The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk StoryGerould, Gordon Hall
General
The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story
Gerould, Gordon Hall
Dead -- Folklore; Folk literature -- Themes, motives; Grateful dead (Tale)
Since Old Swedish agrees with most of the other variants with regard
to the division, and furthermore with Rittertriuwe, in stating
that the hero offered all his property in order to keep his wife,
there seems to be no doubt that it belongs to this particular group,
despite the fact that it says nothing about the hero's poverty. The
connection is not improbable on the score of chronology, if we suppose
that the source of Richars and Lion de Bourges, or some similar tale,
found its way into the North by translation in the first half of the
thirteenth century, a time when translations into Icelandic at any
rate were made in great numbers. Indeed, the names Pippin, Lorraine,
etc., immediately suggest a French source; and the story is not really
a legend at all, though it appears in a legendary, but a narrative
quite in the style of the romans d'adventure.
With reference to Sir Amadas, two points of special interest
appear. The hero is provided the wherewithal for his successful
courtship by means of a wreck to which he is directed by the White
Knight; and he is required to divide his child as well as his wife with
his helper. These peculiarities, together with the different opening,
make it improbable that Richars, as preserved, was the direct source
of the romance, though its author may have known some text either of
that romance, or of Lion de Bourges. It seems more likely, however,
that the source of Sir Amadas was rather the common original of
both those versions. In the present state of the evidence it is
impossible to do more than to show, as I have attempted to do, that
the fourteenth-century Sir Amadas is a member of the little group
under discussion.
The proposed division of the son is peculiarly important in that it
connects the group with the stories in which The Grateful Dead is
compounded with the theme of Amis and Amiloun. Indeed, the general
relationship of The Spendthrift Knight to that theme must be considered
in a later chapter [58] after more important compounds have been
discussed. It will be noted that the group just considered is purely
literary and purely mediaeval. Though it has representatives in Italy,
Germany, Sweden, and England, it is to all intents and purposes French
in source and character. Five of its members are the only variants
treated in this chapter where the question of dividing the hero's
prize is brought up. The group thus stands by itself, and may be
considered as an entity when we come to a discussion of the larger
matters of relationship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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