This story was retold in the fourteenth-century Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild, which relocates the setting to Northumbria. Hind Horn, Child ballad 18, contains the story, distilled to the climax.[7]
There is a marked resemblance between the story of Horn and the legend of Havelok the Dane, and Richard of Ely closely followed the Horn tradition in the twelfth-century De gestis Herewardi Saxonis. Hereward also loves an Irish princess, flees to Ireland, and returns in time for the bridal feast, where he is presented with a cup by the princess. The orphaned prince who recovers his father's kingdom and avenges his murder, and the maid or wife who waits years for an absent lover or husband, and is rescued on the eve of a forced marriage, are common characters in romance. The second of these motives, with almost identical incidents, occurs in the legend of Henry the Lion, duke of Brunswick; it is the subject of ballads in Swedish, Danish, German, Bohemian, &c., and of a Historia by Hans Sachs, though some magic elements are added; it also occurs in the ballad of Der edle Moringer (14th century), well known in Sir Walter Scott's translation; in the story of Torello in the Decameron of Boccaccio (10th day, 9th tale); and with some variation in the Russian tale of Dobrynya and Nastasya.[8]
