SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 177
forces a man she admires to put his wife to death. So stated, there
is material for only a short poem, and so it appears in Piedmont
(Nigra 6); but delaying and elaborating the incident the Spanish
minstrel has contrived to make it one of the longest that survives
from ancient date. The longest is Count Dirks, and for the same
reason. It is merely the Noble Moringer motif, of German origin,
but elaborated with all possible Carolingian pomp of names. As
for Gaiferos, who
quite forgot his lady free,
the case is more complex. Essentially we are concerned with an
escape from imprisonment by a hero and a lady: that is the theme
of the old Germanic epos of Walter of Aquitaine. In that poem,
however, Walter and Hildigund are both hostages at Attila's court,
but in the ballads of Gaiferos he is free and at his ease in Paris
when the action opens. People remind him that he has a lady-love
languishing in prison in Sansuena (which is both Zaragoza and
Saxony in the ballads); he makes his way thither, recognizes the
lady, leaps the walls with her when the Moor closes the gates, and
fights a running battle all the way to the French frontier (effica-
ciously aided, at Maese Pedro's puppet-show, by the redoubtable
Knight of la Mancha). So it is in three ballads (171-3), but in a
fourth it is Gaiferos himself who is escaping from prison:
On the very stroke of midnight,
when the cocks began to cry,
very secretly Gaiferos
issued from captivity.   (174)
This is somewhat incoherent, and belongs to the traditions of
Walter. The other adventure is the stuff of the Catalan-Provencal
ballad ofL'Escriveta, but served earlier for the French romances of
Aye d'Avignon and Comtesse de Ponthieu. The deeds of Gaiferos
are not directly derived from any of these three sources, but
probably from one now lost. His name suggests a Gaiffier of
Aquitaine, substituted (with deference to certain noble persons) for
Gautier, the Germanic Walter.
A more recent German epos to penetrate into Spain is Kudrun*
This gives the ballad of Don Bueso (the name is French), a deriva-
tive of the ballads, perhaps, rather than the thirteenth-century
epic (x, p. 56).
As we approach the domain of narratives which have never been