The Return Song in Medieval Romance and Ballad: King Horn and King Orfeo
The Return Song in Medieval Romance and Ballad: King Horn and King Orfeo
by John McLaughlin
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 88, No. 349 (Jul. - Sep., 1975), pp. 304-307
The Return Song in Medieval Romance and Ballad: King Horn and King Orfeo
After noting verbal similarities between the tail-rhyme version of King Horn, Horn Childe, and Maiden Rimnild, and the considerably later ballad Hind Horn, Professor Child, with characteristic restraint, says only that the likeness evinces a closer affinity of the oral tradition with the later English romance [Horn Childe] than with the earlier English [King Horn] or the French [Horn et Rymenhild], but no filiation. And were filiation to be accepted, there would remain the question of priority. It is often assumed, without any misgiving, that oral tradition must needs be younger [sic] than anything that was committed to writing some centuries ago; but this requires in each case to be made out; there is certainly no antecedent probability of that kind.[1]
To put aside for the moment the question of priority or derivation, it is indeed striking that the overall plot structure of both the romance and the ballad texts should shares o many narrative features, especially so if we assume that romance and ballad, having separate authors, occasions, and audiences, would have relatively little contact with one another. Professor Child's caution, of course, prevents us from making exactly this kind of complex assumption; equally, we are prevented by that same caution from leaping to any conclusions regarding audience, author, and occasion from simple facts of common features between the two narrative forms, striking though we might feel these to be.
Specifically, both Horn Childe and Hind Horn contain the complex of narrative elements that has been called by the generic term "Return Song" in comparative folklore studies such as those carried out by Professor Albert B. Lord in his Singer of Tales, which utilizes the modern Yugoslavic tradition for comparative purposes in analyzing the narrative structures of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Briefly, Lord analyzed this pattern, both in the modern Yugoslavic and in the Homeric case, as containing the following "tension of essences," or irreduciblen arrativec ontent: (1) Return after long exile (prison, the otherworld, various other adventures preventing speedy return); (2) Deceptive story, told to test the worthy (wife, steward, son); (3) Delayed recognition, through recognition token (ring, bow, talisman of some kind); (4) Restoration of ruler to throne (often involving massacre of usurpers), return to stability in kingdom.[2]
If we were attempting to demonstrate filiation or other literary relationship, we would be hard put to describe how a relatively complex narratives tructures uch as that outlined above is found in Homer (Laertes fails to recognize the deceptive Odysseus, even though his son is dressed in his own golden armor),[3] in Serbo-Croatian heroic poetry of the twentieth century, in medieval French romances, and in nineteenth-century Scottish ballads. Commonly shared subunits of this Return Song complex might be explained in terms of literary relationship, but if the far-flung cases are considered all together, an explanation much more reasonable than literary filiation can be found in our recognition of the basic narrative structure as that of one of the classic folktales of European oral tradition, surfacing in a number of literatures and periods. King Horn is not the only medieval English romance whose narrative structure is paralleled in modern popular ballads. The Auchinleck MS. contains one of the finest ornaments of medieval verse, Sir Orfeo (also found in two other Middle English manuscripts).[4] Unlike the classical tale and other medieval versions of this story, such as that of Robert Henryson,[5] the romance in the Auchinleck MSS (and in the two other manuscripts) ends happily, with the restoration of Orfeo to his throne, Queen Heurodys by his side. Moreover, the Child ballad on this theme, Child 19, which was collected in the Shetland Islands in the nineteenth century, agrees with the romance in this striking reversal of the classical tale.
Indeed, in analyzing Sir Orfeo, almost at once one finds oneself dealing with yet another Return Song, with delayed return from exile, deceptive story, recognition token, and final equilibrium all preserved in a perfect demonstration of the continuing operation of the "tension of essences." In this case the matter is clearer in the romance than in the nineteenth-century ballad (largely because the collector of the ballad apparently omitted large sections of the material in his transcription), but the essential nature of the Return Song complex is retained in the ballad, as in the romance, at least insofar as the queen is rescued from the king of fairyland:
He's taen his lady, and he's gaen hame,
And noo he's king ower a' his ain.[6]
We have, then, two medieval romances, each in a number of separate although not necessarily independent versions, together with parallel Child ballads on the same topics, and all containing the Return Song complex outlined as existing in Serbo-Croatian tradition to this day, as well as in Homer. The Return Song pattern unites all of these poems, from Homer throught he Child ballads, in a striking demonstration of the longevity and persistence of traditional story among the European peasantry (and even the aristocracy, if Sir Orfeo is not in fact minstrel verse).[7]
Child recognizes this pattern, without labeling it as such, when he describes The Kitchie-Boy, (Child 252) as "a modern 'adaptation' of King Horn, No. 17" (IV, 401). The shared lines between The Kitchie-Boy and King Horn add considerable weight to this judgment, but the similarities of course go far beyond mere line borrowing to shared narrative structure, in that The Kitchie-Boy, like all of the poems described here, is a complete Return Song, down to the last recognition token.
In the context demonstrated here, the likelihood of The Kitchie-Boy drawing upon the same traditional narrative sources, rather than upon the actual text of Child 17, is quite strong; however, this may be one case where the claims of literary borrowing are as strong as those of oral tradition. That is not so in the case of Child 19, King Orfeo, where the unnamed king from "da aste" rescues his queen of "da wast," Lady Isabel by name, from the clutches of "da king o Ferrie."[8] With none of the names remaining from the "original" versions, one might even be tempted to ask whether this poem is indeed merely conveniently labeled rather than accurately titled.
Once we recognize that not all rescues from fairyland need be by King Orfeo the gates of narrative swing open, and we begin to recognize the much wider field of medieval romance-and Child ballad-which the Return Song complex opens up to our analysis: Tam Lin, Thomas of Erceldoun, Sir Tristrem, Havelok, Amis and Amilounthe company enlarges by the moment. The Journey to the Otherworld, of which the Return Song is the happy conclusion, merits almost a third of the space in Wimberly's Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads.[9] Together, this cluster of thematic materials accounts for substantial portions of medieval romance and Child ballad alike. It becomes clear that to insist upon literary sources or borrowings in this area is to ignore the manifest evidence of popular oral tradition at work in the construction and design of these narrative poems. Thus, King Horn and Sir Orfeo stand side by side with their modern counterparts in the Child ballad collection as demonstration, not of the ingenuity of medieval minstrels, but of the enduring force of traditional narrative patterns in oral poetry.
JOHN McLAUGHLIN
La Salle College
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Footnotes:
1 Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, Vol. i (New York, 1956), 193.
2. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1960), 120-122, 242-259.
See also Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Structural Study of Myth," JOURNAL OF AMERICAN FOLKLORE, 68 (1955), 428-444.
3 Lord, 97, 177-179. See also Appendices III and IV.
4 A. J. Bliss, ed., Sir Orfeo: A Three Text Edition (Oxford, 1964).
5 "Orpheus and Eurydice," in The Poems and Fables of Robert Henryson, ed. Harvey H. Wood (Edinburgh, 1958), 120-148.
6 Child, vol. I, 215.
7 Laura H. Loomis, Mediaeval Romance in England (2nd ed. New York, I960), 195. Child, vol. i, 215-217.
9 Lowry Charles Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago, 1928; reprinted, New York, 1965), 108-161, 275-397.