Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/391

 Shakespearian Story in Serbian Folk/ore. 83

In his essay entitled "Le cycle de la gageure," published in the Romania of 1913, the French savant, Gaston Paris, contends that the subject of our cycle can also be traced in another form, and that this is the primitive form of the cycle. " The primitive form of our theme," he, says, " seems to be that in which the wife pretends to yield to the advances of the lover, but substitutes another woman of inferior station, who is then mutilated by the lover. The woman whom he believes to have seduced proves her innocence by showing that she has not been mutilated. The mutilation consists in the severing of a finger or of the hair."

Gaston Paris quotes several versions of this new — or older — form. They are the Hanes Taliesin, a Welsh tale of the thirteenth century, the Scottish ballad of The Twa Knights, a Tours MS., a thirteenth-century poem trans- lated from the French, entitled Les deux Marchands de Verdun, by Ruprecht de Wiirzburg ; the Comoedie von zweyen filrstlichen Rdthen, by Jakob Ayres, written about 1600, and finally a Greek poem (Child, English and Scottish Ballads, v. 21). He looks upon this last-named poem as being the most characteristic, and possibly the oldest. " Is this the primitive form ? " he asks, and briefly relates the tale :

" At the King's Court, Mavrojanos fell to praising his sister, whom no man, so he averred, could seduce. The King boasts that he will achieve this, and wagers his kingdom against the head of Mavrojanos, whom he casts into prison until he shall have made good his proof. He sends rich gifts to the maiden, and requests but one night of her company in return. She commands one of her handmaids to yield herself in place of her mistress, and the youngest consents. At dawn the King severs her ring- finger and a lock of her hair. He returns to the Court and shows his trophies. Mavrojanos has lost his wager, and is about to be led to the gibbet, when the sister arrives, asks