SOURCE: "Havelok and the Brutal Fisherman," Medium Aevum, Vol. XXXVI, No. 3, 1967, pp. 219-30.

[In the following essay, Mills concentrates on the characterization of Grim and compares him to earlier examples of the brutal fisherman type.]

When Havelok first meets with the sons of Grim the fisherman, he gives them a vivid account of his early sufferings at the hands of Earl Godard, the regent into whose hands he had been committed. In this he lays particular stress on the fact that Grim had refused to carry out Godard's command that he should drown the boy:

'Deplike dede he him swere
On boke, pat he sholde me bere
Unto pe se and drenchen inne,
And wolde taken on him pe sinne.
But Grim was wis and swipe hende,
Wolde he nouht his soule shende:
Leuere was him, to be for-sworen,
Pan drenchen me and ben for-loren;
But sone bigan he forto fle
Fro Denemark, forto berwen me.'
(1417-26)¹

This places Grim in a wholly admirable light, making him comparable in virtue with his namesake in the French versions of the story,² and perfectly typical of the 'good fisherman' of folk-tale and romance—the humble character who is the means of saving the hero's life when this is threatened by seemingly irresistible forces.³ But the lines quoted above, while true as far as they go, are by no means the whole truth about Grim, and for this we must go back to the author's own narrative of the same events in lines 526-656 of Havelok (H):

Grim is told by Godard (whose man he is) that he will be granted his freedom and made wealthy if he will murder Havelok for him. Grim ties up the lad, takes him to his hut, and there gives him into the charge of his wife Leve (who, like Grim, treats him very roughly). In the middle of the night, just as he is getting ready to put to sea with the boy to drown him, he sees that the hut is flooded with a miraculous light. This he finds proceeds from Havelok's mouth; he and his wife untie him and as they are stripping off his clothes discover a birthmark that puts his royal status beyond doubt. The fisherman at once transfers his loyalty from Godard to Havelok, and Leve brings food to the starving hero.

That Havelok, in his own later account of the scene, should leave out all mention of Grim's brutality is hardly surprising. By this point in the story the fisherman is quite firmly on the side of the angels, and it would serve no useful purpose to recall his less engaging characteristics either to his own sons (who seem never to have known of them) or to the wider audience of the romance (which may by now have forgotten all about them).⁴ But however much Havelok and the reader may forgive or forget as the story unfolds, the split down the middle of Grim's rôle is sufficiently curious to demand some kind of explanation. It has not often received attention in the past. Neither Holthausen nor Skeat⁵ discuss the matter in their editions, while W. H. French and C. B. Hale content themselves with referring the fisherman's sudden change of heart to the popular belief in the sanctity of the king's person.⁶ Only H. L. S. Creek seems to have found Grim's behaviour in any way surprising, and he finds the vital clue to it in the English author's desire to provide his hero with an early history as unhappy as that of his wife-to-be. In other words, since, in both the French and the English versions Edelsi (Godrich H) has the power of life and death over Argentille (Goldeboru H), Havelok must in the same way become Godard's prisoner (as Haveloc never is that of Odulf). Then, since godard does not wish to bear direct responsibility for the boy's death, Grim is forced to play a 'cruel and unnatural part … inconsistent with the fidelity and generosity which [he] later displays'.⁷ This does not stand up to very close scrutiny—the Godrich-Goldeboru episode will not in fact account for the most striking peculiarities of its Danish counterpart—and the mode of argument as a whole seems to suffer from two weaknesses. First, a tendency (hardly surprising in an admirer of Bédier's)⁸ to ascribe too much importance to the inventive powers of a single redactor; second, the assumption that the traditional character-types of romance literature were always simple in their earliest manifestations and only became complex or confused at some later stage. To redress the balance I should like to suggest that 'brutal fishermen' whose characters and actions strikingly parallel those of Grim are to be found in texts considerably earlier in date than H, so that the English author, far from being perversely original in his conduct of the scene, was actually keeping with some fidelity to an established pattern. Furthermore, a careful study of the French texts suggests that the character of Grim may not, in any case, have ever been totally above reproach.

I

The most important evidence for the previous existence of the 'brutal fisherman' as an established character-type is offered by the Gregorius (G) of Hartmann von Aue,⁹ and the Wigalois (W) of Wirnt von Gravenberc.¹⁰ Wolfram's Parzival¹¹ contains a fisherman who resembles Grim in being both ill-mannered and covetous, but who does not go to the extreme of being prepared to kill the hero—or to let him die—in the hope of enriching himself. As presented by Hartmann the scene runs as follows:

Gregorius comes to the fisherman's house on his quest for a desert place in which to do penance for his unwitting marriage with his mother.¹² On hearing of his mission, his host—who has from the beginning treated him with contempt and suspicion—is very sceptical of the firmness of his resolve, but promises to take him to a barren rock surrounded by water where he can at once enter upon his life of atonement. He makes him lodge that night in a hovel; next morning, when it proves difficult to rouse Gregorius, he loses patience and prepares to go off in his boat without him. But the hero is wakened just in time by the fisherman's wife, and is taken to the rock; in his haste, however, he leaves behind him a tablet on which the circumstances of his birth had been recorded, and which he had carefully kept with him since setting out in the world. Once on the rock, he is fettered and the key thrown into the water—only when it comes to light again will his sins have been forgiven. Seventeen years later emissaries from Rome are searching for Gregorius, who has been revealed in a vision as their next pope. They come to the fisherman's house, and are served with a large fish as their evening meal. In its belly is found the key to the fetters; the fisherman violently repents his earlier treatment of Gregorius and next day takes the messengers to the rock. There they find a naked and almost unrecognizable figure who, in his shame, tries to run away from them. The fisherman begs his forgiveness, and they take him back to the mainland. Before leaving for Rome he recovers the tablet from the ruins of the hut in which he had been lodged. (G 2751-3740).

In W, on the other hand, it assumes the following form:

After his battle with the dragon Pfetan, Wigalois is lying unconscious at the edge of a lake. Here he is found by a poor fisherman and his wife, who strip him of his armour and also take from him a magical girdle which has the power of protecting the life of its wearer. When he seems to be coming to his senses, the wife tries to drown him, but is restrained from doing so by her husband. She is in any case shortly afterwards moved to pity by the beauty of his naked body. The pair make off with their booty, but are observed by a maiden who subsequently conducts her mistress and companions to the fisherman's hut. The mistress (whose husband had been rescued from the dragon by Wigalois) promises the fisherman a rich reward if he will take them to the knight he has robbed. He does this; when the ladies arrive Wigalois at first flees for shame but is at length persuaded to go back with them. (W 5123-954)¹³

At first glance the two episodes offer very different points of contact with H. Hartmann's contains a rough and unsympathetic fisherman (= Grim), Wirnt's, a violently-disposed wife (= Leve); Hartmann stands closer to the English romance in locating an important part of the scene in the fisherman's own hut, Wirnt, in threatening his hero with drowning, having his body stripped, and recording a complete change of heart on the part of the wife. But a more detailed scrutiny of the three episodes reveals that all three preserve a very similar sequence of events, although the significance of individual parts of it may have been obscured by the need of accommodating it to the very different demands of the stories into which it has been introduced. We may set out the essential common features under the headings of the character of the fisherman and the treatment of the hero.

(I) The character of the fisherman

1. A dominant motive is his desire to enrich himself. This is most sympathetically presented by Wirnt, who lays heavy stress on his poverty in W 5292-318 and 5687-95; this is not clearly presented in either H or G, but Grim undertakes the murder in the expectation of being made riche as well asfre (H 530 f.), while the vischcere is described as schazgîre in G 3294.
2. He is prepared to connive at the hero's death in some way or another. Grim is most direct in this (i shal drenchen him (H 583), but Hartmann's villain is quite as callous in the pleasure which he takes in abandoning Gregorius on a barren rock on which, it seems, he must infallibly perish. Even in W, where he earns from Wirnt the approving label of der vil getriuwe man (W 5378) as the result of hindering his wife's murderous intentions, he is still quite prepared to leave Wigalois in a helpless state, feeling that he is bound to die before long (er doch niht genesen kan (W 5379); compare G 3350-7, where the fisherman tells the messengers from Rome that it is pointless to seek Gregorius on the rock as he must long since have died of exposure).
3. He is impatient to get on with his principal business and as such is sharply contrasted with his wife. The contrast is made most explicit in W, where the husband lacks all sympathy with the woman's sudden concern with reviving Wigalois, and tells her to help him carry off their booty (W 5458-61).¹⁴ In G his determination to put to sea without wasting a moment is immediately followed by his wife's sympathetic rousing of the hero so that he may not miss his chance of entering upon the life of penance that he so greatly desires. Leve also helps to get Havelok ready for his 'fatal' journey in H 575-85, but the distinction between her actions and those of Grim is in other ways closer to the situation in W. For Grim's first words to his wife at this point:

   'Ne þenkeste nowht of mine oþes,
   þat ich haue mi louerd sworen?'

   have a violence that could suggest slowness or reluctance on her part. If so the wife's behaviour would follow a very similar pattern (moving from initial brutality to final sympathy) in these two texts.

(2) The treatment of the hero

1. In both H and G he has a great deal to put up with. Havelok is tied up and gagged by Grim (H 545 f.), Gregorius put in fetters by the vischcere (G 3088 f.); Havelok spends a very uncomfortable few hours on the floor of Grim's cottage (H 567-75), Gregorius is forced to spend the night

   in ein sô armez hiuselin
   daz ez niht armer enmohte sîn
   (G 3033 f.)

   In W details of this kind are quite lacking. The man hides his ill-gotten gains in his hut, but Wigalois is never brought inside it; furthermore, since he is already more dead than alive when he is found there can be no question of tying him up. These developments follow on naturally from the fact that the scene came directly after the fight with the dragon in the common source of W and Le Chevalier du Papegau.
2. Both Havelok and Wigalois are stripped by their captors. Such an action would most logically precede an attempt to drown the hero, as in W, but with a more definite causal connexion established between the two (Wigalois is stripped because the fisherman wants his armour, and the wife does not conceive the idea of drowning him until afterwards (W 5331-44 and 5383-6)). In H, too, the undressing of the hero does not come at quite the expected point; it seems to have been motivated by the sight of the stem which issues from his mouth (H 599-603) and as such could only be given real significance by supposing that Grim had known that there were two tokens by which the heir to the throne might be recognized, and that having seen one of them he at once started searching for the other (the cruciform birthmark on the boy's shoulder).¹⁵ As for Gregorius, although he is not actually naked when left on the rock by the fisherman—presumably because a penitential garment (ein barîn hemede (G 3112)) must now play a part in the scene—he is completely nacket unde blôz when he is found by the messengers from Rome (G 3410).
3. As we have noted, the stripping of Havelok reveals the kyne-merk which establishes his identity. In W the same process reveals an equally marvellous token in the giurtel of W 5349, but the significance of this is too esoteric for it to move the wife (who alone sees and pockets it) to compassion.¹⁶ What does affect her is the beauty of the hero's body and not any mark or talisman found about it.¹⁷ But very shortly after her change of heart she is led to acknowledge the princely rank of Wigalois by the magnificence of his armour (W 5451-3), which therefore—in spite of its relatively commonplace nature as a status-symbol—serves very much the same function as the birthmark had done in H. In G the vital issue at this point in the story is not the identity or the rank of Gregorius, but his spiritual state, while in any case the physical distance between him and the fisherman makes it impossible for the latter to find any token of any kind about his body. And so the function performed by the kyne-merk is taken over, in part at least, by the key to the fetters, which had been thrown into the sea with the chilling words:

             daz weiz ich ane wân,
   swenne ich den slüzzel vunden hân
   ûz der tiefen ünde
   sô bist dû âne sünde
   und wol ein heilic man.
   (G 3095-9)¹⁸

   But the key is not the only token in G that has affinities with the birthmark of Havelok and the girdle and armour of Wigalois; also noteworthy is the tavel which had recorded the incestuous birth of Gregorius. Like the gurtel, this was bequeathed to the hero by his mother and kept closely hidden by him (G 747 ff. and 2277-87; W 1364-77); moreover, in spite of the grief which it causes him it finally becomes something of a talisman in itself, in that it lightens his burden of sin rather than adds to it. Certainly its supposed loss causes him great distress while he is on the rock (G 3682-93; compare the lamentation of Wigalois for the loss of his protective talisman in W 5992-6000). It also serves as a recognition token of a very precise kind at an earlier point in the tale, when it reveals his identity to his mother (G 2471-85), and duplicates the key as an index of his hard-won sanctity by its unblemished condition when found again at the end of the seventeen years (G 3730-40).
4. In both H and G the fisherman's reaction to the sight of one of the tokens is immediate and violent:

   'Goddôt', quath Grim, 'þis ure eir,
   þat shal ben louerd of Denemark!
   He shal ben king, strong and stark.
   (H 606-8)

   dô erkande er sich zehant
   wie er getobet hâte
   und vie sich alsô drâte
   mit beiden handen in daz hâr.
   (G 3306-9)

   In W, as we have seen, a comparable change of heart (this time in the wife) is less explicitly related to either token, but is still placed quite close to the mention of the second of these (the armour). In all three texts the wife brings food and/or water to the hero. In W she merely tries to rouse him with the second of these (W 5454-7), but in both H and G she offers him a great deal more, Leve promising to bring

   'Bred and chese, butere and milk,
   Pastees and flaunes,'
   (H 643 f.)

   the wife of the vischare, ir aller besten spise (G 2889), although in the sequel Gregorius will accept only water and ein ranft von haberbrôte (G 2892) and Havelok is represented as eating only a lof… and more (H 653).

As often happens with cognate episodes of this type, no single version of those surviving presents all the common features in the most convincing way. But it can hardly be doubted that behind all three of them there must have existed very much the same basic sequence of incident, in which a fisherman and his wife who at first treat the hero very roughly undergo a complete change of heart after catching sight of some (miraculous) token which serves to establish his identity. It is, of course, quite possible that even in its early (twelfth-century) form, variant versions of some of its features had been developed—now the man, now the woman, may have constituted the principal threat to the hero's life. But what is more surprising than the variation in individual detail is the tenacity of the ensemble, and never more so than in Hartmann's poem. Here the pressures of the pious legend as a whole have modified the contours of the primitive episode much less than might have been expected. With his external circumstances changed beyond recognition the vischere yet remains constant to his old ways. He is not afflicted with poverty or by any servile status, but he is still covetous; he is now supposedly an agent of the Divine Providence that leads the sinner to salvation, but no gloss of sanctity has rubbed off upon him.¹⁹ On the contrary, he develops a sadistic turn of irony that makes him more purely evil than Grim,²⁰ and the gap of seventeen years which separates the first part of his story from the second is not used to make plausible any creeping sense of remorse on his part; he admits later that he had dismissed Gregorius from his mind as soon as he had left him on the rock (G 3648 f.) and he is clearly his old and obnoxious self when the messengers from Rome appear. This has the effect of making his 'conversion' as sudden and unexpected as that of Grim, or of the wife of the fisherman in W. All in all, the legend seems to have upset the primitive structure of the episode much less than the episode has upset that of the legend, and the malice of the fisherman is stressed to a degree that makes it difficult to hold firmly to the notion that the sufferings of Gregorius are altogether the result of God's anger at his sins (see G 2678 f.) and not, to some extent at least, the work of the man

der den salderîchen
sô ungezogenlîchen
in sînen dürften emphie
und die übele an im begie
daz er in durch sînen haz
sazte, dâ er noch saz,
ûf den dürren wilden stein
und im dâ sîniu bein
slôz in die îsenhalten.
(G 3241-9)

II

No such tension exists in H between the traditional characterization of the fisherman and his function in the story; indeed, with one important exception, the English version seems likely to stand closer to the primitive scene than either of the German examples had done. This exception concerns the relationship of Grim to Godard. The English fisherman does not—impelled by a mixture of economic necessity and original sin—act on his own behalf, but as the instrument of an evil master, and this modification brings him to some degree within the orbit of the much better-known character-type of the hired assassin who fails, through pity, to carry out his orders. The two types have some obvious features in common²¹ and it is thus not surprising that Grim should sometimes have been regarded as an example of the second. Creek compared his dealings with Godard with those of Saber with the mother of Bevis of Hamtoune,²² while G. Bordman has lately rejected Stith Thompson's view of Grim as a benevolent fisherman²³ in favour of seeing him as a compassionate executioner.²⁴ But Grim is still set apart from most other examples of this character by the whole-heartedness with which he complies with Godard's wishes, and this characteristic seems a legacy from the story of the brutal fisherman. Nor does it entirely disappear after H 606 ff., since when he returns to Godard to announce his 'success', he enters into the part with rather disquieting relish:

       'Louerd, don ich haue
þat þou me bede of þe knaue:
He is drenched in þe flod,
Abouten his hals an anker god;
He is witer-like ded,
Eteth he neure more bred;
He liþ drenched in þe se.
Yif me gold and oþer fe,
þat y mowe riche be,
And with þi chartre make me fre,
For þu ful wel bi-hetet me,
þanne i last spak with þe!'
(H 667-78)

From one point of view the assertiveness of the first half of this passage is reasonable enough. Executioners who turn compassionate in a watery rather than a woodland setting cannot in the nature of things produce the heart of an animal or some garment soaked in an animal's blood as proof of their efficiency, and so Grim, in spelling out his message so carefully (what he tells Godard four times is true) may simply be trying to make good this lack. But lines 674 ff. seem more gratuitous, and the total effect of the passage is to resurrect the figure of the brutal and venal fisherman that should really have passed from the scene with the discovery of the kyne-merk. Because of this a certain ambiguity clings to the lines which describe Grim's flight from Godard after the latter has taken up an unexpectedly moral stance (bou haues don a wicke dede (H 688)) and repudiated him:

Grim bouchte to late, bat he ran
Fro bat traytour, bat wicke man,
(H 691 f.)

since traytour might here have the sense of 'one who betrays any person that trusts him' (the first of those recorded for the noun in OED) rather than 'one who is false to his allegiance to his sovereign' (the second). In other words, Godard's lack of reliability as an employer may just as well have been uppermost in Grim's mind (and that of the author) at this point as his treachery towards Havelok. But if so this is the last point at which we are reminded of the fisherman's earlier character; after H 692 he settles down firmly into the groove of helpful virtue and never again leaves it.

He had never really left it at all in the French versions of the story, where he has no personal contact of any kind with Odulf, Godard's counterpart.²⁵ But at the same time he is connected with a group of characters who are very far from respectable, and who prove as fatal to Haveloc's mother and retainers as Godard was to be to his sisters. These are the uthlages met with by the Danish fugitives on their way to England. In Gaimar's version they are mentioned twice: first when Kelloc, Grim's daughter, tells Haveloc of their earlier escape from Denmark; second when Haveloc, in his turn, relates the same events to Sigar the Danish earl.²⁶ In the first passage we learn that everyone in the boat apart from Grim, his wife, and the children, was drowned by pirates who attacked them on their crossing, and that the survivors owed their lives to the fact that the fisherman was known to the attackers

'Mis pere esteit lur cunuissant,
Pur co garirent li enfant—
E jo e vus e mi dui frere—
Par la preiere de mun pere.
(Gaimar 431-4)

In Haveloc's later version of this exactly the same facts are given, but the hero seems to have forgotten just why he had been spared (jo gari, se sai en quel guise (584)). This difference in precision corresponds in miniature to that noted at the beginning of this article between the ME author's account of Grim's treatment of Havelok and Havelok's own. The distance which separates the English Grim's willingness to drown Havelok and the French Grim's failure to prevent the pirates from drowning his mother is, of course, very considerable, but it should not blind us to the essential similarity of pattern between the two versions:

1. Grim is the friend or willing accomplice of ruthless and powerful associates.
2. These murder one or more of Havelok's blood-relations.
3. Grim, who had been unable to prevent this crime, is yet able to preserve the boy's life.

It is much easier to perceive these similarities than to establish which version of the common elements stands closest to that of the Ur-Havelok, but it at least seems unlikely that Gaimar would have developed his own version directly from one resembling the English account.²⁷ Our poet's conception of Grim and of his relationship with Godard is surely too detailed and vivid to have been removed without leaving more trace than the three points of contact listed above. It would certainly seem more likely that a terse and rather colourless account such as that of Gaimar should have been elaborated to produce something more lively. But there is in any case no reason why there should not have existed an intermediate (or supplementary) version that would have provided a more tangible springboard for both departures, and if we wish to indulge our fancy it would not be difficult to construct one such with the help of stories such as those of Tristan, Apollonius and Octavian, which in other episodes show points of similarity with our story:²⁸ Havelok might, for example, have been sold to merchants or kidnapped by outlaws, and subsequently rescued by Grim. But if the relative 'authenticity' of the English and French poems must remain a matter of dispute there is nothing vague or obscure about their different effectiveness as literature. Like much else in the English romance, the character and conduct of Grim may be 'honeycombed with inconsistencies and difficulties'²⁹ when judged by limited and a priori notions of what constitutes plausible human behaviour, but the self-consistency of his opposite number in the Lai and in Gaimar seems a very tepid virtue when set against the excitement generated by his own less predictable behaviour. And in helping to produce this excitement the story of the brutal fisherman has played a vital part.

Notes

¹Havelok (Alt- und Mittelenglische Texte I) ed. F. Holthausen 'Heidelberg 1928'.

²Le Lai d'Haveloc and the Haveloc episode in Gaimar's Estorie des Engleis, both of which are given in A. Bell's edition of the Lai (Manchester 1925).

³ See for example the representatives of the type found in the stories of Guy of Warwick and Apollonius of Tyre (lines 9806-45 of the Caius MS. of Guy and 634-65 of the eighth book of the Confessio Amantis). This simplified view of Grim was accepted by Stith Thompson, who listed the episode under his type R 131.4 ('Fisherman rescues abandoned child') in his Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Copenhagen 1955-8).

⁴ In a still later description of the same events, Ubbe, the Danish earl, sticks rather more closely to the facts:

Hwan Grim saw, pat he was so fayr,
And wiste, he was pe rihte eir,
Fro Denemark ful sone he fledde
(H 2234-6)

It is true that the primary account had made no mention of the impact of Havelok's beauty on his captors, but this motif is of importance in at least one other version of the episode; see below n¹⁷.

⁵The Lay of Havelok the Dane ed. W. W. Skeat, rev. K. Sisam (Oxford 1950).

⁶Middle English Metrical Romances (New York 1930), p. 98.

⁷ 'The Author of "Havelok the Dane"' Englische Studien XLVIII (1914-15) 201.

⁸ Ibid. 194.

⁹ ed. F. Neumann (Deutsche Klassiker des Mittelalters, N.F. II) (Wiesbaden 1958). In what concerns the fisherman as in other parts of the legend, Hartmann's treatment is more elaborate than that of either of the French versions. For the relation of these to G, see H. Schottmann 'Gregorius und Gregoire' Zeitschrift fur Deutsches Altertum und Deutsche Literatur XCIV (1965) 81-3; for Hartmann's additions to the episode discussed in the pages which follow, ibid., 91 f. and the notes to lines 2821 ff., 3055 ff. and 3095-9 in Neumann's edition.

¹⁰ ed. J. M. N. Kapteyn (Bonn 1926). Reference must also be made to the fifteenth-century romance of Le Chevalier du Papegau which, cognate with W for much of its length but not derived from it, has often preserved the material common to both in more authentic form; see Saran 'Ueber Wirnt von Gravenberg und den Wigalois' Beiträge zur Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache und Literatur XXI (1896) 336 ff.

¹¹ ed. A. Leitzmann (Altdeutsche Textbibliothek XII) (Halle 1955), 142.11-144.16.

¹² He is himself the child of her incestuous union with her brother.

¹³ A much abbreviated version of the same scene is found in Le Chevalier du Papegau p. 68 f. (see n. 10 above); it must therefore have been already present in Wirnt's source. But some of the detail of W could well have been taken directly from G, both from the episode under consideration and the earlier scene in which two fishermen discover the infant Gregorius after he has been committed to the sea (G 939-1216). Hartmann's Iwein was certainly laid under contribution for such later details as the discovery of the hero by a group of ladies and his lamentation on recovering his senses (Iwein 3359-593; for a discussion of these borrowings see R. Bethge Wirnt von Gravenberg (Berlin 1881) p. 59 ff.).

¹⁴ The same contrast is implied by what we are allowed to hear of the conversation between the fisherman and his wife after the robbery in Le Chevalier du Papegau (the scene itself is never described by the author).

¹⁵ Like Sigar the Danish earl (= Ubbe H) in the French versions. Here twofold proof of royal birth is provided by the miraculous flame (Gaimar 633-40, Lai 833-40) and by the ability to sound a horn that had belonged to Haveloc's father, King Guntier (Gaimar 670-724, Lai 879-914).

¹⁶ Wirnt has not mentioned it since the hero's departure from his mother's home. At the beginning of W it had figured chiefly as a protective talisman (W 610-12), but by the time it is given to Wigalois by his mother it may also have been meant to serve as a token by which he and his father Gawain could recognize each other (W 1367-75).

¹⁷ Compare G 2835 f. in which we are told (at the very beginning of the episode)

Des übelen vischæres wîp
erbarmte sich über sînen lip.

¹⁸ For the widespread diffusion of this motif independently of the story of the fisherman, see K. H. Jackson The International Popular Tale and Early Welsh Tradition (Cardiff 1961) pp. 25-9.

¹⁹ In this he contrasts sharply with his counterpart in the related story of Martinian; see H. W. J. Kroes 'Die Gregorlegende' Neophilologus XXXVIII (1954) 170.

²⁰ In his tardy confession of his sins to Gregorius he admits

darnâch volcte ich iuwer bete
wan daz ich ez in hônschaft tete.
(G 3643 f.)

²¹ In making the effective cause of the wife's compassion the beauty of the hero's body (instead of the perception of some talisman or token of rank), Wirnt has made the overlapping of the two types more obvious than ever. Compare lines 85-7 of King Horn:

Payns him wolde slen,
Oþer al quic flen,
ɜef his fairnesse nere.

²² 'Character in the "Matter of England" Romances' JEGP X (1911) 432.

²³ See n.3 above.

²⁴Motif-Index of the English Metrical Romances (Helsinki 1963) pp. 10 and 53 (where the episode is listed under ^* K 512.8).

²⁵ Odulf is responsible for the death of Guntier, Haveloc's father, and persecutes all those who had supported him (Lai 81 f.), but his act of regicide is so briefly presented (Odulf l'oscist par traisun (Lai 35, 603)) as to have much less impact than Godard's murder of Havelok's sisters in H 465-80.

²⁶ Lines 424-34 and 580-6. The corresponding passages in the Lai are lines 609-14 and 782-6, but these are preceded by another more detailed version, narrated by the author himself (lines 110-22).

²⁷ French and Hale boldly declare that 'the French poets replace this episode [H 519 ff.] with an attack by pirates, after which Grim saves Havelok from the sea.' (op. cit., p. 94), but unfortunately produce no supporting evidence for their belief (they do not even indicate the points that the English and French episodes have in common).

²⁸ For the relationship of the first and second of these to the story see A. Bell, op. cit., pp. 47-9 and H. Newstead 'The Enfances of Tristan and English Tradition' Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of A. C. Baugh (Philadelphia 1961) pp. 169-85.

²⁹ES XLVIII (1914-15) 199.