Old French Romances, Done into EnglishMorris, William
General
Old French Romances, Done into English
Morris, William
French literature -- To 1500 -- Translations into English; Romances; Tales, Medieval
Now on the east wall of the chancel of Stepney Church there is a monument
erected to Dame Rebecca Berry, wife of Thomas Elton, of Stratford, Bow,
and relict of Sir John Berry, 1696. The arms on the monument are thus
blazoned by heralds . . . . “Paly of six on a bend three mullets (Elton)
impaling a fish, and in the dexter chief point an annulet between two
bends wavy.” The reference in the impalement of the blazon is obvious.
A local tradition confidently identifies Dame Berry as the heroine of the
Yorkshire legend, though of course it is ignorant of her connection with
the etymology of Constantinople.
Now this tale, or the first half of it, is but a Yorkshire variant of one
spread throughout Europe. The opening of the twenty-ninth story of the
collection of the Brothers Grimm, and entitled _The Devil with the Three
Golden Hairs_, is exactly the same, and in their Notes they give
references to many similar European folk-tales. The story is found in
Modern Greece (Von Hahn, No. XX.), and it is, therefore, possible that
the story of King Coustans is the adaptation of a Greek folk-tale for the
purposes of a Folk Etymology. But the letter, “On delivery, please kill
bearer,” is scarcely likely to have occurred twice to the popular
imagination, and one is almost brought to the conclusion that the romance
before us was itself either directly or indirectly the source of all the
European Folk-tales in which the letter “To kill bearer” occurs. And as
we have before traced the Romance back to Constantinople, one is further
tempted to trace back the Letter itself to a reminiscence of Homer’s
σηματα λυγρά.
I have said above that no Greek original of any of these Romances has
hitherto been discovered. But in the case of King Coustans we can at any
rate get within appreciable distance of it. As recently as 1895 a
learned Teuton, Dr. Ernst Kuhn, pointed out, appropriately enough in the
_Byzantinische Zeitschrift_, the existence of an Ethiopic and of an
Arabic version of the legend. He found in one of Mr. Quaritch’s
catalogues a description of an illuminated Ethiopic MS., once belonging
to King Theodore of Magdala fame, which from the account given of several
of the illustrations he was enabled to identify as the story of “The Man
born to be King.” His name in the Ethiopic version is Thalassion, or
Ethiopic words to that effect, and the Greek _provenance_ of the story is
thereby established. Dr. Kuhn was also successful in finding an Arabic
version done by a Coptic Christian. In both these versions the story is
told as a miracle due to the interference of the Angel Michael; and it is
a curious coincidence that in Mr. Morris’ poetical version of our story
in the “Earthly Paradise” he calls his hero Michael. Unless some steps
are taken to prevent the misunderstanding, it is probable that some
Teutonic investigator of the next century will, on the strength of this
identity of names, bring Mr. Morris in guilty of a knowledge of Ethiopic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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