The purpose of this article is to further the understanding of the nature and function of dwarves in Old Icelandic belief by an investigation of the names applied to them. I have therefore collected the dwarf-names, supplied meanings and etymologies, and classified the names by form and function. These names are scattered through the Fornaldarsögur, the Younger Edda and in various Eddic poems. Most of the names are in two versified lists; the shorter list in stanzas 10 to 16 of the V$ooluspá, the longer, called Dverga heiti, among the nafnaþulur. These two lists, which are derived from a common source, have a large number of names in common; the V$ooluspá has nine or ten that are not in the þulur, and the latter have a somewhat larger number which are not in the V$ooluspá. The various manuscripts show variant readings. All these readings are of interest to us, for the opinion of a scribe as to what is a suitable name for a dwarf may be just as valuable as the opinion of the man who composed the original.

The composition of The Owl and the Nightingale is dated by all editors after the death of Henry the Second in 1189, undoubtedly because of the prayer

In a previous paper, “The Origin of the Ancren Riwle,” I showed that a remarkable series of coincidences would seem to prove that the Ancren Riwle was written for the three “puellae” (Emma, Christina, and Gunhilda), to whom the hermitage of Kilburn, together with land and three corrodies, was granted by the abbot and convent of Westminster c. 1134. Their house was described in the foundation charter as “heremitorium de Cuneburna, quod aedificavit Godwynus,” and it was given to the three young women “concessu tamen, atque precatu illius Godwyni heremitae, quatinus eundem locum qui ad ilium pertinet in elemosina pro redemptione animarum totius praedicti conventus fratrum possideant.” The gift was made, not only to the three maidens in question, but “omnibus illis quae inibi eadem sanctitatis vitae norma fruendi causa futurae sunt.” Godwin, who had evidently instigated the establishment, was to oversee it: “Sit ille praescriptus heremita Godwynus, magister loci, illarumque puellarum quamdiu vixerit custos. Et post ejus obitum eligat conventus puellarum seniorem ydoneum, qui earum ecclesiae praesit, abbatis tamen concilio.” Some further information as to the nucleus of Kilburn Priory is given us by Prior Flete of Westminster in the fifteenth century. He writes of Abbot Herebert: “Iste fundavit cellam canonissarum de Kilborn, ubi prius quidam nomine Godwinus heremiticam multo tempore ducebat vitam. . . . statuit tres virgines Deo sacratas, domicellas videlicet camerae Matildis bonae reginae, consortis regis Henrici primi.”

The Irish, it has often been stated, displayed an interest in Nature which in the Dark or Middle Ages was exceptional. The purpose of the present paper is to examine the references to outdoor nature in Older Irish literature with a view to determining their extent and their special characteristics.

When Christopher Hunt took it upon himself, in 1593, to publish the first five “songs” of Godfrey of Bulloigne or the Recoverie of Hierusalem . . . . translated into English by R.C. Esquire (that is, of course, Richard Carew), he reprinted on facing pages the first five cantos of the Italian original. “Thereby,” says Hunt in his prefatory address, “the learned reader shall see to how strict a course the translator hath tyed himselfe in the whole worke, usurping as little liberty as any whatsoever, that ever wrote with any commendation.”

If One wishes to bother, one may divide mankind into two classes: those who judge their fellows by predetermined laws of conduct, and those who merely observe their fellows for what they are. Bunyan and Tolstoy are typical of the former class; Shakspere and Jane Austen of the second.

Marie de France was a sort of mediaeval Jane Austen. Both women knew their set, they knew their sex, and they knew little more of life. But that little they knew well, and of that little they wrote well, for both had the knack of story-telling. Both steered a sure course between sentimentality and cynicism; their writings reveal a general deftness, a perfect tact—“restraint,” as it is sometimes called—and a nice analysis of motives, from which spring plots that fit the characters as inseparably and yet as flexibly as the skin fits the hand. Jane is dryer, and more steadily ironical, though Chaitivel indicates that Marie could also be ironical; indeed, we might label their chief spiritual difference by saying that Jane is British through and through, but Marie is French.

The French romance of Fergus and Galielle, composed in the first 'quarter of the thirteenth century, is a conventional piece of Arthurian narrative, which has received comparatively little attention from scholars. The episodes of the poem in themselves contain little indeed that is not over-familiar to readers of romances dealing with the matter of Brittany: giants, robbers, and lawless knights to be conquered; a difficult quest; outspoken maidens; a tournament for the selection of a likely husband; dwarfs and a magic spring and the inevitable mockery by Sir Kay. But what does give unusual interest to this romance is the fact, pointed out first by Martin in his edition in 1872, that the scene of the action is indubitably Scotland, described by one who must have known it at first-hand, and that among the characters who appear in this faery setting, two at least were Scottish chiefs of the twelfth century. Although the evidence already cited by Martin is sufficient to prove these general conclusions, his material was drawn entirely from secondary sources, which afford only brief, general statements about the persons involved. The possibility of augmenting this evidence by material from primary sources has hitherto been neglected.

Many strikingly divergent views have been advanced as to the structural integrity or looseness of Piers Plowman. Its early critics, to be sure, had little to say upon the subject but there seemed to be general agreement in the view that the work is loosely put together. The long summaries by Morley and others, for example, give small evidence that the critics had detected any strong organizing elements in the design. With the strenuous attack by Professor Manly, a new epoch in the criticism of the work began. Scholars who favored multiple authorship naturally agreed that the poem lacks a well defined plan, and even advanced the view that we have in fact not only from two to five authors but from two to five poems, all upon themes in important respects dissimilar and more or less loosely constructed. While Professor Manly tore Piers' seamless coat asunder, the advocates of a single authorship—somewhat less emphatically, to be sure—found relative coherence in the poem as a whole and discounted the view that the style is excessively digressive. Throughout the controversy the critics dealt largely with textual problems, only occasionally turning to consider the primary subject-matter of the work. The articles of Mensendieck furnished the most important contributions to an interpretation of an underlying plan, especially in regard to the most difficult section, the Vita de Do-Well. His chief concern, however, was with a few theses relating to special passages, so that his studies hardly deal with the larger problem of the enveloping thoughts of the poem, if indeed such thoughts exist. Thus far investigation has resulted in many contradictory views but in no detailed statement upon the cardinal problem in the interpretation of Piers Plowman.

When we say that an act or a statement is without rime or reason, we mean, I suppose, that the thing said or done was utterly without justification or excuse, that there was no reason or occasion for it. Alliteration makes the phrase emphatic. The appropriateness of “reason” in the formula seems obvious enough; but the meaning of “rime,” in this connection is more obscure. The purpose of this brief discussion is to suggest a plausible origin of the formula and to explain the meaning of “rime” in the phrase—in other words, to show that the formula itself is not “without rime or reason.”

The Middle English romance of Athelston, preserved in a unique MS of the fourteenth century, has of late received some share of the recognition which its excellence deserves. The poet's narrative and descriptive powers have struck each reader with something of the effect of a discovery. But the full realization of his constructive skill and independent creative gift has only become possible through the light thrown on his sources by the studies of Gerould, Miss Hibbard (Laura Hibbard Loomis), and Beug. Each of these renders more unnecessary Zupitza's assumption of a French original and correspondingly raises our estimate of the English author. It is the purpose of the present paper to call attention to a further source, one that reveals still more clearly the workmanship of the poem.

The suggestion which this paper has to make will remain only a suggestion when the argument is complete. Perhaps I should disarm criticism in advance by admitting that the plausibility of my final and boldest point consists partly in its seductiveness. I should, in short, like to persuade the reader that the character of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene owes something not only to the Venus of the Æneid but also to the allegorical interpretations of the Virgilian Venus which Spenser inherited from Italy.

If the Normans were, as ten Brink has called them, the foremost representatives of chivalry, they certainly had good measure of instruction to fit them for the part. Among the flood of Anglo-Norman didactic literature which has come down to us, we find a number of treatises on manners for the benefit of budding chivalry; they differ from the many Continental Arts d'aimer in that they are mostly written for quite young boys, and the elaborate doctrines of courtly love are replaced by practical details of a page's service, mingled haphazard with moral precepts of a more general nature. Even when the pupil is considered as having emerged from pagehood and attained to the dignity of a lover, we never exchange an atmosphere of reality and common-sense for the complex artificiality of the first part of the Roman de la Rose, any more than we approach the literary grace and finish of that poem. The little Norman pages were instructed in no fantastic chivalry, such as bound the heroes of the romances, but in a doctrine calculated to assure their success in this world, without endangering their chances in the next.

Strange perversions of the story, tending to the disparagement of Criseyde, began almost in her creator's lifetime, and have been repeated and enlarged upon down to the present day. She has been accredited with a versatility in vice that matches the accusations of Catullus against bis lost Lesbia.

Three times in Canto X of the First Book of the Faerie Queene the ‘godly aged Sire’ impresses upon Red Crosse the fact of his earthly, rather than elfin, lineage.

The statement is often made that the Pléiade sang nature with exuberance and freshness. The feeling for nature, which virtually passed out of French literature when the poésie courtoise finally died with Charles d'Orléans, began to reappear early in the sixteenth century with Jean Le Maire de Belges. This re-ëmergence was at first very slow, and the new feeling did not attain its fullest development until the second half of the century. It is perhaps well to say at the outset that the words “a feeling for nature” applied to the poetry of the sixteenth century are not the equivalent of “a nature poetry,” and must not be taken to mean that the century of the Renaissance in France created a genuine poetry of nature. If we define this as consisting essentially in a sincere love and a spontaneous, as opposed to a conventional, treatment of nature; a concern with nature for its own sake instead of using it merely as an ornament in poetry with a primarily human interest; and a sympathetic interpenetration between the soul of man and the soul of things, we shall not find these conditions fulfilled in the French poetry of this period. In the first part of this paper I shall endeavor to trace the origins of the feeling for nature exhibited in sixteenth-century French poetry, to define its limits, and to explain why the Pléiade did not create a true nature poetry; in the second part I propose to show that the interest in nature was diverted in the last quarter of the century into another channel, to assume the form which may be called the solitude and desert motif, its predominant mode of expression in the next century, and to set forth the causes of this deviation.