Life & Wisdom Quote by Marie de France

Storytelling, Marie de France suggests, is less about having a pile of plots than having range. "Divers tales" aren’t just different anecdotes; they’re a demand for tonal agility. The line reads like craft advice and a quiet flex: the poet who can "vary the tune" controls not only what the audience hears, but how they feel hearing it.

The intent is practical. In a medieval courtly culture where stories circulated aloud and attention was a scarce resource, repetition was death. Variation becomes a survival skill. Marie’s phrasing borrows the logic of music: a tale is a melody, and the storyteller is judged on modulation. That metaphor does subtle work. It frames narrative as performance rather than private expression, suggesting the poet’s job is to orchestrate mood, pace, and expectation with almost technical precision.

The subtext is also professional positioning. Marie de France, one of the earliest known women writing in French, is staking authority in a world that often treated authorship as anonymous or male by default. She implies a standard that not everyone can meet: to tell widely, you must know how. It’s a gatekeeping line, but an earned one, sketching a hierarchy of skill over mere output.

Contextually, it fits the lais: short romances where shifts in register matter, where tenderness can turn to cruelty, wonder to warning, without losing the thread. Variety isn’t decoration; it’s the mechanism that keeps desire, morality, and surprise in play.