APPENDIX 1
Lohengrin to manhood grew And gave the Grail his service true … Across the sea a maiden dwelt … She a princess of Brabant. From Munsalvach he was sent Whom the Swan did bring …
…
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival 276
Two characters dominate the short prose prologue to Sone de Nansay that introduces the life story of the hero, and questions have been asked as to whether they really existed. One is the indomitable old lady known as Fane, the chatelaine of Cyprus and lady of Beyrouth, the other her 105-year-old servant, a lay priest named Branque who had served her for the past forty years. Branque is certainly an invention of the anonymous poet, especially when one realises that the term in old French means “imbecile”!
Fane may also be invented, as there is no record of any such person in the historical record, and given that her name can mean “temple” or “shrine,” one may suspect that the author is having a joke at his readers’ expense. We are told that the chatelaine had commissioned the work as a means of recollecting her distinguished relations over several generations, with the emphasis upon Sone himself, who takes pride of place in the annals of her extended family. Her claim to be a titled lady of both Beyrouth and Cyprus may seem unlikely in the light of modern geography and politics, but not if we have some knowledge of the history of the First and Third Crusades, which were very piecemeal affairs.
Jerusalem fell to a loose confederacy led by Godfrey de Bouillon in 1099, but Beyrouth, some distance to the north, remained unconquered for years, while Cyprus became an island kingdom under the Holy Roman Empire in 1197 after the Third Crusade. It was possible for local families to have title to various scraps of territory to which they laid more or less permanent—if only titular—claim. Of such could have been Fane, lady of Beyrouth and chatelaine of Cyprus at the time when she commissioned the writing of Sone de Nansay, probably some time after 1265.
The family tree certainly makes for fascinating study and speculation, with its mixture of fact, fiction, and legend. Beginning with major royal characters such as the King of Hungary and Count of Flanders among the hero’s ancestors, and with the addition of the pious Aelis of Gand, capable of postmortem miracles that led to her reburial. Ancient and legendary figures such as the Knight of the Swan are, surprisingly, descendants of Sone.
Our main line of interest, however, focuses upon the fascinating variations upon the Knight of the Swan and why Fane should have found him playing so prominent, intimate, and indeed recent a role in her own life.
The Swan Knight story is present in Sone at least partially because Wolfram von Eschenbach connects him, under the name of Lohengrin, with the Grail family, and because it was clearly important to the author to add the Swan Knight to the already starry list of descendants of his hero, including an emperor, several kings, and a pope! Another possible reason is that by adding this story and calling the Swan Knight Helias, an alternate name for Tannhäuser, the author of Sone was trying to connect his story with the Venusberg legends, which included King Arthur and references to the Grail Temple.
Indeed, one of the most intriguing points in the association of the Swan Knight myth with the Grail is the connection made in a number of medieval German romances between the Venusberg (Mountain of Venus) and Muntsalvasche. On the face of it, this would seem an unlikely pairing since the one is undoubtedly pagan and the other primarily Christian, but the examples which exist suggest that “Der Gral” was used as an alternate name for the Venusberg, and thus as a place where the Goddess of Love actually lived. We may cite, for example, the fifteenth-century chronicle compiled by Caspar Able, which, referring to Helias, says that “this youth Helias came out of the mountain where Venus is in the Grail.” 277
This seems to tie in with a theme referenced in German, Spanish, and Italian romances that tell how King Arthur lives, with other heroes, beneath a hollow mountain.278 Venus is often there, as is the goddess Juno and the daughter of the Sibyl. In some instances Arthur sleeps, as in the famous account of the Nine Christian Worthies, including Charlemagne and Frederic Barbarossa, sleeping beneath Mount Etna, awaiting a call to arms; in others Arthur and as many as a hundred of his knights are awake, enjoying an entertaining time beneath the mountain in a paradisal realm ruled over by Venus. In at least one poem, by the thirteenth-century poet Heinrich von Meissen, the implication seems to be that heroes retire “to the Grail,” where they enjoy a vastly extended life.279 Perhaps not surprisingly, this was often used as an example of the beliefs of weak-minded fools and came with threats of eternal damnation for those who wandered into such an antechamber of hell. That Albrecht was aware of these stories seems beyond doubt; in the romance of Lohengrin, Arthur, his warriors, and “many beautiful ladies of fair hue” dwell in a hollow mountain in “Inner India,” which “encloses the Grail with all the heroes …” 280 Once again, this seems to relate to the earthly paradise of Prester John, also, as we saw, placed in India.
The first evidence of the Knight of the Swan outside the literary sphere is a letter from a certain Guy de Bazoches, written between 1175 and 1180, who remarks that Baudouin I of Jerusalem, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, is the grandson of the miles cygni, or Knight of the Swan.281 More publicly, in about 1184 William of Tyre, historian of the First Crusade, alludes to the tradition, although regarding it only as fable.282 Nonetheless the legend quickly spread and references multiplied.
The Song of Antioch is the first literary text that relates Godfrey of Bouillon to the Knight of the Swan.283 It was written towards the end of the twelfth century and is part of a group of poems known as the Old French Crusader cycle, comprising “Helias,” “The Childhood of Godfroy,” “The Song of Jerusalem,” and “The Captives.” 284 The Song of Antioch itself contains fragments of an even older poem that tells us how Godfrey’s ancestor sailed down the River Rhine in a small boat drawn by a swan to land at a beach near the main keep of the imperial city of Nimégan. He was clad in white and his head shone brighter than a peacock’s wing.
The emperor, who could well have been Otto I (912–973), retained him with the assurance that he could come and go freely, and even provided him with a wife from one of his own female relations. He gave him a stretch of good fertile land and invested him with the fief of Bouillon. The knight led the army, carried the colours, and served the emperor as a good vassal until unexpectedly the swan returned and sailed off with the knight, the emperor unable to keep him at any price. The people were very distressed, but he left behind a pregnant young woman at the castle of Bouillon whose line some claim subsequently bore Godfrey.
A story was soon added to the legend of the Knight of the Swan to explain the origin of the swan that pulled his boat. It was not part of the original story but fits in with the mysterious figure and comes down to us in various literary forms, of which the oldest is that of Johannes de Alta Silva (circa 1190) in a Latin text called Dolopathos,285 in which he tells how a young lord became lost while hunting and arrived at a fountain where a faery was bathing, holding a golden chain in her hand. He robbed her of her chain (and/or possibly her hymen), and far from wishing to escape, she agreed to marry him. After studying the course of the stars, she also predicted that she would bring six sons and a daughter into the world in a single pregnancy. The lord took her back to his castle and married her despite the opposition of his mother.
The faery’s prediction came true and she gave birth to seven children, each bearing a golden chain about its neck. However, her mother-in-law seized the children and replaced them with seven puppies, then presented her son with the dogs as his children, claiming that the faery had bewitched them. The lord condemned his wife to be buried up to the breast in the great hall of the castle, gave her dog food to eat, and instructed that all who came to the castle should wash their hands over her head and dry their hands in her hair. Thus things continued for seven years.
The mother-in-law had meanwhile given the children to one of her servants with orders to kill them, but he took pity on them and left them with a forest hermit. Seven years passed and the lord came across the children when hunting in the forest and saw their golden chains. After attempting in vain to follow them, he returned to the castle and told his adventure to his mother, who, realizing that the children of her daughter-in-law had not been put to death, ordered a servant to seek them out and at least bring back the golden chains.
The men went to the forest and came to a river where the six boys were swimming in the form of swans, while on the bank their sister guarded the chains that preserved their human form when worn. Nonetheless, the men seized the boys’ chains from her and took them back to their mistress, who gave them to a goldsmith to fashion into a goblet. The chains resisted all his efforts, however, and one was severely damaged. He used another piece of gold to complete the required vessel, while back in the forest the boys were obliged to continue their lives in the form of swans. They flew with their sister, who could still transform between human and swan, and gathered at a lake near their father’s castle. Here the girl in her human form begged for bread, which she shared with the swans and their half-buried mother, near whom, rather surprisingly, she slept at night.
This led the lord to question the girl. She told him all she knew, at which her grandmother tried to kill her, but her father saved her on learning the whole story and made the goldsmith surrender the chains so the children could regain their human form, apart from the one whose chain had been damaged. This was the one who was destined to draw the boat in which the armed knight rode. The children’s mother was freed, and their evil grandmother took her place.
This story explains the origin of the swan but contains some elements that demand explanation and reveal the great antiquity of the tale. The faery’s barbarous punishment disappears from later versions. The resistance of the gold to the goldsmith’s tools shows that the metal comes from the faery kingdom, and in some accounts it is described as silver. Jean de Haute-Seille preserved these elements in his reworking of the story of Dolopathos, which is why his version is of considerable importance. In circa 1210 Herbert de Paris translated the story into French and varied from his source to associate the Knight of the Swan with Godfrey de Bouillon.
A later version of the story called Elioxe 286 is characterised by the addition of new motifs and the fact that the protagonists have lost their anonymity. It tells how King Lothaire, whose kingdom was near Hungary, became lost while hunting a stag. Tired out, he rested near a spring and went to sleep. From a nearby mountain a courteous and friendly young lady arrived, saw the sleeping king, and shaded his face with her sleeve to protect him from the sun. Lothaire awoke and, dazzled by her beauty, offered his hand in marriage and his crown. Elioxe consented and declared she would give birth to seven children, six boys and a girl, at a single accouchement, all conceived on their wedding night; she added that she would die as a result, but one of the male children would become a king in a country overseas.
Lothaire took Elioxe back to his castle and married her despite the misgivings of his mother, Matrosilie. She was close to giving birth when Lothaire had to leave the country to fight a pagan king who had invaded his lands. In his absence, Elioxe gave birth to seven children, each bearing a golden chain around the neck, after which she died. Matrosilie took the children, put them in two baskets, and gave them to her servant Monicier to abandon in the forest. Realizing that the newborn children were in the baskets, Monicier left them before the window of a forest hermitage. A hermit rescued the children and cared for them.
When Lothaire returned from his campaign, his mother told him that Elioxe had given birth to seven baby dragons, which had torn up the entrails and flown away.
Seven years later Rudemart, a messenger of the king, was by chance taking refuge with the hermit and saw the children with the chains at their necks. Returning to the castle, he told of this meeting to Matrosilie, who ordered him to return to the hermit’s house. While the children were asleep, Rudemart managed to cut the chains of the six boys with a strong pair of shears while they slept. The girl, who slept apart, escaped, but on waking saw what he had done. In the morning the six brothers, changed into swans, guided by an instinct that enabled them to follow the trail of the chain snatcher, alighted at fish ponds near Lothaire’s castle, who forbade that they be hunted. Unaware of this order, his nephew Nantoul tried to kill a swan, and returning to the palace, admitted his misadventure to the king, who lost his temper and threw a goblet at his head, breaking its base. Matrosilie gave it to a goldsmith for repair with metal from one of the chains.
However, the hermit dismissed the girl, fearing the dangers of solitude for her, and she went to Lothaire’s court, where she begged for bread and shared it with the swans. The behaviour of the birds toward the little girl attracted the king’s attention so that he sought out the child and questioned her. The king realised, on hearing her, that his mother had lied to him and obliged her to tell him the truth. The goldsmith brought the chains still in his possession, Lothaire passed them over the necks of the swans and they transformed back into human beings. Only the one whose chain had been melted down kept his swan form.
Matrosilie was pardoned and took on the role of a benevolent grandmother. Five brothers left to take up lives of adventure as knights; the one who took the swan, according to an angel who appeared in a dream to Lothaire, fulfilled the prediction of Elioxe and went on to found a royal line overseas.
The mythical elements of the story brought to us by Dolopathos have been largely rationalized. The faery died, the chains remained separate, and Lothaire pardoned Matrosilie, whose role is quite astonishing. These changes tend to show that Elioxe and the story of Dolopathos come from the same source, and the alterations are due to oral transmission. It is always the little girl who keeps her chain. An epilogue also shows that the anonymous author knew the legend of the Knight of the Swan as originally told: one of the brothers arrives, accompanied by a swan, at Nimégan on the day of Pentecost and remains a guest of the emperor.
Another form of the story, called Isomberte,287 further reduces the marvelous parts. It tells how, hunting in the forest, Count Eustache de Portemise sees some dogs barking around an old oak tree. There he finds a beautiful young girl, Isomberte, daughter of King Popleo, whose kingdom is beyond the sea. She is fleeing from her father, who wants her to marry, whereas she is against all thoughts of marriage, although this hostility does not last long, for she accepts when Eustache asks her to marry him. The count’s mother, Ginesa, is very much against accepting this foreign daughter-in-law. Soon after their marriage Eustache has to render service to his lord, but putting this off, he keeps her at his side.
During this time Isomberte gives birth to seven sons, at whose birth an angel passes a golden chain round the neck of each. Bandoval, Eustache’s seneschal, is saddened by this event, for he believes that a woman who gives birth to more than one child at a time must have been guilty of adultery. He writes to his lord, telling him what has happened, but Ginesa substitutes his letter for another saying that Isomberte has brought seven dogs into the world. Eustache replies that they must keep them and do nothing wrong to the mother, but Ginesa intercepts the message and replaces it with another ordering that they kill the mother and her children. Bandoval cannot bring himself to do this and leaves the countess alive but takes away the children, whom he abandons in the forest, where a female deer comes and suckles them. Soon after, a hermit looks after the newly born.
The children grow, and the hermit, accompanied by six of them, arrives one day at Ginesa’s castle. On seeing the chains worn by the six brothers, Ginesa questions the hermit, who tells her how he discovered the children abandoned. She realizes that they are her grandchildren and tells the hermit to leave them with her. Ginesa has the chains taken from the necks of the children and intends to kill them, but they fly away in the form of swans and reach a lake near the hermitage, where their brother has remained.
Ginesa gives the chains to a goldsmith to be made into a goblet. He begins to melt one down, but to his great astonishment the gold begins to increase, so much so that a single chain is enough to make the goblet, which weighs more than the rest of the chains put together. He gives this to Ginesa and keeps the other chains intact.
When Eustache returns home, the conversation he has with his wife puzzles him. After a brief enquiry he accuses his mother of theft, and Ginesa admits that she has had the children killed to protect the honour of a son deceived by an adulterous woman. Did she not have seven children at once? The court takes the side of Ginesa, and Isomberte is condemned to be burnt unless she can find a champion to defend her. An angel reveals to the hermit the identity of the child who lives with him and announces that the boy must go to the town to defend his mother; God will give him the victory.
At the moment that Isomberte is taken to her fate, her son appears, takes on Ginesa’s champion, and defeats him. The old countess has to admit the truth and is condemned and imprisoned; the goldsmith returns the chains in his possession. They are passed over the necks of the swans, who recover their human form. One child, whose chain was melted down, remains a swan and lives with the brother who proved the innocence of their mother. It was he who became the Knight of the Swan.
We note that the girl has disappeared from this story and the faery’s origin remains obscure; the tale has been Christianized, as shown by the intervention of an angel, whether it be to pass the chains round the children’s necks or to let the hermit know what the child who lives with him must do.
The final form of the story is found in Le Chevalier au Cygne,288 the first chanson de geste to tell the complete legend of an unknown knight who championed Béatrix, duchess of Bouillon. We possess two redactions in prose, four fragments, and two versified songs of the legend, with some significant divergences. It is sometimes called Béatrix to distinguish it from Isomberte and Elioxe.
Orians, the king of l’Ile-Fort, with his wife, Béatrix (who is a human, not a faery), were looking out of their palace windows and saw a beggar woman accompanied by a pair of twins. This led Orians to regret the sterility of his marriage, but Béatrix insists that a woman who had twins must have lain with two different men. Then, during the absence of the king, she herself gives birth to six sons and a daughter about each of whose necks a faery has fastened a silver chain.
Matabrune, Orians’s mother, who is called “a devil,” affirms that if Béatrix had brought seven children into the world, she must have slept not only with her husband but six other men. She orders her servant Markes to drown the children and takes seven puppies to her son, claiming them to have been delivered by her daughter-in-law. Orians throws his wife into prison to await her fate. Markes, overcome with pity, does not drown the children but leaves them on the bank of a river; a hermit finds them and weans them on goat’s milk, an animal that he believes God has sent in answer to his prayers.
Ten years pass before another servant of Matabrune, an “evil forester,” passes by the hermitage and sees the children and their chains, and on returning to the castle tells Matabrune what he has seen. She orders him to steal the chains and bring them back to her. He returns to the hermitage, finds six of the children, one being absent with the hermit, and steals their chains. The five boys and the girl, changed into swans, fly off to fishponds belonging to Orians.
The brother who has escaped the change remains with the hermit and goes regularly to Orians’s castle for alms, until one day he discovers the swans. In the meantime Matabrune has taken the six chains to a goldsmith and ordered him to make a goblet from them. The artisan melts down one chain and finds that it wondrously produces enough metal to make two goblets. He locks the others away.
Fifteen years go by, Matabrune insisting that Béatrix should be burnt at the stake, until eventually Orians decrees it should be the next day if she cannot find a champion to defend her. An angel appears to the hermit and reveals that the child he has brought up is the king’s son and that he is destined to defend his wrongly accused mother. The hermit tells the boy of this revelation, and he immediately goes to the town and is baptised with the name of Elyas, arriving at the field of combat just in time to become his mother’s champion.
The furious Matabrune has appointed a relative, Malquarré, to defend “her right,” whom Elyas, armed and dressed as a knight, decapitates in the course of the fight. He then tells Orians the message of the angel and makes himself known. The goldsmith brings the remaining chains and the swans are transformed back into handsome youths and a beautiful girl. They are baptized and receive the names of Orians, Zacaryes, Orions, Johans, and the maiden Rosete.
The king presents his crown to his son and Matabrune escapes but is trapped in her castle. Elyas besieges it and after another judicial combat Matabrune is obliged publicly to admit her crimes before mounting the pyre. In the course of the following night, an angel appears to Elyas and tells him to spend the next morning in a garden beside the river, where his brother swan appears, pulling a boat, which he boards.
Immediately after Elyas has stepped into the boat pulled by the swan, the legend proper of the Knight of the Swan begins as opposed to that of the children.
In the most popular version, rendered by the scholar C. Hippeau (which follows neither the oldest sources nor the most complete but is supplemented by the so-called Paris manuscripts and a German edition by Baron von Reiffenberg), the story runs as follows:
The swan takes Elyas as far as a pagan town where he fights Agolant, Matabrune’s brother, but is defeated and taken prisoner, as a consequence of which Orians mounts an expedition and arrives in time to prevent his son from being executed. Elyas then kills Agolant, gives the county and fief to one of his vassals, and leaves with the swan in search of further adventure.
Rainier, duke of Saxe, has invaded the lands of the duchess of Bouillon. In the boat pulled by the swan, Elyas sails back up the Rhine as far as Nimégan, where he hears of the misdeeds of Rainier. He offers his help to the emperor, Othon, and takes on the Saxon duke in single combat as champion for the lady of Bouillon. Elyas kills Rainier and marries Béatrice, the duchess of Bouillon’s daughter, after making her swear never to ask his name or where he comes from, on pain of losing him forever.
The tale then lingers, recounting the combats of Elyas against Rainier’s brother, marked by a new divine intervention. Béatrix gives birth to a daughter whom they call Ida (or Yde or Idain). Seven years later, on the day of their anniversary, Béatrice breaks her word: “Sir,” says the lady, “by God the son of Mary tell me your name; do not hide it from me any longer. Tell me the place of your birth and who your parents are and what is your lineage.”
Elyas did not answer her questions but announced that he was obliged to leave the next day, taking leave of his wife, his daughter, and the emperor and his vassals. The swan appears, crying strangely, and Elyas tells his lord, “Sire, let me go, I can no longer delay. If you force me to stay, you will see me die here at your feet,” and asks him to take care of Ida. The swan calls a second time and Elyas hurries to the boat, climbs aboard, crosses himself three times, and departs.
He leaves Béatrice with a talisman, an ivory horn. One day, when the room in which it is kept is in flames, a swan arrives who seizes it and carries it off. From then on, texts agree in seeing Ida as the mother of Godfrey of Bouillon and tell that Ida marries Eustache II of Boulogne, by whom she has three crusading sons: Eustache III, Count of Boulogne, who returned home to rule the family estates; Godfrey, first ruler of Jerusalem; and Baudouin, first crowned king of Jerusalem.
When we come to the version of the Knight of the Swan’s tale as provided in Sone’s prologue, we find a much-modified account. The final paragraphs translate as follows:
Then the pope ordered Sone to join him (in Rome) as emperor (of the Christian world), and he had to leave. His son Houdiant, hardly eighteen months old, was crowned king of Norway and much later married Matabrune, the worst woman ever! By her he had a son, King Oriant, who married Elouse, who bore triplets, each one of the three boys with a golden neck chain. Because she hated Elouse, Matabrune broke up the chain of one of the children, who changed into a swan, so she did not dare do this again. The swan flew off to 213the river that runs at the foot of the walls of Galoche, and was later the swan that pulled the boat of Elyas, his brother, the Knight of the Swan.
Elyas killed the Saxon at Nimégan and married the heiress Béatrix, by whom he conceived Yde. Despite the promise she had made him, Béatrix asked him who he was. He replied, “You will never see me again after today as you have not respected my conditions.” He sounded his horn and his brother arrived with the boat. Elyas boarded it and went to Beyrouth, the port where my lady still lived with her three sons.
A great battle took place at the port of Acre. 20,000 Christians and 300,000 pagans were killed. As far as is known, no miscreant survived. The battle lasted five days and five nights, and there Elyas was cut to pieces. His brother, the swan, brought him from the sea to die in the arms of my lady. No one ever saw such grief shown by his brother, the swan. No one could console it. It threw itself into the waves and thus perished.
The family units of seven children have been modified to a standard three—mostly born singly but with the occasional pair of twins such as Houdiant and Henri to Sone and Odée, perhaps to signify that multiple births do not imply adultery. Fane, who commissioned the romance, is revealed within it to have been the daughter of Henri, who became king of Jerusalem by marriage to the royal heiress Hermine. Whilst there is no shortage of such marital arrangements in the history of the Crusader kingdom, there are only two named Henri in the course of a couple of centuries, and neither of them fit the circumstances.
It is also interesting to note that a legendary couple has been introduced, Oriant and Elouse, who are not mentioned in any family history. Whatever the reason for this, it implies that Fane is an aunt of the Knight of the Swan! By naming the Swan Knight Elyas, a later version of the character which refers back to Lohengrin and Tannhauser, the author of Sone ties together strands of myth that include the Venusberg.
Like a faery, whose ability to remain in human zones is dependent on a particular condition (geis289), Lohengrin arrives in the kingdom of Brabant and agrees to be the husband of Elsa, heir to the duchy, provided that she never asks his name or place of origin. When Elsa breaks this promise, he departs in the swan boat in which he had arrived, never to return. We may speculate on whether the geis is a typical stipulation in Celtic mythology—an equivalent of the situation to be found in the legends featuring Melusine of Lusignan. Professor Claude Lecouteux, who has provided much information on Knight of the Swan lore in his Mélusine et le Chevalier au Cygne,290 likes to think each figure originated as a Celtic goddess or Scandinavian god; our own preference is a focus on faery lore.
These tales, taken with the story of Lohengrin as it appears in Wolfram, show a half-human, half-faery lineage resembling those found in the mysterious work called the Elucidation. The “patient wife” motif, applied to the swan children’s mother, is a common folk tale that also appears in the Mabinogion story of “Pwyll and Rhiannon.” There is a curious half-echo between the story of the families of Brabant and Bouillon—whose sons were crusading heroes who secured the safety of Jerusalem and the Holy Lands—and that of Lohengrin, who as the son of Parzifal and Condwiramurs in Wolfram’s poem becomes the Grail Knight of Muntsalvasche, just as his brother, Kardeiz, inherits Parzival’s secular lands.
The great battle described in the final paragraph seems likely to have been the fall of Acre in 1291, which spelt the end of Crusader occupation of the mainland of the eastern Mediterranean coast. The numbers involved are, as usual, grossly exaggerated, but it was a great national disaster and a personal one as well if we are to believe the prologue account, where it appears that Fane took in some character, possibly a nephew, who liked to pose as the legendary Knight of the Swan.
276. Barto, Tannhäuser and the Mountain of Venus.
277. Cited in Clifton-Everest, The Tragedy of Knighthood. Our italics.
278. For a full-length study of these and other related legends, see Barto, Tannhauser and the Mountain of Venus.
279. Cited in Clifton-Everest, The Tragedy of Knighthood.
280. Ibid., 10.
281. Guy de Bazoches, cited in Lecouteux, Mélusine et le Chevalier au Cygne.
282. Peter W. Edbury, William of Tyre, The Conquest of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade (Ashgate, 1998).
283. Edgington and Sweetenham, The Chanson d’Antioche.
284. Mickel Jr. and Nelson, The Old French Crusade Cycle.
285. Gilleland and de Alta Silva, Dolopathos.
286. Mickel Jr. and Nelson, The Old French Crusade Cycle.
287. Mickel Jr. and Nelson, “La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne” in The Old French Crusade Cycle.
288. Hibbard, Medieval Romance in England, 239.
289. Geis, pl. geasa: an Irish term for conditions and agreements that must be performed in order to preserve one’s life.
290. Lecouteux, Mélusine et le Chevalier au Cygne.