Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/282

256 relationship. In a sense no doubt it is so; there never was a person of the name of Taillefer de Léon who fulfils the description here given. But it is my object in this paper to show that he is not a mere myth, a mere invention. The hero-names of romance are usually shadows of the hero-names of history, and like all shadows they grow more vast and more vague the further they are removed from the substance that throws them; and I hope to show that this Taillefer, mythical as he has become in most of his doings and relationships, was at first a real actual person, who performed actual exploits against the Normans, and became for these exploits celebrated in popular songs or legends, till, as happens to all heroes of popular legends, the myths that grew round his name have nearly destroyed his reputation as a real man.

The name, or nickname, Taillefer was common about the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is most familiar to us as the name of the Jongleur who sang the song of Roland at the opening of the battle of Hastings. In Latin deeds and chronicles it is usually rendered as Sector-Ferri, but in other cases as Ferrum-Sector, or Scindens-Ferrum, or Incisor-Ferri. Among the Counts of Angoulême the name became to some extent hereditary, and between 916 and 1178 there were four Counts of Angoulême bearing the name of Guillelmus (or Willelmus) Sector-Ferri, William Taillefer. The first of these four, William Taillefer, Count of Angoulême from 916 to 962, seems to have early become a popular hero by his prowess against the Normans, and an ecclesiastical hero by his benefits and benefactions to the Church; and it seems almost certain that so far as Taillefer de Léon had a historic and real prototype, it was this first William Taillefer, Count of Angoulême. It is true that we find nothing in the meagre historical account of him to explain the addition of de Léon to his name. But we have a parallel instance of the attachment of a place-name to a hero of history, as part of the process of making him a hero