Sir Eglamour of Artois

"[5] The action of the story involves the hero fighting with a giant who is fifty feet tall, a ferocious boar and a dragon.

The mother of his son, like Emaré and Geoffrey Chaucer's heroine Constance, is carried in an open boat to a distant land.

There are scenes of non-recognition between the principal characters and a threat of incest; but after all these vicissitudes, father, son and mother are reunited at the end.

Having achieved this first trial, Sir Eglamour returns home triumphant, carrying the giant's head as well as that of the deer.

Annoyed at Sir Eglamour's success, the next task that the earl gives his daughter's suitor is to kill the Boar of Sidon, a dreadful beast that has laid waste to the area where it lives.

Sir Eglamour spends a month travelling out to Sidon where he locates this boar by seeing all the bodies of dead men strewn about the ground.

His feat of bravery and skill-at-arms is noticed by the King of Sidon, who is riding nearby on the day that Sir Eglamour at last overcomes this beast.

The King of Sidon at once offers to confer onto Sir Eglamour all his titles and lands, as well as the hand of his daughter in marriage.

Before leaving for this final test, Sir Eglamour asks for twelve weeks to recuperate and the earl's noblemen support him in this request, so it is granted.

Her father is so angry that he swears to have her killed, so he puts her into a small boat with her new-born baby and they are set adrift without food or water, at the mercy of the winds and the currents, to share a fate that is suffered also by Emaré[13] and by Geoffrey Chaucer's heroine Constance in his Canterbury tale from the Man of Law.

Having set off again from the rock of seagulls, she is carried in the boat by wind and tide until she is washed ashore in Egypt where she is found by the king of that country.

Following recognition of the device on his shield, however, mother and son are quickly made aware of each other's true identity and another tournament is swiftly arranged.

Present at the tournament is Organate, the daughter of the King of Sidon who has been waiting for Sir Eglamour for fifteen years.

[16] Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a Canterbury tale about a young lady, Constance, who alone survives a massacre only to be put into an open boat and set adrift upon the sea.

Just like Constance, and just like Christabel in this tale of Sir Eglamour of Artois, Emaré narrowly survives death and is put instead into a boat which takes her to a distant land and a new life.

[19] One of the Breton lais recorded in Old French by Marie de France in the 12th century concerns a young man named Guigemar.

Burning at the boat's prow are lighted candles and, like King Arthur, this vessel takes him to a place where he will be healed of his wound.

They travel on horseback together across the waves and when Oisin returns to Ireland only a few weeks later, he finds that hundreds of years have passed there since he left.

[20] According to an early-12th-century Irish manuscript, the Lebor na hUidre, Bran mac Febail is visited by a mysterious female stranger holding a bough of apple blossom who urges him to sail his boat to a Land of Women, and a similar thing happens on his return.

[22] A daughter of the Irish god Manannan carries her dead lover in her boat to an island, where she finds a plant that revives him.

[23] Odysseus, in Homer's 8th century BC epic the Odyssey, having suffered so much in an ocean within which he has been unable to find his way home, is at last taken to the shore of his native Ithaca in a boat that travels more quickly than a swallow in flight and completes the journey in a single night.

[24] On his return, Odysseus pretends at first to be a Cretan fugitive, then disguises himself as a beggar, then, to his own father, declares himself to be Eperitus, the son of Prince Apheidas of Alybas, who has been blown off course.

Its earliest depiction can be seen in the throne room of the Palace of Knossos on the Mediterranean island of Crete, in Greece, in a Minoan fresco that dates to the mid-2nd century BC.

Arrow-Odd is taken by this giant to Giantland where he spends some time, before continuing an extraordinary life that is destined to last for three hundred years.

[36] The acclaimed German (later naturalized Swiss) writer Hermann Hesse wrote a short story in 1915 in which a young man is carried by a giant bird across a mountain range to a distant plain that is to him like another world.

[38] The first task that the earl gives to Sir Eglamour, in order to win the hand of his daughter, is to defeat a giant far to the west.

Florent kills one that has been leaning over the outer wall of the city of Paris, taunting its inhabitants, in the medieval romance Octavian.

[46] And the boy Perceval, in the Middle English romance Sir Perceval of Galles, steals a ring from the finger of a sleeping maiden, and only after having travelled to a Land of Maidens and defeated an entire Saracen army singlehandedly, does he learn that it is a magic ring that confers invulnerability to its wearer.