[4] Strange that a sword and a ring should so often be the test of identity in such tales! So it was, as regards the first of these tokens at least, with Theseus, Arthur, and many another hero. On this head see Hartland, The Legend of Perseus (1894–96).
[5] Urganda, as Southey remarks, is a true fairy, resembling Morgan le Fay in her attributes, but, as Scott says, she has no connexion with the more classic nymphidæ. But is not this dea phantastica identical with Morgan, and her name merely a Hispanic rendering of the Celtic fairy’s?
[6] Scott girds fiercely against Southey’s interpolation of Anthony Munday’s translation of these verses in his Amadis, and with justice. The above translation is only slightly more tolerable, but it is at least sense. Poor Tony was bitten by the absurdities of euphuism, and his lines are mere nonsense. But there is even less excuse for a modern translation to backslide into the style of the eighteenth century.
[7] She had previously visited Scotland and embarked there “for Great Britain,” and while on this voyage was driven on the Poor Rock, which would seem to have been ‘somewhere’ in the Mediterranean! Strange that geography should have been so shaky at such a period and among a people who had done so much for discovery and navigation.
[8] ’Cildadan’ I take to be Cuchullin (pron. Coohoolin, or Coolin), the hero of the well-known Irish epic.
[9] It was Munday’s translation of these verses from the French which chiefly aroused the scorn of Scott, and it is in dread of the memory of that scorn that I offer these lines, which partake much more of the nature of an adaptation than a translation, the original Spanish being much too stiff and artificial for rendition in English.
[10] I take this incident to be a reminiscence of the Minotaur story. Indeed the Firm Island appears to me, both from its geographical proximities and its whole phenomena, as a borrowing of Cretan or Minoan story. The “old covered way” from which the bull emerges is surely the Labyrinth. Is the wise old ape Dædalus?
[11] It is scarcely necessary to indicate to the reader that the name Nasciano is borrowed from that of Nasciens, the hermit king of Grail romance.
[12] Forbear.
[13] William Stewart Rose, Amadis de Gaul: A Poem in Three Books (London, 1803).