principal characters. From this point of view the book is one to be commended more to the literary, than to the folklore, student, but the romances in question are so characteristic of their age, the very delicacy and minuteness of their treatment present us with so many precise details of the dress, manners, and social customs of the period, that they possess a very real and vivid interest for the student of the past. From this point of view two of the poems, Galeran and L'Escoufle, had already been treated by M. Langlois in his La Société Française au XIIIième Siècle, but the previous discussion is lacking in the touch of sympathetic enthusiasm which makes the charm of Mme. Lot-Borodine's book. The little volume is one warmly to be recommended to all lovers of mediaeval literature, whatever their point of view.

To the piety of Richard Wünsch we are indebted for a second edition of his great master's work on Mother Earth. The text is