Note 1 — Chapter VII · The Relations of The Grateful Dead to The Spendthrift Knight, The Two Friends, and The Thankful Beasts.

Eleven variants, namely, Richars, Oliver, Lope de Vega, Dianese, Old Swedish, Icelandic I., Icelandic II., Rittertriuwe, Treu Heinrich, and Sir Amadas, have more or less clearly expressed the motive of a knight who has exhausted his patrimony and goes out to recruit his fortunes by winning a princess in a tourney. The figure of such a knight or adventurer is not an uncommon one in the fiction of Europe, and scarcely requires illustration. Of the variants just named all except Oliver, Lope de Vega, and Old Swedish actually state that the hero sets out from home on account of his poverty. In the two former the motive of the incestuous stepmother is introduced in place of this, and in Old Swedish the trait is obscured without any substitution, implying that the hero is led merely by ambition to undertake the tourney. On the other hand, the tourney occurs in all save Icelandic I. and II., which are the only folk-tales in the list. The second of these, moreover, makes the hero a merchant instead of a knight; but since the two come from the same island and are in other respects rather similar,1 this is perhaps not very significant.