THE PREHISTORY OF ROMANCE

As the Victorians were well aware, tales describing groups of men departing for unknown destinations in search of wealth, or to quell some peril, are as old as the art of storytelling itself. In Myth, Ritual and Religion, his treatise of 1887 on the relation between legend and belief, Andrew Lang lists several such legends which are so widely diffused over the world that their point of origin is impossible to locate. Among the most common that he mentions is the story known to the Greeks as ‘Jason and the Argonauts’. Yet Jason is only one of a whole series of male protagonists who, in stories found in various parts of the world, set out with a team of picked companions to recover a golden fleece, or the skin of some fabulous animal. Tales such as this are to be found in Homer, Mimnermus, Apollonius Rhodius, and Euripides, but the motif is also recognizable in folk tales from non-European cultures. For the Victorians, who had noted these coincidences, the question therefore arose: had the folk tales borrowed from literary epic, or epic from the folk tales?

Though the subject of priority proved difficult to resolve, one fact was clear: romances such as ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ formed one element in a trio, the other items in which were myths, and the stories told to children. As early as 1810, in the Preface to The Lady of the Lake, Sir Walter Scott had spelled out this equation: ‘The mythology of one period,’ he had written, ‘would seem to pass into the romance of the next, and that into the nursery tales of subsequent ages.’ In other words, so late Victorians came to believe, people had begun with certain beliefs, which they had then embodied as legends. These were in turn handed down from generation to generation until they ‘degenerated’ – a word often used by late-Victorian folklorists – into fairy stories. The relationship between such stories and romance was of paramount importance to nineteenth-century theories of fiction, and determined contemporary thinking about the certain kinds of narrative.