Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1981, Page 118

heiti Erex, son Ilax kongs, hefi ek verit med Artus konungi
fimm år, ok vidr J^essa jungfru vil ek bædi lifa ok deyja.
(11:13-12:6)
(Your daughter is the most beautiful giri in all the world, yet I
wonder why she is so poorly clothed. But to come right to the
point, it is my desire and request that you give this young lady to
me in marriage, because I love her more than all my father’s gold
and kingdom. It will only further your honor if I am allowed lo
marry her. I have no intention of concealing my name from you - I
am Erex, the son of King Ilax and I have been with King Arthur for
five years. With this young lady I wish both to live and to die.)
The proposal of marriage is a striking departure from Chrétien’s version
of the first meeting of the couple. To be sure, Enide’s beauty is more fully
described in the romance (vv. 411-42), and Erec is amazed to see such
loveliness - Erec d’autre part s’esbahi/Quant an li si grant biauté vit (vv.
448-49) - yet the hero is concerned solely with a matter touching his
honor: he needs to be equipped with arms and requires the companion-
ship of Enide in order to be able to avenge an earlier insult to the queen
and to himself. In the romance Enide’s beauty becomes not the occasion
for a declaration of love and a proposal of marriage, but rather a prereq-
uisite: if Erec is to compete in a contest at arms - in which he means to
avenge his honor - he must be accompanied by a woman whose beauty he
can extol. Only if Enide’s father outfits Erec with arms, only if he allows
Enide to accompany Erec, only if Erec is victorious in the tourney, will
he, Erec, take Enide home with him to crown her queen of three cities
and - an unspoken assumption - make her his wife:
Se vos d’armes m’aparelliez
Et vostre fille me bailliez
Demain a l’esprevier conquerre,
Que je l’an manrai an ma terre,
Se Deus la victoire me done;
Je li ferai porter corone,
S’iert rerne de trois citez. (vv. 659-665)
Love at first sight is not the prerogative of men alone. An episode anal-
ogous to the episodes in Erex saga discussed above occurs in the Saga af
Tristram ok Isodd. In the Icelandic version of the Tristan legend the
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