As a gentil knight, stout and gay.'
Cf. note to l. 1949.
1974. seinte, being feminine, and in the vocative case, is certainly a dissyllable here—'O seintè Márie, ben'cite.' Cf. note to B. 1170 above.
1977. Me dremed, I dreamt. Both dremen (to dream) and meten (also to dream) are sometimes used with a dative case and reflexively in Old English. In the Nonne Prestes Tale we have me mette (l. 74) and this man mette (l. 182); B. 4084, 4192.
1978. An elf-queen. Mr. Price says—'There can be little doubt that at one period the popular creed made the same distinctions between the Queen of Faerie and the Elf-queen that were observed in Grecian mythology between their undoubted parallels, Artemis and Persephone.' Chaucer makes Proserpine the 'queen of faerie' in his Marchauntes Tale; but at the beginning of the Wyf of Bathes Tale, he describes the elf-queen as the queen of the fairies, and makes elf and fairy synonymous. Perhaps this elf-queen in Sire Thopas (called the queen of fairye in l. 2004) may have given Spenser the hint for his Faerie
Queene. But the subject is a vast one. See Price's Preface, in Warton's Hist. Eng. Poetry, ed. Hazlitt, pp. 30-36; Halliwell's Illustrations of Fairy Mythology; Keightley's Fairy Mythology; Warton's Observations on the Faerie Queene, sect. ii; Sir W. Scott's ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, &c.
1979. under my gore, within my robe or garment. In l. 2107 (on which see the note) we have under wede signifying merely 'in his dress.' We have a somewhat similar phrase here, in which, however, gore (lit. gusset) is put for the whole robe or garment. That it was a mere phrase, appears from other passages. Thus we find under gore, under the dress, Owl and Nightingale, l. 515; Reliquiae Antiquae, vol. i. p. 244, vol. ii. p. 210; with three more examples in the Gloss. to Böddeker's Altenglische Dichtungen des MS. Harl. 2253. In one of these a lover addresses his lady as 'geynest under gore,' i. e. fairest within a dress. For the exact sense of gore, see note to A. 3237.
1983. In toune, in the town, in the district. But it must not be supposed that much sense is intended by this inserted line. It is a mere tag, in imitation of some of the romances. Either Chaucer has neglected to conform to the new kind of stanza which he now introduces (which is most likely), or else three lines have been lost before this one. The next three stanzas are longer, viz. of ten lines each, of which only the seventh is very short. For good examples of these short lines, see Sir Gawayne and the Greene Knyȝt, ed. Morris; and for a more exact account of the metres here employed, see vol. iii. p. 425.
1993. So wilde. Instead of this short line, Tyrwhitt has:—
'Wherin he soughte North and South,