SOURCE: “From Legend to Romance,” in The Foundling and the Werwolf: A Literary-Historical Study of Guillaume de Palerne, University of Toronto Press, 1960, pp. 125-39.

In the following essay, Dunn focuses on the setting and plot of Guillaume de Palerne. Dunn comments on the author's adaptation of Sicilian source legends into the French romance.

Now that we have established the probability that Guillaume derives its setting from geographical facts and its plot from national Sicilian legends, we are in a position to analyse the romancer's methods by asking how he obtained his material, why it appealed to him, and how he converted it into romance.

The use of a Sicilian setting and legend by a writer in the service of a countess from Hainaut may be readily explained by the close contact preserved between France and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies during the period of Norman and Hohenstaufen...