Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/42

34 Deux-Mondes (Oct. 15th), Mons, Joseph Bédier's equally erudite and charming article on Marie de France. Therein the lai of Eliduc is analysed at length, and as I read, the supreme interest of the Gaelic tale was borne in upon me.

It hardly needs to point out what that interest is. Connection of some sort between the two narratives must be patent to all; evident also that the story of Eliduc is a civilised and Christianised version of that found in Gold-tree and Silver-tree. I say evident to all, as I cannot think it will be seriously urged that the lai of Eliduc made its way to Northern Scotland, and was there shorn of its ecclesiastical ending, and otherwise transmuted as we now find it. But it is not safe to take for granted that a certain school of storyologists will refrain from any contention, however desperate, in support of their views, and I will therefore cite one argument which seems to me absolutely conclusive in favour of my argument that Eliduc has been deliberately altered to its present shape. In the great majority of folk-tales, as indeed of most forms of narrative, the interest of the story depends upon complications wrought by the agency of a "villain", a villain technically being anyone who opposes the hero or heroine. In Eliduc the "villain" is the squire, whose words on board ship throw the heroine into her death-in-life trance, and as "villain" he is fitly punished by being straightway cast overboard. But he it is who embodies the moral sentiment of the narrator and of the better part of her audience. It is inconceivable that this antinomy should be the deliberate act of Marie or of her predecessor, if either had invented the story; equally inconceivable that it could appear in any genuine folk-tale, an unfailing characteristic of which is that it never deviates into sympathy for the villain. We can see as clearly as if the process went on before our eyes how one special incident of the folk-tale appealing to the minstrel's fancy, that incident was transformed to suit the taste of a different audience. As generally happens in these mediæval