[Footnote 99: _Tristram_, for editions _v._ p. 116: _Havelok_, edited by Madden, 1828, and again by Prof. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868. _King Horn_ has been repeatedly printed--first by Ritson, _Ancient English Metrical Romances_ (London, 1802), ii. 91, and Appendix; last by Prof. Skeat in the _Specimens_ above mentioned.] [Sidenote: Havelok the Dane.] It is, moreover, not a mere accident that these three, though the authors pretty certainly had French originals before them, seem most likely to have had yet older English or Anglo-Saxon originals of the French in the case of _Horn_ and _Havelok_, while the Tristram story, as is pointed out in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend, is the most British in tone of all the divisions of that Legend. _Havelok_ and _Horn_ have yet further interest because of the curious contrast between their oldest forms in more ways than one. _Havelok_ is an English equivalent, with extremely strong local connections and identifications, of the homelier passages of the French _chansons de geste_. The hero, born in Denmark, and orphan heir to a kingdom, is to be put away by his treacherous guardian, who commits him to Grim the fisherman to be drowned. Havelok's treatment is hard enough even on his way to the drowning; but as supernatural signs show his kingship to Grim's wife, and as the fisherman, feigning to have performed his task, meets with very scant gratitude from his employer, he resolves to escape from the latter's power, puts to sea, and lands in England at the place afterwards to be called from him Grimsby. Havelok is brought up simply as a rough fisher-boy; but he obtains employment in Lincoln Castle as porter to the kitchen, and much rough horse-play of the _chanson_ kind occurs. Now it so happens that the heiress of England, Goldborough, has been treated by her guardian with as much injustice though with less ferocity; and the traitor seeks to crown his exclusion of her from her rights by marrying her to the sturdy scullion. When the two rights are thus joined, they of course prevail, and the two traitors, after a due amount of hard fighting, receive their doom, Godard the Dane being hanged, and Godric the Englishman burnt at the stake. This rough and vigorous story is told in rough and vigorous verse--octosyllabic couplets, with full licence in shortening, but with no additional syllables except an occasional double rhyme--in very sterling English, and with some, though slight, traces of alliteration. [Sidenote: King Horn.]