6. Crystyabelle is driven away into Egypt, where she is graciously
received by the king. Desonelle finds refuge in the court of the king of
Nazareth.
7. Degrabelle, the son of Crystyabelle, is saved and brought up by the
king of Israel; the sons of Desonelle by the kings of Greece and
Jerusalem.
8. The father of Crystyabelle is not punished like Calamond in
_Torrent_, immediately after the heroâs return, but he dies at the end
of the poem, throwing himself down from the battlements.
9. Degrabelle is sent, when fifteen years old, into Egypt by his
adoptive father to sue for a spouse. In a joust he gains the hand of his
mother and marries her. On the very wedding-day the mother recognizes
her son by his escutcheon, and the marriage is instantly dissolved.
Quite differently does the story run in _Sir Torrent_. Leobertus,
fifteen years old, marches by order of the king of Jerusalem against his
father, and takes him prisoner, but at length solicits his release.
10. The tournament, which in both poems compasses the reunion of the
separated family, is brought on in a different manner. In _Eglamour_
Degrabelle himself proposes the hand of his mother as the prize in the
next tournament, to which his father comes. In _Torrent_ Desonelle,
hearing of the victories of the strange knight, supposes him to be her
spouse from his arms, and at her request a tournament is arranged. (Her
hand seems to have been likewise the prize, as may be gleaned from
l. 2440.)
11. At the very end of the poems two slight differences are to be noted:
in _Eglamour_, Degrabelle marries Organata, daughter of the king of
Sidon, whereas the sons of Torrent return into Greece and Jerusalem.
Eglamour is crowned prince of Artois; Torrent is elected Emperor of
Rome.
From this comparison we may conclude that _Torrent_ is not directly
founded upon _Eglamour_, or _vice versâ_; the differences are too great
to justify the supposition that either is drawn from the other.
Especially is the opinion of Halliwell, which I mentioned above, to be
rejected: _Sir Torrent_ cannot be founded on _Sir Eglamour_, simply
because it agrees more closely with the old legendary tale than _Syr
Eglamour_ does, and has preserved some essential features not to be
found in _Eglamour_, in which these are supplanted by others. Desonelle,
for instance, has two children according to the old legend, Crystyabelle
one; Torrent must fight and suffer in heathen lands like Eustache,
whereas Eglamour appears as a mere knight-errant. Further, neither in
the Eustache legend nor in _Torrent_ do we find the history of the son
who marries his mother, which motive the poet may have taken from the
legend of Pope Gregory, or perhaps from the tale of _Syr Degaré_.
But how can the resemblance of the leading features and the
discrepancies in particulars be explained? IÂ think the most probable
conjecture is, that an old poem, now lost, existed, with which the
authors of _Sir Eglamour_ and of _Sir Torrent_ were acquainted; but not
having a MS. of it, or knowing it by heart, both of them made up their
minds to rewrite the story in a well-known metre, changing, omitting,
adding whatever they liked, even filling up the gaps in their memories
by invention. Both of them recollected the first half of the story
better than the second.
That this poem was an English one seems to be shown by a good many
verbal coincidences in both poems; these I accordingly suppose to have
belonged to the lost original. They are, indeed, too frequent to be
counted simply amongst the large stock of conventional phrases which are
to be met with in every poem of this kind. Here they are:--
_Eglamour._