Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/132

 124 W. p. Ker.

Golden Horse, and the Princess of the Golden Castle, and the Fox is employed throughout.

Mac Iain Direach is sent to look for the blue Falcon, and is helped by the Fox. The giant who owns the Falcon offers to give it for the White Glaive of Light of the Big Women of Jura. The Big Women of Jura ask for the bay Filly of the King of Eirinn : the King of Eirinn sends Mac Iain Direach to bring him the daughter of the King of France as his bride. With the help of the Fox, Mac Iain Direach wins all for himself: the Falcon, the Sword, the Filly, and the King's daughter.

In another version, given by Campbell, i, p. 353, the Fox is brother of the Princess, as he is also in Grimm's story, and is restored at the end.

The comparative insignificance of the Fox in Walezvein is easily explained by the discrepancy between the adven- turer of fairy-tale, and the knight-errant of chivalrous romance. Gawain is more heavily armed ; he has an inconvenient history of his own, a character to keep up ; so also has Gringalet, his horse. The difficulty of turning a hero of fairy tales into a knight of romance is obvious wherever a comparison has to be made between the romances and the popular tales. What is remarkable about Walewein is that in spite of its length there is so little organic change in the simple economy of the mdrchen. The lines of the story are clear and well defined : the rules are observed, the unities of the fairy- tale, not those of the sophisticated romance of chivalry. Much is added, but what is added is not intruded ; the additions can be taken away ; there is very little distortion or vitiation of the system.

The story has some likeness to la Mule satis Frein (Meon, Nouveau Recueil, i ; cf G. Paris, Romania^ xii), in which also the search for something mysterious leads Gawain the adventurer beyond the River of the Narrow Bridge. That strange story, with its wonderful description of the gladness brought by King Arthur's knight into the