Aucassin and Nicolete

Aucassin and Nicolete, by Andrew Lang
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Title: Aucassin and Nicolete Author: Andrew Lang Release Date: March 17, 2005 [eBook #1578] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE***
Transcribed from the 1910 David Nutt edition by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETE
Dedicated to the Hon. James Russell Lowell.
INTRODUCTION
There is nothing in artistic poetry quite akin to “Aucassin and Nicolete.” By a rare piece of good fortune the one manuscript of the Song-Story has escaped those waves of time, which have wrecked the bark of Menander, and left of Sappho but a few floating fragments. The very form of the tale is peculiar; we have nothing else from the twelfth or thirteenth century in the alternate prose and verse of the cante-fable. {1} We have fabliaux in verse, and prose Arthurian romances. We have Chansons de Geste, heroic poems like “Roland,” unrhymed assonant laisses, but we have not the alternations of prose with laisses in seven-syllabled lines. It cannot be certainly known whether the form of “Aucassin and Nicolete” was a familiar ...