The Lays of Beleriand

The twelve “lays” of Marie de France, the earliest known French woman poet, are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France’s series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate.

This book serves as a basis for the exploration of language in a more systematic way. The main impetus for writing this book derives from the fact that linguistics and semiotics are two fields of study that need to be brought together under one compass because language is what is known as the “passkey semiotic,” i.e. the system of signs that underlies all other sign systems owing to its foundational status. Due to the current balkanization of linguistics as an academic discipline, the academic study of language structure rarely if ever incorporates the insights of semiotics and semioticians when presenting its material.