With reference to Sir Amadas, two points of special interest appear. The hero is provided the wherewithal for his successful courtship by means of a wreck to which he is directed by the White Knight; and he is required to divide his child as well as his wife with his helper. These peculiarities, together with the different opening, make it improbable that Richars, as preserved, was the direct source of the romance, though its author may have known some text either of that romance, or of Lion de Bourges. It seems more likely, however, that the source of Sir Amadas was rather the common original of both those versions. In the present state of the evidence it is impossible to do more than to show, as I have attempted to do, that the fourteenth-century Sir Amadas is a member of the little group under discussion.
The proposed division of the son is peculiarly important in that it connects the group with the stories in which The Grateful Dead is compounded with the theme of Amis and Amiloun. Indeed, the general relationship of The Spendthrift Knight to that theme must be considered in a later chapter[22] after more important compounds have been discussed. It will be noted that the group just considered is purely literary and purely mediaeval. Though it has representatives in Italy, Germany, Sweden, and England, it is to all intents and purposes French in source and character. Five of its members are the only variants treated in this chapter where the question of dividing the hero’s prize is brought up. The group thus stands by itself, and may be considered as an entity when we come to a discussion of the larger matters of relationship.
A solitary folk-tale now demands attention—my Breton II. The Grateful Dead in a simple form is here combined with a story told of Gregory the Great,[23] as Luzel, to whom the tale was recounted by a Breton peasant, indeed briefly noted.[24] The Breton tale runs as follows: A rich lord and lady had no children. While the lady was praying to St. Peter in a chapel that was being repaired, she fell a victim to a young painter, and had by him a son, who was named after St. Peter. When the boy was twelve years of age, he carried St. Peter across a stream one day, while his shepherd companion carried Christ. The companion died soon after. Pierre then set forth to visit his patron in Paradise. On his way he stopped overnight at the house of an old woman, whose husband lay unburied because there was no money to pay the priest. Pierre gave all his money for the interment, and went on. When he came to the sea, a naked man, who said that he was the dead, carried him across to a point near the gates of Paradise. There he found Peter, and was shown the glories of heaven by the Saviour, as well as Purgatory and Hell. In the last he saw a chair reserved for his mother, but by his entreaties induced the Lord to grant her a release on condition of doing penance himself for her. So he was told to put on a spiked girdle, to throw the key of it into the sea, and not to take it off till the key should be found. After donning this instrument Pierre was carried by the ghost back to his own land, where he lived on alms—first on the public ways, and later, without discovering himself, in his father’s castle. During his father’s absence he was killed at the command of his mother, but was dug up alive by his father and treated with respect. One day at a feast he found the key in the head of a fish. When the girdle was opened, he died, and his soul was borne to heaven by angels.
Two Danish variants present a curious but not inexplicable combination of The Grateful Dead with Puss in Boots, as was noted by Köhler.[25] Danish I. relates how a youth pays three marks, which is his all, to bury the body of a dead man, for whose interment the priest has demanded payment in advance. He is then joined by another youth, who is the ghost of the dead, and goes to a certain city. There, by giving himself out as a prince at the advice of his companion, who provides him with proper trappings, he wins the hand of a princess. In Danish II. an old soldier pays his last three marks to prevent three creditors from digging up a corpse. He is joined by a pale stranger, who takes him in a leaden ship to a land where he marries a princess, who is fated to marry no one save a man who comes in this way. The stranger secures, by a lying ruse, a troll’s castle for the hero, and, after explaining that he is the ghost of the buried debtor, disappears.
The traces of the Puss in Boots motive[26] are, I think, sufficiently clear, especially in the first of the two variants, since the point of that familiar tale is certainly that the hero marries a woman of high estate by making himself out as of equal rank, substantiating his statements by a succession of clever ruses. That the grateful dead enables him to fulfil the required conditions is an introduction that could easily replace the ordinary one, especially since a helper of some sort is necessary to the story. Just what the relation of these two variants is to other Puss in Boots stories does not here concern us. From the side of The Grateful Dead, however, it is possible to see how the combination—found only in two folk-tales from a single country, it will be observed—may have arisen. The benefits bestowed on the hero show an essential likeness to those found in a widespread compound type to be studied in a later chapter,[27] where the thankful dead helps his friend to obtain a wife by the performance of some feat. Since the combination now in consideration seems to be confined to the region about Denmark, while mediaeval and modern examples of the other are found in many lands, it may be regarded as a mere variation on the better-known compound type, produced by the similarity of the two endings. Yet it has to be treated separately, because it involves an independent theme.
An echo of the simple theme of The Grateful Dead is found in two English plays—Massinger’s Fatal Dowry and Rowe’s Fair Penitent. In the former young Charolais goes to prison to release his father’s body from the clutch of creditors, who wish to keep it unburied for vengeance.[28] He is rescued by Rochfort, who pays the debts and gives him his daughter in marriage. The intrigues of love and vengeance that follow do not concern us. In Rowe’s play, which was based on Massinger’s, this part has been curtailed to a few slight references. Altamont gives himself as ransom for his father’s body to the greedy creditors, who will not allow burial to take place. He is rewarded by the care and bounty of Sciolto, who becomes a second father to him.
Stephens was certainly right in connecting[29] the story in The Fatal Dowry with The Grateful Dead, though it is only a fragment and lacks some of the most essential features of the complete theme. The ghost, indeed, does not appear at all, but the part played by Rochfort may be regarded as a greatly sophisticated reminiscence of that trait, especially since he not only rescues the hero, but provides him with a wife. The echo of the theme is too vague for us to distinguish the form in which it was found by Massinger, though I think that we should not go far wrong in supposing that he had in mind some narrative, either popular or literary, nearly approaching the compound type treated in chapter vi. below. As one of the comparatively few traces that the motive has left in England this double dramatic use is not without interest.[30]
[1] Miss Petersen’s conclusion, Sources of the Nonne Prestes Tale, p. 109, note, is not altogether convincing, since the vogue of Valerius Maximus was so great that other authors than Holkot are likely to have quoted Cicero’s stories from him. The book may yet be found in which the one follows the other “right in the nexte chapitre.”
[2] Given by Hippe, pp. 143 f. Wherever Hippe’s summaries are adequate and careful, I shall refer the reader to his monograph for comparison.