This is an early Middle English work (that is, about 1270 - a century before Chaucer) about a woman who writes to a cleric for an incantation that can be used to bind a lover to her. "The Love Rune" is a striking work that connects with literacy, gender studies, and certainly, the magical power of the word.
If you've had a Chaucer course are are interested in feminist criticism and literacy (women readers, for example), you might want to research this very interesting text.
"The Love Rune," a poem written before 1272, describes the transformation of a reader into a teacher. The text, like its central figures, a woman who requests a "rune" to enchant a lover, and a cleric who supplies this text, is a go-between.
In this poem a cleric writes to a maiden who has asked him for a love "rune," evidently an incantation to make a man fall lastingly in love with her. (See Carleton Brown English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century. Oxford, 1932. repr. 1971. 68-72.) "Rune" is translated in the Life of St. Katherine as "amatoria carmina" or "love poem." The poem is also edited in various Middle English anthologies; ask for assistance if you want to work on this text, which is in a form of Middle English more difficult than Chaucer's.
The woman wants another true lover ("onother soth lefmon") who knows how to "guard" (6) her as a noble ("freo") woman.
The king uses the poem as his messenger: "Mayde, to thee he send his sone / And wilneth for t beo thee cuth," ll. 103-4). The maiden is told that the king has granted her a treasure better than gold: the jewel of chastity. She is to guard it in her "bur," bower, a word that designates "the woman's quarters" and her "womb" (Middle English Dictionary). Chastity is hard as a rock, a gemstone that heals "all luve wunde" (l. 156) and that James W. Earl has persuasively connected to the iconography of the pearl (in a 1986 essay, "The `Luue-Ron' of Thomas of Hales" in Robert Earl Kaske . New York: Fordham UP, 1986. 204). But the image suggests more to me than a link between the poem's immediate objective and the far-reaching vision of the Heavenly City that Earl sees in pearl as an anagogical link to the afterlife (205). It is difficult not to associate the gem of this poem with the gem of female genitalia imaged so freely as jewels throughout the fabliau.
Is the image of the healed wound potentially an image of "wounded" or experienced sexuality? Betrayed maidens are common in love lyrics of the Middle Ages. One thinks of "I have a young sister" ("When the cherye was a flowr, / Thanne hadde it no stoon," l. 22 or John Skelton's "Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale," both in the Norton).
Are there references to "runes" like this one in Chaucer, to lovers' incantations? Check the glossary to your Riverside Chaucer for starters.
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