[Footnote I-9: Ward (H. L. W.), Catalogue of Romances in the British Museum, I, 450.]
[Footnote I-10: Aethelwulf was King of Kent, Surrey and Sussex (Gaimar, 2391. Cf. also 2476, 2480-82). Aethelstan had Wessex, for see 2480-82. Aethelwulf was defeated by the Danes (2440-46), and was avenged by his brother Aethelstan, who defeated the Danes (2480-83).]
[Footnote I-11: All three MSS. of K. H. say of Horn’s father, “_king he wes by weste_,” perhaps referring to this western division of the eastern kingdom. Asser visits Alfred at the latter’s royal ‘vill’ which is called Denne. East Dene (or Dean) and West Dene are two villages near Chichester. There are also two villages of the same name near Eastbourne.]
As we have seen, the story of Horn belongs to a second growth of English story. The manner of expression, and the general movement of the story are quite different from those peculiar to Anglo-Saxon poetry, lacking almost entirely the parallelism,--the appositional construction and the heaped-up epithets, or _kennings_ of the earlier stories. With the large French element in the vocabulary, there seems to have been introduced a manner of expression more like the French than like the earlier English. The movement is direct, and the imagery very simple and popular. Cf. _He was briȝt so þe glas. He was whit so þe flur, Rose red was his colur_, 14-16, _Also blak so eny cole_, 624. _Also he sprunge of stone_, 1102, etc. In this respect King Horn is less closely linked with the past than is Layamon’s Brut, which was composed in the West Midlands, where the OE. traditions in poetry persisted the longest. The Brut, while presenting many of the modern features of manner and of phrase, still preserves much of the manner of the past. There are in King Horn a number of the conventionalized phrases, to be found also in Layamon (cf. Notes to vv. 11, 67, 69, etc.), but the number of such instances is much smaller than one would have expected, and if Layamon’s West Midland work represents an earlier stage than King Horn in the development from the Anglo-Saxon manner of writing, the composer of Horn has certainly been subjected to many new and modernizing influences.
The very element in common between Layamon and King Horn is, perhaps, the new, the modern phraseology more often than the old phraseology rooted in the past. While, then, there are but few traces of the older English poetic phraseology, there is much in common between King Horn and the romances of the 13th and 14th centuries. The language in King Horn seems to be already again crystallizing into new conventional forms. In spite of the different demands of the metre of Horn from those of the later, more regular, forms of versification, there are a very great number of stereotyped phrases common to King Horn and to the contemporary and succeeding romances composed in the other metre. I have brought together in the Notes a number of instances of this agreement in phraseology. The minor elements, also, are often rather mediæval than Anglo-Saxon, and the customs described, the princess’s manner of receiving visitors, the manner of salutation in meeting and in parting, etc., if truly representing the manners of the time of the composition of King Horn, soon became conventionalized and common to the whole body of Middle English romance. (Cf. Notes to vv. 315, 319, 321, 403, 537, 739, etc.) In these respects the composer of K. H. no doubt at times follows the conventional mode of composition of his time, but he is probably also at times an innovator, for several scenes in Horn seem to have been prototypes directly imitated in later romances in the _Ipomydon_ and in the _Richard Coeur de Lion_. (Cf. Notes to 239 ff., 264.)