Ed de Moel

Child Ballads - Additions and Corrections

31. The Marriage of Sir Gawain

P. 293. Mr. Clouston, Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, p. 520 cites a pretty story from a modern Turkish author, in which, as so often happens, parts are reversed. A young king of the fairies of a certain realm is cursed by his mother to appear old and ugly until a fair mortal girl shall love him enough to miss his company. This comes to pass after forty years, and the ugly old man becomes a beautiful youth of seventeen. (Phantasms from the Presence of God, written in 1796-97 by 'Ali 'Aziz Efendi, the Cretan.)


P. 288 ff., II, 289 b, III, 454 a. Mr. Whitley Stokes has pointed out that the incident of a hag turning into a beautiful woman after a man has bedded with her occurs in the Book of Ballymote, an Irish Manuscript of about 1400, and elsewhere and earlier in Irish story, as in the Book of Leinster, a Manuscript of the middle of the twelfth century. The Academy, XLI, 399 (1892). It is singular that the sovereignty in the first tale is the sovereignty of Erin, with which the disenchanted hag rewards her deliverer, and not the sovereignty over woman's will which is the solution of the riddle in the ballad. See also the remarks of Mr. Alfred Nutt in the same volume, p. 425 (and, again, Academy, October 19, 1889, p. 255), who, while denying the necessity for any continental derivation of the hideous woman, suggests that Rosette in Gautier's Conte du Graal, vv. 25380-744, furnishes a more likely origin for her than Chrétien's damoisele, since it does not appear that the latter is under spells, and spells which are loosed by the action of a hero. [See also O'Grady, Silva Gadelica, p. 328 ff.; translation, p. 370 ff. F.N. Robinson.]

289 b. Gromere Gromorson (Grummore Gummursum) and Gromore somyr Ioure, in Malory's Morte Darthur, ed. Sommer, 256, 258, 799.

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