Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/320

 296 Notes on Orendel and other Stories.

the Travelling Companion, at the end of the story, should exact the half of all that the adventurer has gained, even to the dividing of his wife or child ; but this ordeal is part of the plot all over the world/ and it is found in Sir A?nadas as it is found in scores of other places, — for instance, in the admirable version published the other day by Mr. Larminie.^ Here the coincidence is not due to accidental shuffling of commonplaces ; it is one identical story which survives and holds the same elements in com- bination.

On the other hand there is a pretty instance of the way common adventures may be put together independently in similar order, in the French romance of Durinart le Gallois as compared with Orendel? Diirmart le Gallois is work of a higher class than Orendel \ but its author is also a professional story-teller working up the common- places of a romantic school. He tells in his own way the story of a King's son and his love for a princess he has never seen, a Queen in Ireland, and of his wan- derings in search of her, and how he finds her besieged m her city (Limerick), and takes command of the defence and raises the siege, while the Queen looks on from the battlements. The poem has other merits besides its plot; it is one of the best of the romances of the school of Chrestien of Troyes, and very successful in its choice of motives, especially in its rejection of the unnecessary conventional machinery of dragons, enchanters, and so on. It would have been passed by the curate and the barber with no more censure than they gave to Tirant the White, which it anticipates in some respects as a work of edification and an exposition of the chivalrous ideal. The story is of less

' Max Hippe, Herrig's Archiv, l.xxxi., Untersuchungen zur mittelengl. Romanze von Sir Aviadas.

■■* West Irish Folk-tales and Romatices (1893), P- '55; 'he original Irish in Appendix, p. 245.


 * Ed. Stengel, Strassburg, 1873.