before returning to his home of Ithaca in the mysterious boat of King Alcinous. Hercules visits the Garden of the Hesperides in the far west of the world, near to where the giant Atlas holds up the sky. Magic ring The daughter of the King of Sidon gives a ring to Sir Eglamour that gives its wearer invulnerability to death. Sir Eglamour gives this ring, in turn, to Christabel before departing to undertake his third trial, and she is presumably wearing this magic ring when she is put into the boat and sent to what is expected to be her death. A magic ring that provides invulnerability to death is encountered not only in this tale of Sir Eglamour of Artois. In a 12th-century romance Floris and Blancheflour, Floris's mother gives her son a ring when he departs, disguised as a merchant, to look for the maiden Blancheflour, whose tomb he has just seen to be empty. ‘Take this ring, son. While you are wearing it, you need fear nothing. Fire will not burn you, the sea will not drown you and steel will not be able to cut you,' she urges him. And the boy Perceval, in the Middle English romance Sir Perceval of Galles, steals a ring from the finger of a sleeping maiden, and only after having travelled to a Land of Maidens and defeated an entire Saracen army singlehandedly, does he learn that it is a magic ring that confers invulnerability to its wearer. In the late-14th century Middle English alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain refuses the offer of a ring from Sir Bertilak's amorous wife before accepting, instead, another circular adornment, a girdle, that will protect him from ever being killed, and which he wears when he goes to suffer a return stroke of the axe from the Knight of the Green Chapel. Notes External links Sir Eglamour of Artois Introduction and Middle English text. TEAMS. Sir Eglamour of Artois Modern English prose translation Middle English literature Romance (genre) Middle English poems 14th-century poems