Ancient Tales Research Articles

The Art of Manora: an Ancient Tale of Feminine Power Preserved in South-East Asian Theatre

When is a widely-known fairy tale more than a story? Poh Sim Plowright recently went to South Thailand and North Malaysia to examine the relevance of the ‘birdwoman’ folk tale to the lives of the villagers1 in those two regions. Here the local people still participate in a ritual dramatization of a story which for them represents a crucial renewal of life in their yearly calendar – a celebration of the roots of feminine magical power which goes back to the ancient historical south-east Asian practice by which a victorious ruler would carry back as booty to his kingdom the wives and dancers of the vanquished. Since most of the members of these royal harems were mediums gifted with special powers of healing and communicating with spirits, they were seen as valuable additions to a ruler's aura of divinity – and consequently to his terrestrial power. More importantly, the theatrical art form known asManora, which enshrines the ‘birdwoman’ tale, is said to have been founded by two royal female trance mediums, regarded as primal healers and guardians of a life-renewing elixir: thus, each performance also serves as a shamanic and healing ritual. The performances here described by Poh Sim Plowright also have links with drama in China and Japan, and at the end of her article she explores the powerful connection with W. B. Yeats's celebrated ‘birdwoman’ play,At the Hawk's Well, which features a ‘Hawk’ Woman guarding a ‘well of miraculous water’ against male intrusion. Poh Sim Plowright is Director of the Centre for the Study of Noh Drama and Lecturer in Oriental Drama at Royal Holloway College, University of London.

The Novellino, or, One hundred ancient tales: an edition and translation based on the 1525 Gualteruzzi editio princeps

The Novellino, or, One hundred ancient tales: an edition and translation based on the 1525 Gualteruzzi editio princeps

The Death of the Imagination

Elizabeth Sewell The Death of the Imagination In the NORTH SIDE aisle OF Hereford Cathedral there hangs that wonderful old document, the Mappa Mundi.Whenever you go there, turning into the cool nave from the long line ofrose- filled and swan-patrolled gardens down theWye (for each cathedral city seems to have its appropriate weather and for Hereford it is midsummer ), there is always a group of people to be found in front of Mappa Mundi, gazing at that work of the cartographer. Jerusalem stands there in the center of the earth, a little citadel surmounted by spire and cross, and one can amuse oneself by considering the very odd shape of Spain or Arabia, or the monsters lurking in the corners. If you look in the right place, not very far from Inde, you will find a territory labeled Paradise Terrestre, the Earthly Paradise. Reprinted from Thought 27 (1953): 413-445. © 1953 Fordham University Press, NewYork. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of Fordham University Press. Logos 1:1 1997 The Death of the Imagination Anyone who knows about the mind knows that time and space inside it are quite different from time and space outside it, and the further into the mind one gets, the queerer do they become, as dreams will testify. For the thirteenth-century map maker, the Earthly Paradise was contemporary with himself. It was no relic of an ancient tale dating back to God knows when, but something existing at the same time as himself, though considerably removed in distance.We need for the present this same frame ofmind, for it is an imaginative one. This is our first step into the imagination, which is its own Mappa Mundi. There will be others to follow, for one can only study the imagination by consenting to it, in part at least. Reason will do what it can, but the only entry to this world is by affirmation ofits ways; and ifthis seem already to you like the death of reason, it has to be accepted in faith as no more than a sleep in a darkness which, after all goodnights, is not a final one but merely this world turning itself in its proper hemispheres of day and night. Without your consent, we can advance no further and Paradise will be Lost for good and all. What an image the Earthly Paradise gives the mind! There are those who claim to know what it is like. "Men say that Paradise terrestre is the highest lande in all the worlde, and it is so high that it toucheth nere to the cyrcle of the Mone...."1 That is Sir John Mandeville, but he adds, with a curious pathos in so noble and fullblooded a liar, "OfParadise can I not speake properly for I haue not bene there." Milton, too, is a rather odd mixture of sobriety—"A happy rural seat of various view"2—and subtropical exuberance. Each soul would image it for himself, one asking one thing and one another: a stretch of black and white squared marble tiUng, between box hedges and rose borders; water in small stone fountains ; wild rocky streams down open valleys full of tumbled boulders and birds sailing; sunflowers along the edge ofa wood.Yet we know this country when we meet it in others, "a most pleasant Mountainous Countrey, beautified withWoods,Vinyards, Fruits of 1S5 156 Logos all sorts, Flowers also, Springs and Fountains, very delectable to behold."3 All park and garden images, from the Song of Songs to Elizabethan emblem books and the rose garden in Alice in Wonderland, have this familiarity about them, as if we knew this place and had only to remember it with an effort ofconcentration. It is this too which makes the image ofthe defiled garden so powerful . A ragged wilderness where once was cultivation and abundance brings home to the imagination the vision of what Paradise might have grown into after Fall, as ifat the very moment Eve sank her teeth into the apple the weeds began to germinate and grow, as though the hair ofthe ground rose slightly, and now The rusted nails fell from die knots That held the...

Engendering inspiration: visionary strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D

In a culture where passivity and receptivity are stereotypically deemed feminine traits, while authority and power are typically associated with maleness, the idea of poetic inspiration--which invests an individual with authority through the act of reception--sets up a conflict between traditional gender roles. In Engendering Inspiration, Helen Sword explores this conflict in the visionary poetics of three important modernist poets, Rainer Maria Rilke, D. H. Lawrence, and H.D. Sword argues that these three poets were paradigmatic in their struggle to come to terms with the fundamentally gendered paradoxes of inspiration, whether by appealing to ancient prophetic traditions, by subverting existing cultural stereotypes, or by engaging in revisionist mythmaking.The first three chapters of the book present a broad overview of the visionary poetry and poetics of each writer. The final two chapters, in contrast, employ closer reading and a more comparative analysis, discussing how Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D., through their poetic revisions of the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and Leda and Zeus, rendered these two ancient tales of gender conflict into modern metaphors for poetic inspiration. In addition, a substantial introductory section traces connections between inspiration and gender in ancient and medieval prophetic and mystical traditions as well as in the works of other twentieth-century poets.The subjects of inspiration, gender, and modernist literature have not yet been examined together in any major critical study. This book will be important reading for students and scholars of literary theory, feminist theory, and literary modernism.Helen Sword is Assistant Professor of English, Indiana University.

Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood (review)

Reviewed by: Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood Tim Brennan Marc Shell . Children of the Earth: Literature, Politics and Nationhood. New York: Oxford, 1993. 353 pp. $35.00. When push comes to shove, says Shell, this thing we call identity is all about consanguinity. Ancient tales and legends are conspicuously drawn to stories of genealogy and biological kinship. If we examine the soberer and more literal era of modernity when science takes over, "blood"—as paternity, racial mixing, or genetics—always seems to play the final arbiter of meaningful belonging. The title of the book, then, can easily mislead. Unlike so many other books of the last decade, "nation" here implies neither a study of political states, immigration, narrative, or aesthetic traditions but the image and reality of siblinghood. Although a lot of what Shell explores in the book bears on this modern sense of the nation-state, Shell leaves those sorts of interests to the imagination, digging instead in the primordial caves of the bonds that tie. Swinging back and forth from earnest ethnographic and medical definitions of consanguinity to literary and popular cultural images of kinship (Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, Hamlet's mother, the famous Siamese twins Chang and Eng, Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson) the book covers an immense and wildly varied array of examples. One indication of the thoroughness with which he traces out his central idea: the endnotes take up only slightly less space than the book itself. With the citations and the argument of almost equal length, we get the sense that the matter has been pinned down with an inescapable firmness. But I don't think this is so; I kept wanting more of a defense of the categories and of the methodology, rather than more examples. For one thing, the sheer weight of difference among the cases studied gives the argument an idiosyncratic feel, probing as they do Shell's own highly particular set of expertises, impressive though they are. In one section exploring bilingual roadsigns in Canada, Shell is quickly on to Roman vestal virgins in the next, moving then to the animal cruelty movement before musing over an epigram from Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. The performance itself is astounding and pleasurable; the illustrations alone (often culled from obscure sources) are always precisely appropriate and evocative, as in the film-still from Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast or the remarkable drawing of Mark Twain on a city street beholding a hoarding advertisement for a famous tour of Siamese twins. But if evidence can be found in such divergent places, what, one wonders, could not be used as fuel. Marked by an impressive historical range, there is too little sense of the radically different historical understanding of siblinghood's functions in these times and places. If the warrant for the thematic and evidentiary jumping is given in the wonderful point he makes about the contradiction [End Page 201] found at the heart of belonging by "blood," the very universality of the point makes the cases themselves seem hopelessly partial and easily extendible. That point is that the logic of the blood tie, far from marking off with unarguable precision one community from another, makes us all "children of the earth" but (and here's the tension) all equally powerless to demonstrate paternity. It is easier to believe, he argues, that we are all brothers and sisters in the firm, but unsatisfying, sense of being a species than that the person I call my brother or sister is sprung from the same biological parents. Birth papers are easily faked, phenotypical resemblance is notoriously untrustworthy, and (as Hortense Spillers once remarked in a different context): "mama's baby, papa's maybe." But there is an admirable against-the-grain quality to Shell's demon-stration that "consanguinity is ultimately unknowable and hence fictive." Cutting the props out from under arguments for the race-nation, the strategy, however, creates an unexpected methodological problem, and Shell does not worry about it enough. He switches with troublesome ease between societal customs and literary conventions, between metaphor and sharp ethnographic or genetic definitions. For example, siblinghood in one of his cases...

Ancient Greece, MBAs, the Health Service and Georg: Part 1

Highlights the key elements of a mentor scheme which is running to support the NHS students on the part‐time MBA programme at Durham University Business School. Outlines the background and scope of the MBA programme in the context of the Northern Regional Health Authority. Examines the origins of mentoring and shows how the key elements from the ancient Greek tale are used as a model for the mentor system. Goes on to look at many aspects of the system in relation to both the mentee and the mentor. Draws on the writings of Georg Simmel to explain the uniqueness of mentoring and attempts to offer some solutions to the problems involved in the scheme. Forms part of an ongoing research project.

Semites, Iranians, Greeks and Romans: Studies in Their Interactions (review)

Reviewed by: Semites, Iranians, Greeks and Romans: Studies in Their Interactions Peter W. Flint Jonathan A. Goldstein . Semites, Iranians, Greeks and Romans: Studies in Their Interactions. Brown Judaic Studies 217. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990. Pp. x + 257 Jonathan Goldstein is best known among scholars of the Bible, early Judaism and nascent Christianity for his books on 1 and 2 Maccabees in the Anchor Bible series. In this volume of collected essays and reviews he provides a panorama of his other writings and research over a period of 23 years, ranging from 1966 to 1988. The eleven articles reveal the author's wide range of interests and expertise, and are divided into two main sections. Part One is aptly entitled "Intercultural Borrowing," and contains five essays, two of which deal with intertestamental history. "Jewish Acceptance and Rejection of Hellenism" proposes that the Jews of Palestine were initially not hostile to Hellenism, but came to reject many of its traits as a result of their experiences in the "critical period" (i.e., the oppressive rule of Antiochus IV). In "Tales of the Tobiads," Goldstein examines the problems and apparent contradictions in Josephus' account of Joseph the Tobiad and his son Hyrcanus in Book xii of the Antiquities. In the remaining three essays of this section, the town of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates features prominently. "The Central Composition of the West Wall of the Synagogue of Dura-Europos" deals with the synagogue's religious, historical and architectural significance, while "The Syriac Bill of Sale from Dura-Europos" examines P. Dura 28, one of the oldest Syriac papyri (243 CE). Goldstein furnishes an annotated transliteration and translation of the text, a brief synopsis of its grammar and orthography, and a detailed commentary. In "Review of Goodenough," the author evaluates vols. IX-XII of Erwin R. Goodenough's renowned Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, making frequent reference to the Dura synagogue. According to Goldstein, Goodenough's "solid achievement" in the twelve volumes of Jewish Symbols was his comprehensive collection of a vast body of figured remains, which can be ascribed only to Jews, and his demonstration that these contain a limited number of motifs, some from Jewish sources and other clearly pagan in origin. Part Two, "Religious Resistance to Foreign Rule," contains the remaining six essays, one of which is "Uruk Prophecy," where Goldstein deals with a fragmentary tablet discovered at Uruk in 1969. This text belongs to a genre of Babylonian literature for which he proposes the term "present-future prophecy," in preference [End Page 85] to "Akkadian prophecy" (A. K. Grayson & W. G. Lambert) or "Akkadian apocalypse" (W. W. Hallo). Specific intertestamental books are the subject of three more essays, one of which is self-explanatory: "The Testament of Moses: Its Content, Its Origin, and Its Attestation in Josephus." In "The Date of the Book of Jubilees," the author argues that Jubilees was most probably written between 169 and 167 BCE. This contrasts with the dates proposed by R. H. Cares (late in the reign of John Hyrcanus I [134-104 BCE]) and James VanderKam (between 161 [pace Goldstein] and 140 BCE). In the "Apocryphal Book of Baruch," Goldstein concludes that Baruch was translated into Greek from a Hebrew original which was composed by a single author in 163 BCE, during the reign of Antiochus V. The remaining two items focus on the books of Maccabees with which the author is so familiar. In his "Review of Doran's Temple Propaganda," Goldstein examines Robert Doran's proposals regarding the purpose and character of 2 Maccabees. He agrees with several theses: for instance, that the Abridged History (2 Macc 3:1-15:39) should be viewed in the wider context of ancient Greek historiography, and fits the pattern of ancient tales depicting how a god miraculously defends his temple and his chosen territory. However, Goldstein is more critical of other aspects of Doran's book: for example, his treatment of the prefixed letters in 2 Maccabees ( 1:1-10a and 1:10b-2:18). The final essay in the collection is entitled "How the Authors in I and II Maccabees Treated the 'Messianic' Promises." In response to the series of disasters...

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West by Wallace Stegner

Reviews 65 rituals, a search to connect not only with her own inner strengths and powers but with those she recalls in childhood memories of her grandmother. The result is an unusual illustration of the relationship of a specific indi­ vidual to mythology. This true story moves through a series of montage-like adventures with archetypal images and events rising and falling through centu­ ries of human behavior, as if our everyday linear time no longer existed: a distraught madonna in a play in Marsala, wailing loudly and waving her hands in the air, calls to life the stereotypical bereaved Demeter, whose daughter, Persephone, was abducted by the lustful god of the underworld, Pluto, as he swept her offin his chariot. Shortly after, Lloyd relates how she escapes from the Fiat of an amorous young Italian, intent on her seduction. As the story progresses, both the author and the reader seem to move through layer upon layer and layer of human behavior, distributed over centuries. What the reader begins to realize (sooner perhaps than the author herself) is that Susan Lloyd is looking for something deeper than family, deeper than her Christianity, deeper than the ancient Madonna Addolorata, and deeper even than the ancient tales of sorrowing Demeter and her lost child. Slowly we comprehend that Susan Lloyd is looking for something deep, deep within herself. That she finds it—and in a truly unorthodox but dramatically commu­ nicable form—creates a thrilling conclusion for author and reader alike. CHARLES L. ADAMS University ofNevada, Las Vegas Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. By Wallace Stegner. (New York: Random House, 1992. 227 pages, $21.00.) The public and private voices of Wallace Stegner come together in this eloquent, often deeply moving collection of essays. Divided into three sections (“Personal,” “Habitat,” and “Witnesses”), the essays in this volume include Stegner’s reflections on his own itinerant life in the American West, on the psychology and ecology of the West as “living space,”and on other writers who have contemplated the West or “place” more generally—including John Steinbeck, George R. Stewart, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Norman Maclean, and Wendell Berry. The introduction alone is worth the price of the book; here Stegner reiterates his famous description of “the remaining western wilderness”as “the geography of hope,” but he qualifies this hopefulness with new reservations. “Yes, the West is hope’s native home,”writes Stegner, “but there are varieties and degrees of hope, and the wrong kinds, in excessive amounts, go with human failure and environmental damage as boom goes with bust.”Earlyin the introduction and in many of the essays, the writer castigates the “exaggerated, uninformed, unrealistic, greedy expectation” that has frequently led to disap­ 66 'WesternAmerican Literature pointment in the West, mainly because of the failure to recognize and adapt to the region’s environmental limitations. But Stegner nonetheless concludes his introductory comments and the book itself by pointing out the “surge of inextinguishable western hope” he feels when he considers the many fine writers working in the West today. For him, the contemporary literature of the West is what gives us reason to hope that our society “will work out some sort of compromise between what must be done to earn a living and what must be done to restore health to the earth, air, and water.” The personal essays in the first section of the book offer revealing accounts of Stegner’s childhood migrations throughout the Northwest and the Great Basin. But in light of the essays on place and placedness later in the collection, all three of the personal narratives become archetypal renderings of the west­ ern American experience, the transience and desolation as well as “the bigness, sparseness, space, clarity, and hopefulness.”The “Habitat”essays, informed by the writer’s thorough understanding of the history of western land use, effec­ tively complement Stegner’s personal and literary ruminations, creating a book of immense value for all students of the region “beyond the 98th meridian.” Literary scholars may already be familiar with some of the eight essays in the book’s concluding section, including the survey of western literature in...

The View from the Ghats: Traditional Exegesis of a Hindu Epic

The most popular book in northern India is a Hindi retelling of the ancient tale of Prince Rām and his wife, Sītāa, composed in about A.D. 1574 by the poet-saint Tulsīdās of Banaras. Throughout a vast region with a population of more than three hundred million people, this epic of some fourteen-thousand lines has come to be regarded not only as a great masterpiece of literature but also as a religious work of the highest inspiration—a status recognized by nineteenth-century British scholars who labeled it "the Bible of North India." To its audience it is known by several names: simply the Rāmāyaṇ(borrowing the title of the Sanskrit archetype that, for Hindi speakers, it has largely supplanted); the Tulsī Rāmāyaṇ(invoking its author); and also the Mānas(The lake), which is a condensation of its true title, Rāmcaritmānas(The lake of the acts of Rām). Encountering the last name for the first time, a reader from another culture might be puzzled by its central metaphor: why should the image of a lake be so closely associated with this celebrated saga of virtue, heroism, and devotion?

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales. Selected and Translated by Fanny Hagin Mayer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. (Copublished with Asian Folklore Studies.) xxi, 360 pp. Notes to the Stories, Glossary, Cross Reference Table, Bibliography of Sources, Alphabetical List of Titles, General Index. $22.50.

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan makes available for the first time in English a unique collection of Japanese folk tales. More than half of these tales have never before been translated. Fanny Hagin Mayer, a pioneer Western scholar in the field of Japanese folklore, has selected 347 folk tales from the standard Japanese reference work, the Meii. Ninety early collectors from throughout Japan, among them key figures such as Sasaki Kizen and Iwakura Ichiro, furnished tales for this selection. This remarkable anthology presents a vivid picture of centuries of Japanese folk culture. Ancient Tales in Modern Japan is an essential work for students of folklore and Japanese culture.

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan makes available for the first time in English a unique collection of Japanese folk tales. More than half of these tales have never before been translated. Fanny Hagin Mayer, a pioneer Western scholar in the field of Japanese folklore, has selected 347 folk tales from the standard Japanese reference work, the Meii. Ninety early collectors from throughout Japan, among them key figures such as Sasaki Kizen and Iwakura Ichiro, furnished tales for this selection. This remarkable anthology presents a vivid picture of centuries of Japanese folk culture. Ancient Tales in Modern Japan is an essential work for students of folklore and Japanese culture.

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales.

Ancient Tales in Modern Japan: An Anthology of Japanese Folk Tales.

Tocqueville's Models of Law, Religion and Democracy in America: Virtue, Interest, and the Duty to Rescue

Two thousand years ago a Jewish lawyer demanded a definition of the term “neighbor.” … Whether the tale of the Samaritan answered his perplexities we cannot say. But he would surely have been astonished had he been informed that there were two answers to his question, one if he was asking as a lawyer, another if he was asking as a layman. To him, neighbor was neighbor and duty, duty. Perhaps this ancient lawyer's tale has a moral for law and lawyers today. If you are not under a duty to “fease,” then nonfeasance can never be held actionable. But if you do engage in feasance toward somebody, then under most circumstances you must “fease” carefully. Moral: Don't ever “fease” unless you have to! This essay explores the relationships among law, morality, and democracy in the American system as expressed in the development of tort rules regarding the duty to rescue someone in peril. The formative period of this legal development occurred during the period of industrialization and urbanization in America, in particular during the period between the Civil War and World War I. Religious developments in this era were principally expressed in the emergence of what came to be known as the “Social Gospel.”

Sprookjes in tijden van “crisis”

The present paper takes Apuleius’s tale of “Cupid and Psyche” (2nd century A.D.) as itspoint of departure. Though often taken for granted as one of the oldest literary fairy talesin the Western tradition, the text itself in fact defies such “easy” categorisations. Afterconsidering the ways in which scholars in the past have attempted to bridge the gapbetween this Ancient tale and the actual fairy tale genre, I will suggest an alternativeapproach, based on the notion that fairy tale-like narratives tend to self-consciously participatein the dynamics of their respective literary fields, especially in times of relativecrisis. This approach affords us with the opportunity to study Latin texts like “Cupid andPsyche” in relation to other fairy tale-like narratives, not only as part of a tradition, but asa recurring literary phenomenon in its own right.

Lenormand's Asie and Anderson's the Wingless Victory

`W 7ITHIN THE space of five years two dramatists working on opposite sides of the Atlantic made use of the same ancient tale of Medea and Jason as material for their tragedies. The appearance of these works can scarcely be cited as phenomenal, since the reinterpretation of Greek myths by modern dramatists has been widespread. Some of the most exciting moments in the twentieth-century theater have occurred as a result of a neoclassical trend. Giraudoux, Anouilh, Cocteau, O'Neill, Eliot, Sartre, and a number of less known playwrights all tried their hand at renovating Greek legend between 1900 and 1950.

Anchises and Aphrodite

This ancient tale has naturally been recognized by modern scholars for what it is—a story of the Great Mother and her paramour; but several features appear to me to have been given less examination than they deserve, in view of their own peculiarity and the obvious antiquity of the myth.That it is pre-Greek is fairly clear from the names of the principal actors. Anchises yields no tolerable meaning in Greek, and we do not know to what speech it belongs—possibly Phrygian. Aphrodite is, of course, no Greek goddess at all. The tale was known to Greek saga-men about the tenth century B.C., and is fully told for the first time, so far as our surviving records go, in a document possibly of the seventh century—the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Connected as it is, though loosely, with the Troy-saga, it may quite possibly go back to Minoan-Mycenaean times, as that does. The features which I think worthy of further investigation are the fate of Anchises after his enjoyment of the goddess' favours, and in particular the effect upon him of the thunderbolt with which he was smitten.

Ancient Tales from Many Lands: A Collection of Folk Stories

Ancient Tales from Many Lands: A Collection of Folk Stories

XI.—Athelston, a Westminster Legend

Athelston is one of the most vigorous and independent of Middle English romances, yet it is one about which least is known. Various writers have commented on this “strange neglect,” but in the years since 1829 when Hartshorne first published the text in his Ancient Metrical Tales, it has only twice been made the subject of serious study. Zupitza's edition in Englische Studien XIII-XIV (1889–1890) was primarily textual in character and devoted less than two pages to questions of origin. In Englische Studien XXXVI (1906), Prof. Gerould discussed “Social and Historical Reminiscences in Athelston.” Frankly accepting Zupitza's brief conjectures as to the original personages and events of the story, he concerned himself with the study of sworn brotherhood, a custom prominently referred to in the romance, and with the interesting possibility that the characterization of king and bishop in the romance had been influenced by the vivid personalities of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Certainly their memory was as living for the fourteenth century as it had been for the twelfth since it was continually renewed by the pilgrim hosts at Becket's shrine. A story which had to tell of the quarrel between a king and a churchman might well borrow something from the traditional violence of King Henry and the fearless courage of Becket, but such influence in Athelston, if it existed at all, must have affected simply the characterization of the two dominant personalities; in other respects, in motive, detail and incident, there is no real correspondence between history and the romance. In a story so closely knit as Athelston it is unprofitable to believe that it had absorbed unrelated incidents or that it had varied very much from whatever was its basic type. From the false accusation brought by the king's friend against his sworn brother, through the king's quarrel with the archbishop who hurries to the defense of the king's sister and her husband, to the great climax when the accused pass through the ordeal by fire, the story pursues an almost inevitable course which allows for hardly one of the haphazard accretions usual in mediaeval romance.

Ancient Tales and Folk-Lore of Japan

Ancient Tales and Folk-Lore of Japan