Richarda, accused of adultery with a bishop, protests, like Cunigund, not only her innocence of crime, but her intact virginity after a marriage of ten or twelve years, and offers herself to the judgment of God, either by duel or hot ploughshares; or actually proves her integrity by some form of ordeal, divino [aquino] judicio, or by passing through fire in a waxed shift, or donning a wax shift, which is set on fire at her hands and feet. Disculpated thus, she goes, like Cunigund, into a monastery for the rest of her days.[45]
Gundeberg happening to praise a certain nobleman's figure, he solicited her in shameless style, and was most contemptuously rejected. Upon this he tells the king that Gundeberg means to poison her husband and take another man, and the queen is put under confinement. Remonstrance is made by the king of the Franks, to which race Gundberg belongs, and Arioald consents to allow her to clear herself by a champion. One Pitto (otherwise Carellus) fights with the accuser and kills him.[46] If Pitto, as Bugge has suggested, and as seems more than plausible, be Little (old Italian pitetto, etc.), then the root of the Scandinavian-English story is found in the early part of the seventh century. The name Carellus may also be a significant diminutive.
Henry, in the Scandinavian ballad, accepts the testimony of the man in whose charge he had left Gunild, without asking for proof. Circumstantial evidence is offered in the English ballad; the false steward shows the king a leper lying in the queen's bed. Aldingar induces the leper to conform to his orders by promising that he shall be a sound man in two hours. Rodyngham gives the leper a drink, and lays him in the bed asleep. The queen, to the advantage of good taste, but to the detriment of the proof, is not there in either case.
We have here a link with the story of Oliva, or Sibilla, in the Charlemagne cycle of fictions. We may begin with the second section of the Karlamagnus saga, because we know that it was translated from an English copy brought home by a Norseman resident in Scotland in 1287.
Olif is here sister to Charles, and married to King Hugo. Going to the chase, Hugo leaves his wife in the care of his steward, Milon, who had long had a passion for her, and takes advantage of this occasion to declare it. The queen threatens to have him hanged. Milon goes home, puts a potion in a mazer, returns to the queen, and, pretending that what he had said was only a jest and meant to try her virtue, asks her, in token of reconciliation, to drink the cup with him. He feigns to begin; the queen follows in earnest, and falls into a dead sleep. He lays her in her bed, administers the same drink to a black beggar, and, when it has had its effect, lays him by the queen, putting the arms of each about the other's neck. When the king comes back he wonders that his wife does not come to meet him, and asks where she is. The steward answers, as in A 8, that the queen has taken a new love, and conducts the king to his chamber. Hugo cuts off the black man's head. Every drop of his blood turns to a burning candle, which makes the king think that he has killed a holy man. But the steward says, Not so; rather she is a witch, that can make stones float and feathers sink, and urges the king, now that his sword is out, to take off the queen's head, too. The king refuses. Olif wakes, and is astounded at what her eyes behold. What means this black man in her bed! God wot, says Milon, he has long been your leman. The queen demands an ordeal, according to the law of the land; and successively proposes that she shall be put naked into a copper over a hot fire, or be thrown from a high tower on sword and spear points, or be taken in a boat out of sight of land and thrown into the water. The king is each time disposed to let her have her way, but is always dissuaded by Milon, who tells him that no such trial would signify anything with a witch of her powers. Hereupon a knight leaps up and knocks Milon down for a liar, and offers to fight him on these terms: Milon to be fully armed and on his best horse, and the challenger to have no armor, a mule for a steed, and a wooden wand for a weapon. Milon is immediately thrown, but the king is still induced to think this to be more of his wife's magic, calls his best men to council, and bids them determine what death she shall die. There is no further resemblance to our ballad. Karlamagnus Saga, Af Fru Olif ok Landres, Unger, p. 51.
A Färöe ballad, 'Óluvu kvæði,' Hammershaimb, in Antiquarisk Tidsskrift, 1846-48, p. 281, repeats this story with variations, and as we are informed by Grundtvig, I, 201, so do Icelandic rimes, 'Landres rímur,' as yet unprinted. In the Färöe ballad, after Óluva's champion (who had come with her from home, like Memering) has unhorsed her accuser, she passes the ordeal of water and fire triumphantly, and still another.
In the Spanish prose romance of Oliva (printed in 1498) and the French chanson de geste of Doon l'Alemanz (fifteenth-century manuscript), the heroine, who is now Pepin's sister, becomes the victim of slander, not in consequence of her having rebuffed an overweening lover, but because the father or uncle of the arch-traitor Ganelon had been thwarted in his plan to match his daughter or sister with the nobleman upon whom Pepin has bestowed Oliva. It is an ordinary young lad who is put into the lady's bed, and no loathsome leper or beggar. The injured woman asks for the ordeal of fire or of water, and, in the Spanish romance, when these are refused her, to be thrown from a tower. After much difficulty this right is conceded in the latter, and, like Richardis,[47] she walks through a blazing fire, in simple shift, without singeing hair or thread. But all this helps her not. F. Wolf, Ueber die neuesten Leistungen der Franzosen, u. s. w., p. 98 ff; C. Sachs Beiträge, u. s. w., p. 2 ff.
According to other forms of the same story, it is Sibilla, wife of Charles the Great, that is temporarily repudiated by her husband, owing to a false suspicion of unfaithfulness, seemingly justified by an ugly dwarf being found in bed with her. A French romance, which narrated this story, is described in the Chronicle of Alberich, a monk of the cloister of Trois Fontaines, in the diocese of Liége, writing in the first half of the thirteenth century.[48] A fragment of the latter half of such a romance, and of the same age, is preserved. A complete tale is extant in a variety of forms: Hystoria de la reyna Sebílla, in Spanish prose, French by origin, of which a full analysis is given by Ferdinand Wolf, Ueber die neuesten Leistungen, u. s. w., p. 124 ff, from a printed copy dated 1532;[49] a Dutch volksbuch, also from the French, printed not far from the same time, of which an ample account is also given by Wolf in Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Phil. Hist. Classe, VIII, 180 ff; Macaire, a French romance in verse, of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, Mussafia, Altfranzösische Gedichte aus venezianischen Handschriften, II, Guessard, Les Anciens Poëtes de la France; a German metrical tale of uncertain date, 'Diu Künigin von Frankrich und der ungetriuwe Marschalk,' found in many manuscripts, von der Hagen, Gesammtabenteuer, I, 169, Meyer und Mooyer, Altdeutsche Dichtungen, p. 52; a meisterlied, 'Die Kunigin von Frankreich, dy der marschalk gegen dem Kunig versagen wart,' u. s. w., printed in the fifteenth century, and lately in Wolff's Halle der Völker, II, 255.[50] The king and queen are nameless in the last two, and the queen bears the name of Blançiflor in 'Macaire.' In the two German versions the false marshal repeats the part of the false steward in the English and Norse story; having failed with the queen, he lays a sleeping dwarf in her bed. The dwarf is principal in the Spanish and Dutch story, and after a discomfiture in which he loses some of his teeth at the vigorous hand of the queen, creeps into her bed while she is asleep. He does the same in the Venetian-French romance, thinking to get vengeance for rough handling from his mistress when acting as Pandarus for Macaire, of whose spite against the queen for rebuking his inordinate passion he is all the while the tool.
Sibilla appears again as Sisibe, daughter of a Spanish king, married to Sigmundr, father of Sigurðr Fáfnisbani. The king, summoned to arms, entrusts her to two of his nobles, one of whom, Hartvin, proposes that she shall accept him as a husband, and is threatened with the gallows. The two represent to the king, on his return, that the queen has had a handsome thrall for her partner during his absence. Hartvin advises that she be relegated to a desolate forest and have her tongue cut out, to which Sigmundr assents. Þiðriks Saga, Unger, p. 159 ff, cc 156-59; Hyltén-Cavallius, p. 115, cc 149-51.
The first part of the English romance of Sir Triamour, or a little more than 600 verses, is derived from some French form of Sibilla. A king going on a crusade to the holy land commits his queen to the care of his steward; the steward sues the queen to accept him as a paramour, and is threatened with hanging; the steward pretends that he has only been proving her, but when the king comes home tells him that he has seen a man lying with the queen, and has slain the traitor; the king is minded to burn his wife, but is advised by the steward rather to banish her; three days are allowed the queen to quit the country, and if found after that she is to die in the fire. Percy Society, vol. XVI, ed. Halliwell; Percy MS., ed. Hales and Furnivall, II, 78; Utterson, Select Pieces of Early Popular Poetry, I, 5.