Prince Tancredi has an only daughter (cf. A, B, C, 1), whose name is Ghismonda (Diamond, C, Dysmal, B, Dysie, D, Daisy, A). She has a secret amour with a young man of inferior condition (valetto, di nazione assai umile; giovane di vilissima condizione, says Tancredi), sunk in the ballad to the rank of kitchen-boy. This young man, Guiscardo, is, however, distinguished for manners and fine qualities; indeed, superior in these to all the nobles of the court. In the ballad he is a very bonny boy (preferred to dukes and earls, B, C). Guiscardo is strangled (or suffocated); the bonny boy is smothered between two feather-beds in B 8, C 7. The bonny boy’s heart is cut out and sent to the king’s daughter in a cup of gold, in the ballad; she washes it with the tears that run from her eyes into the cup. Ghismonda, receiving Guiscardo’s heart in a gold cup, sheds a torrent of tears over it, pours a decoction of poisonous herbs into the cup (ove il cuore era da molte delle sue lagrime lavato), and drinks all off, then lies down on her bed and awaits her death. Tancredi, repenting too late of his cruelty, has the pair buried with honors in one tomb.[31]
Italian. A. ‘Il padre crudele,’ Widter und Wolf, Volkslieder aus Venetien, p. 72, No 93. A king has an only daughter, Germonia. She has twelve servants to wait upon her, and other twelve to take her to school, and she falls in love with the handsomest, Rizzardo. They talk together, and this is reported to the king by Rizzardo’s fellow-servants. The king shuts Rizzardo up in a room, bandages his eyes, cuts his heart out, puts it in a gold basin, and carries it to his daughter. ‘Take this basin,’ he says; ‘take this fine mess, Rizzardo’s heart is in it.’ Germonia reproaches him for his cruelty; he tells her, if he has done her an offence, to take a knife and do him another. She does not care to do this; however, if he were abed, she would. In a variant, she goes out to a meadow, and ‘poisons herself with her own hands.’
B. ‘Flavia,’ Sabatini, Saggio di Canti popolari romani, in Rivista di Letteratura popolare, Rome, 1877, p. 17 f., and separately, 1878, p. 8 f. Flavia has thirteen servants, and becomes enamored of one of these, Ggismónno. His fellows find out that the pair have been communing, and inform the king. ‘Ságra coróna’ orders them to take Ggismónno to prison, and put him to death. They seat him in a chair of gold, and dig out his heart, lay the heart in a basin of gold, and carry it to Flavia, sitting at table, saying, Here is a mess for you. She retires to her chamber, lies down on her bed, and drinks a cup of poison.
C. ‘Risguardo belo e Rismonda bela,’ Bernoni, Tradizioni pop. veneziane, p. 39. A count has an only daughter, Rismonda. She has twelve servants, and falls in love with the handsomest, who waits at table,—the handsome Risguardo. She asks him to be her lover; he cannot, for if her father should come to know of such a thing he would put him to death in prison. The knowledge comes to the father, and Risguardo is put into prison. One of his fellows looks him up after a fortnight, and after a month cuts out his heart, and takes it to Rismonda; ‘here is a fine dish, the heart of Risguardo.’ Rismonda, who is sitting at table, goes to her chamber; her father comes to console her; she bids him leave her. If I have done you wrong, he says, take this sword and run it through me. She is not disposed to do this; she will write three letters and die.
All these come from the Decameron, IV, 1. The lover is sunk to a serving-man, as in the Scottish ballad. The names are fairly well preserved in A, C; in B the lover gets his name from the princess, and she is provided with one from the general stock.
Swedish. ‘Hertig Fröjdenborg och Fröken Adelin,’ broadside, 48 stanzas, Stockholm, 1757; Afzelius, I, 95, No 19, ed. Bergström och Höijer, I, 81, No 18, 47 sts; Lagus, Nyländska Folkvisor, I, 30, No 8 a, 47 sts; Djurklou, Ur Nerikes Folkspråk, p. 96, 22 sts; Dybeck, Runa, 1869, p. 34, 37 sts, of which only 8 are given; Lagus, as above, b, 2 sts, c, 1 st.; Aminson, Bidrag, I, 1st heft, p. 31, No 6, 2d heft, p. 16, 1 st. each; unprinted fragments, noted by Olrik, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, V, II, 216 f. The broadside is certainly the source or basis of all the printed copies, and probably of an unpublished fragment of twenty-eight stanzas obtained by Eva Wigström in 1882 (Olrik); some trifling variations are attributable to editing or to tradition.
Adelin is in the garden, making a rose chaplet for Fröjdenborg, who, seeing her from his window, goes to her and expresses the wish that she were his love. Adelin begs him not to talk so; she fears that her father may overhear. False maid-servants tell the king that Fröjdenborg is decoying his daughter; the king orders him to be put in chains and shut up in the dark tower. There he stays fifteen years. Adelin goes to the garden to make Fröjdenborg a garland again. The king sees from his window what she is about, orders her into his presence (he has not cared to see her for fifteen years), and angrily demands what she has been doing in the garden. She says that she has been making a rose garland for Fröjdenborg. ‘Not forgotten him yet?’ ‘No; nor should I, if I lived a hundred years.’ ‘Then I will put a stop to this love.’ Fröjdenborg is taken out of the tower; his hair and beard are gray, but he declares that the fifteen years have seemed to him only a few days. They bind Fröjdenborg to a tree, and kill him as boors slaughter cattle. They lay him on a board, and gut (slit) him as boors gut (slit) a fish. The false maids take his heart and dress the lady a dainty dish. She has a misgiving, and asks what she has eaten. They tell her it is her lover’s heart; then, she says, it shall be my last meal. She asks for drink: she will drink to Fröjdenborg, she will drink herself dead. Her heart breaks; word is carried to her father; God a mercy! he cries, I have betrayed my only child. The two are buried in one grave, from which springs a linden; the linden grows over the church ridge; one leaf enfolds the other.
Danish. ‘Hertug Frydenborg,’ in about forty copies from recent tradition and a broadside of the eighteenth century, but not found in old manuscripts: Olrik, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, V, II, 216, No 305, H-A, and Kristensen, XI, 117, No 46. Of these, E i, obtained in 1809, had been printed by Nyerup og Rasmussen, Udvalg af danske Viser, II, 238, No 71. Others are in Kristensen’s Skattegraveren, I, 33, No 113, III, 148, Nos 835-38, and in Kristensen’s Jyske Folkeminder, II, 207, No 61 A-D (‘Ridderens Hjærte’), and X, 213, 385, 360, No 52 A-E, No 94 B.
One half of these texts, as Olrik remarks, are of Swedish origin, and even derived from the Swedish broadside; others have marks of their own, and one in particular, which indicates the ultimate source of the story in both the Swedish and the Danish ballad. This source appears to be the Decameron, IV, 1, as in the Scottish and Italian ballads. The points of resemblance are: A princess, an only daughter, has a lover; her father disapproves, and throws the lover into prison (where he remains fifteen years in the ballad, only a day or two in the tale). The lover is taken from prison and put to death, and his heart is cut out. (The heart is not sent to the princess in a golden vessel, as in the Decameron, IV, 1, and the Scottish and Italian ballads, but is cooked, and given her to eat, and is eaten; and she says, when informed that she has eaten her lover’s heart, that it shall be her last food.) In most of the Scandinavian ballads the princess calls for wine (mead), and ‘drinks herself to death.’ But in C it is expressly said that she drinks poisoned wine, in E a, c, k, poisonous wine, in D that she puts a grain of poison in the cruse. (In E l they mix the lover’s blood in wine; she takes two draughts, and her heart bursts.)
A husband giving his wife her lover’s heart to eat is a feature in an extensive series of poems and tales, sufficiently represented for present purposes by the ninth tale in the fourth day of the Decameron, and no further explanation is required of the admixture in the Scandinavian ballad.[32]