Full on his sinewy neck the fragment fell,
And o’er his eyelids, clouds eternal dwell.
Parnell, Battle of the Frogs and Mice (about 1712).
Troil (Magnus), the old udaller of Zetland.
Brenda Troil, the udaller’s younger daughter. She marries Mordaunt Mertoun.
Minna Troil, the udaller’s elder daughter. In love with the pirate.--Sir W. Scott, The Pirate (time, William III.).
(A udaller is one who holds his lands by allodial tenure.)
Tro´ilus (3 syl.), a son of Priam, king of Troy. In the picture described by Virgil (Æneid, i. 474-478), he is represented as having thrown down his arms and fleeing in his chariot, not equal to meeting Achilles; he is pierced with a lance, and, having fallen backwards, still holding the reins, the lance with which he is transfixed “scratches the sand over which it trails.”
In the Troilus and Creseide of Chaucer, and the Troilus and Cressida of Shakespeare, we have a story unknown to classic fiction. Chaucer pretends to take it from Lollius, but who Lollius was, has never been discovered. In this story Troilus falls in love with Cressid, daughter of the priest Chalchas, and Pandărus is employed as a go-between. After Troilus has obtained a promise of marriage from the priest’s daughter, an exchange of prisoners is arranged, and Cressid, falling to the lot of Diomed, prefers her new master to her Trojan lover.
Chaucer’s Troilus and Creseide is not one of the Canterbury Tales, but quite an independent one, in five books. It contains 8246 lines, nearly 3000 of which are borrowed from the Filostrato of Boccaccio.