lore we find it in the garland which does not fade while the owner remains true.[1]
While, however, we miss the Chastity Test in the Odyssey, we have the Test of Recognition. In the Saga of the Return it appears in the familiar form of the wound by the boar's tusk through which the old nurse recognises her lord.[2] We have a good parallel to this in the lay of the Recognition in the French ballad of Germaine, where the situation very closely resembles our version, if it be not derived from it.[3] In the Saga of the Wooing it appears in a much more puzzling and less appropriate form in the incident of the secret bedchamber of the long-parted pair, in which the knowledge of Odysseus that he had made their marriage-bed round an olive tree in the courtyard of the palace is taken by Penelope to prove his identity. I may, perhaps, hazard the suggestion that in the earlier form of the tale this olive tree was the marriage tree of the lovers, and that a very primitive and obsolete incident of wedding ritual assumed this rather clumsy form in the later recension. At any rate this is not the usual shape in which the Test of Recognition appears in folklore. In the Indian tales, for instance, the tests are a ring, the power of reciting the tale of the heroine or the hero's early life, a wound in the leg inflicted by the heroine, which last comes very close to the simpler Odyssey version.[4]
- ↑ Tawney, Katha Sarit Sâgara, vol. i., pp. 86, 573; vol. ii., p. 601; North Indian Notes and Queries, vol. v., p. 86; Clouston, Popular Tales, vol. i., p. 173; Jacobs, Transactions Folklore Congress, p. 89. For the negro chastity ordeal see Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 138.
- ↑ Odyssey, xix., 467, seqq.
- ↑ Folk-Lore Record, vol. i., p. 109.
- ↑ Temple, Wide Awake Stories, p. 416. At the same time it should be said that there is a parallel in modern Greece to the bed as described by Homer. Mr. Bent came across a bed formed by some boards fixed into the wall on two sides, and supported at the outer angle by the rough trunk of a tree, with one branch left as a step to help the owner to climb the four feet that it was raised from the ground. Cyclades, p. 22.
