with Rittertriuwe, in stating that the hero offered all his property in order to keep his wife, there seems to be no doubt that it belongs to this particular group, despite the fact that it says nothing about the hero's poverty. The connection is not improbable on the score of chronology, if we suppose that the source of Richars and Lion de Bourges, or some similar tale, found its way into the North by translation in the first half of the thirteenth century, a time when translations into Icelandic at anyrate were made in great numbers. Indeed, the names Pippin, Lorraine, etc., immediately suggest a French source; and the story is not really a legend at all, though it appears in a legendary, but a narrative quite in the style of the romans d'aventure.
With reference to Sir Amadas, two points of special interest appear. The hero is provided the wherewithal for his successful courtship by means of a wreck to which he is directed by the White Knight; and he is required to divide his child as well as his wife with his helper. These peculiarities, together with the diiferent opening, make it improbable that Richars, as preserved, was the direct source of the romance, though its author may have known some text either of that romance, or of Lion de Bourges. It seems more likely, however, that the source of Sir Amadas was rather the common original of both those versions. In the present state of the evidence it is impossible to do more than to show, as I have attempted to do, that the fourteenth-century Sir Amadas is a member of the little group under discussion.
The proposed division of the son is peculiarly important in that it connects the group with the stories in which The Grateful Dead is compounded with the theme of Amis and Amiloun. Indeed, the general relationship of The Spendthrift Knight to that theme must be considered in a later chapter[1] after more important compounds have been
- ↑ See chapter vii.
