[273] In Heinrich vom Türlin's Crône we have the following passage, vv 3313-4888, very possibly to be found in some French predecessor, which recalls the relations of Cornwall King and Guenever. The queen's demeanor may be an imitation of Charlemagne's (Arthur's) wife's bluntness, but the liaison of which Cornwall boasts appears to be vouched by no other tradition, and must be regarded as the invention of the author of this ballad.
Arthur and three comrades return half frozen from a hunt. Arthur sits down at the fire to warm himself. The queen taunts him: she knows a knight who rides, winter and summer alike, in a simple shirt, chanting love-songs the while. Arthur resolves to go out with the three the next night to overhaul this hardy chevalier. The three attendants of the king have an encounter with him and fare hard at his hands, but Arthur has the advantage of the stranger, who reveals himself to the king as Guenever's first love, by name Gasozein, and shows a token which he had received from her.
Under thrub chadler closed was hee. 292.
The bunge of the trubchandler he burst in three. 432.
Being unable to make anything of thrub, trub, I am compelled to conjecture the rub-chadler, that rub-chandler. The fiend is certainly closed under a barrel or tub, and I suppose a rubbish barrel or tub. Rubb, however derived, occurs in Icelandic in the sense of rubbish, and chalder, however derived, is a Scottish form of the familiar chaldron. Professor Skeat, with great probability, suggests that chadler == chaudeler, chaudière. Caldaria lignea are cited by Ducange. Cad or kad is well known in the sense barrel, and cadiolus, cadulus, are found in Ducange. Cadler, chadler, however, cannot be called a likely derivative from cad.
In stanza 48 the fiend, after he has been ousted from the "trubchandler," is told to "lie still in that wall of stone," which is perhaps his ordinary lair. The spy is concealed under a flight of stone steps in the French poem; in "a large hollow stone in the door outside" in the Welsh story; in a hollow pillar in Galien and the Rímur; in a stone vault in the Färöe ballad: Koschwitz, Karls Reise, p. 64; Sechs Bearbeitungen, pp 29, 52, 85, 117, 153, 179.
[275] Roland's last blast splits his horn. See the citations by G. Paris, in Romania, XI, 506 f.
[276] The first has been printed by Kölbing in Koschwitz's Sechs Bearbeitungen, as already said. The four texts were most kindly communicated to me by Professor Grundtvig, a short time before his lamentable death, copied by his own hand in parallel columns, with a restoration of the order of the stanzas, which is considerably disturbed in all, and a few necessary emendations.
[277] Pól, A, C, Kortunatus, B, i. e. Koronatus (Grundtvig). Coronatus == clericus, tonsura seu corona clericali donatus: Ducange.
[278] The white bears and the wolf-dogs are found in another Färöe ballad, as yet unprinted, 'Ásmundar skeinkjari,' where they are subdued by an arm-ring and "rune-gold:" the white bears in a kindred ballad, Grundtvig, No 71, A 4, 5, 8, 9, C 6, 7, 13, quelled with a lily-twig; E 12, 13, with runes; and in No 70, A 28, B 27, 30. The source of this ballad is Fjölsvinnsmál, which has two watch-dogs in 13, 14. 'Kilhweh and Olwen,' Mabinogion, II, has a similar story, and there are nine watch-dogs, at p. 277. (Grundtvig.)