Kemp Owyne is a tale of a maiden abused by her stepmother and cursed to remain an ugly sea monster until a man has the courage to kiss her 3 times. The stepmother believes the maiden will be imprisoned forever, because nobody will have the fortitude to break the spell, but Kemp Owyne does, and after kissing the unfortunate girl 3 times, ends up with a beautiful wife, plus a host of weapons that will defend him from any attempts to draw his blood.
The story is similar to that of Sir Gawain, once the most noble and admired of Arthur's knights, and Dame Ragnell. Dame Ragnell is known far and wide for her ugliness, but when Gawain is forced to marry her, and begins to love her for her character, she becomes more beautiful with each passing day, until he is so besotted with her by the time that she dies that he actually goes insane for a period of time.
While the obvious meaning of these poems deals with the lifting of enchantment by the brave, it could also be seen as a tribute to the transforming power of love. Too many times people are given up on, because they are not seen as worth saving, or the price of the saving seems too high for the one who is attempting to accomplish it. While there are people who stubbornly stick to self-defeating habits and addictions from which they are unable to be freed, there are others for whom love is enough to truly accomplish a change, in their lives and sometimes even in their characters.
There is, according to the Bible, no power greater than love, and the writers of Owyne Kemp and Dame Ragnell, all of the saints themselves, and everyone who has ever given love to someone and seen it literally change their lives knows this.
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