SAGA-BOOK - Viking Society Web Publications

Mimir: Two Myths or One? 47
George Peele's The Old Wives' Tale, of 1595, and in the
chap-book History oj the Four Kings of Canterbury,
Colchester, Cornwall and Cumberland, their Queens and
Daughters. 20 In Peele's playa father despairs of finding
husbands for his daughters, since one is beautiful but
ill-tempered, the other good but ugly. He is advised to
send them to a Well of Life; the first to reach the well is
the ill-tempered one, and when she. "offers to dip her
pitcher in, a Head rises in the well." It sings:
Gently dip, but not too deep,
For fear you make the golden beard to weep;
Fair maiden, white and red,
Stroke me smooth and comb my head,
And thou shalt have some cockell-bread.
Enraged, the girl breaks her pitcher on the head;21 the
husband she meets is a deaf fool. Later her gentle sister
also comes, with a blind man who loves her; when she
dips her pitcher in, "a Head comes up with ears of corn,
which she combs into her lap", and then "a second Head
comes up full of gold, which she combs into her lap."
The first of these heads sings the same song as that which
appeared to her sister; the second sings:
Gently dip, but not too deep,
For fear you make the golden beard to weep;
Fair maid, white and red,
Comb me smooth and stroke my head,
And every hair a sheaf shall be,
And every sheaf a golden tree.
The gold she has thus won enables her and her husband
to live prosperously.
The chap-book version of this story tells how the King
of Colchester's daughter, persecuted by a wicked step-
•• Printed in R. H. Cunningham, Amusing Prose Chapbooks (1889); also in
E. S. Hartland, English Fairy- and Folk-Tales (1890) .
.. Her anger is roused by the term 'cockell-bread'. Peele's is the earliest
reference to this; it seems to have been the name of a mildly indecorous country
game, and also of bread made from dough kneaded in a somewhat unusual
manner and used as a love charm. See note ad. loco in A. Thorndike, Minor
Elizabethan Drama 1I, Pre-Shakespearean Comedy, ISO-I; also NED s.u.,
and Wright's Dialect Dictionary s.v. cocklety-bread.