Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.10.1979, Side 242

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Rome (Part III A, see pp. 195-203). Sapientes is a story for which no really
instructive parallels have yet been pointed out, apart from the story of the boy
Merlin and King Vortigem’s tower (in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
Regum Britanniae) and the Turkish marchen mentioned above. A study of the
complicated relationships between the several textual branches of The Seven
Sages of Rome would be outside the scope of this article, but a Sapientes text
of version A is chosen as the basis of comparison with the story of the dream-
interpreting boy, AT 671 E* (p. 198ff.).
In Sapientes the order of events and the story structure are widely different
from the folktale. Sapientes has only a single theme: the search for the cure of
the emperor’s malady, whereas the folktale is focused on the career of the boy
in its three phases. From the moment when the boy intercepts the man with
the dream (1), the story follows his dealings with the soothsayer (2), until at
last he reveals the evil threatening the emperor by interpreting his dream (3).
Apart from this difference, the stories have so much in common, and this
matter is so essential to them both, that it is out of the question not to regard
them as related to each other.
What is the nature of this relationship? The specific subject of a boy
interpreting dreams (and/or other portents) and competing with the established
soothsayers in this art renders it implausible that both stories could be derived
from a single source not basically identical with either of the two. Other
common features support this assumption. The problem on hånd may therefore
be expressed in the simple question: Which of the two tales was the source of
the other?
It seems that most of the differences between them can be explained by the
hypothesis that:
the story told in Sapientes is the result of a rearrangement of the matter of
the folktale to fit the purpose of the author in the context of The Seven Sages.
Sapientes is a story told by the Queen to demonstrate to the Emperor the
risks involved in relying on ministers (soothsayers). This may explain the
emphasis on the Emperor’s malady and the search for its cure, the main matter
of Sapientes which figures only in the last section of the marchen. Etc. (See
pp. 202-203).
There is no easy way to explain a hypothetical development in the opposite
direction, from Sapientes to the folktale.
Sapientes and the folktale share the motif of the boy telling the dreamer his
dream and interpreting it. In all but two versions of Sapientes this happens
when the boy and the Emperor’s ministers, travelling in search of a remedy,
meet. The two events coincide, and this can hardly be original. In the folktale,
on the other hånd, the dream-telling incident has the important function of
being the cause of the first meeting of the boy and the soothsayer. This must
be original, and the coincidence of the two important meetings must be seen as
a consequence of Sapientes’ radical rearrangement of the matter of the
marchen. (See p. 205-206).
This piece of evidence reaches far towards being proof that the source of
Sapientes was a medieval variant of AT 671 E*. In that case Sapientes,