Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/43

 Rh of the common folk-tale, the adaptor cared little for logical consistency, so that whilst his villain represents the high-water mark of moral sentiment in the story, he yet suffers as he did in the primitive folk-tale, where he was thought of as wholly bad, simply because his action inconvenienced hero and heroine.

Admit Eliduc to be a modification of a previously existing folk-tale, and the conclusion cannot be resisted that its original must have been closely akin to the original of Gold-tree and Silver-tree. Unless indeed we can point to any other narrative type which is equally or more likely to have given rise to the lai as we now have it.

There is a widely spread narrative type which in the Middle Ages was localised in widely separated districts, and furnished the matter of many favourite stories—that of the Husband with two Wives.

This cycle has been briefly studied by Mons. Gaston, Paris (Comptes rendus de l'Acad. des Inscr. et Belles-Lettres, 1887, pp. 577-586). One of the best known of the stories belonging to it is that of the Count of Gleichen, whose tomb is still shown between that of his two wives. But this cycle, so far as studied, is really of literary origin, and goes back to the Breton lai. Thus one of the oldest forms, the French metrical romance of Ille et Gateron, by Walter of Arras, recently made accessible in Professor Förster's admirably handy edition in his Romanische Bibliothek, is, as the learned editor argues, based entirely upon the Lai of Eliduc, with such developments as were required to spin out a story of 1,000 lines to one of 6,000, and such modifications as the poet deemed necessary to suit the theme to the taste of his patrons and patronesses, among them the Countess Marie of Champagne, the leading love-casuist of North France, under whose auspices it was that the theory of love, as professed by all the courtly spirits of the time, was elaborated and codified. Now, as one of the texts of this code ran, Nemo potest duplici amore ligari, it is evident that Walter had a task of some difficulty before