I would suggest, both from analogy, and from evidence derived from Edgar's lines (ut supra), by reason of their being repeated in the tale as it was originally told.[1] As a commonplace in fairy tales the lines given by Jamieson are often casually recalled.[2] I met with an instance of this a few years ago:
"The terrible surprises threatened by Germany, and the petty hatred shown towards Britain, remind me very much of the giant in the fairy tale who went about saying:
'Fe, fi, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make me bread.'"[3]
Jamieson's remembrance of the lines is thus not sui generis, and was possibly due to the causes I have detailed. The important question to solve is, was Shakespeare able to quote the lines for similar reasons?
The first difficulty to be solved is to find if the stanza quoted above was repeated in Child Rowland. Although in Jamieson's version, as I understand it from Mr. Jacobs' article in Folk-Lore,[4] the lines are only written once, yet I consider such was not the case originally, for putting aside the possibility of Jamieson's defective memory, Shakespeare wrote:
His word was still 'Fe, fo, fum,' etc.
Why would Shakespeare have written 'still' unless the words 'Fe, fo, fum,' etc., had been previously repeated in the Child Rowland tale? Therefore what Shakespeare quotes would seem to be a verse that was recurrent. If the tautology in verse referred to is to be considered as connected with the folk-tale of Child Rowland, we have in Edgar's lines the repeated verse lines of a cante-fable.
Shakespeare is not sui generis in quoting such lines; Gretchen in a scene in Faust, like Edgar in the mad scene in Lear, quotes the repeated verse lines of a cante-fable:
- ↑ Vid. remarks ut infra.
- ↑ In Ireland the stanza is, so far as I know, traditionally known.
- ↑ "Comparison," Daily Mirror, p. 7, Jan. 25th, 1915.
- ↑ Folk-Lore, vol. ii. pp. 182-197.
