The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 2 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 2 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
Gundeberg happening to praise a certain nobleman's figure, he solicited
her in shameless style, and was most contemptuously rejected. Upon
this he tells the king that Gundeberg means to poison her husband and
take another man, and the queen is put under confinement. Remonstrance
is made by the king of the Franks, to which race Gundberg belongs,
and Arioald consents to allow her to clear herself by a champion.
One Pitto (otherwise Carellus) fights with the accuser and kills
him.[46] If Pitto, as Bugge has suggested, and as seems more than
plausible, be Little (old Italian pitetto, etc.), then the root of the
Scandinavian-English story is found in the early part of the seventh
century. The name Carellus may also be a significant diminutive.
Henry, in the Scandinavian ballad, accepts the testimony of the
man in whose charge he had left Gunild, without asking for proof.
Circumstantial evidence is offered in the English ballad; the false
steward shows the king a leper lying in the queen's bed. Aldingar
induces the leper to conform to his orders by promising that he shall
be a sound man in two hours. Rodyngham gives the leper a drink, and
lays him in the bed asleep. The queen, to the advantage of good taste,
but to the detriment of the proof, is not there in either case.
We have here a link with the story of Oliva, or Sibilla, in the
Charlemagne cycle of fictions. We may begin with the second section of
the Karlamagnus saga, because we know that it was translated from an
English copy brought home by a Norseman resident in Scotland in 1287.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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