The Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac

re, shall be assigned to the author of the romance we have last studied. On the question of the literary excellence of Chrétien's handling of his material all are more or less agreed, but the

ne of the chosen battlegrounds of widely

d formally re-stated, in the light of such knowledge as recent investigation may have cast upon them. We are then in a better position to judge whether they retain, unimpaired, the force and cogency their adherents have ascribed to them. Professor Foerster has ap

the meantime the present study appears to me to offer an excellent opportunity for the re-statement of certain principles, and the reiteration

sed ourselves of the answer to two leading questions. (a) What is the nature of the Arthurian tradition itself? (b) What was the popul

ically introduced Arthur to the literary world, and secondarily by certain passages in the earlier prose romances. This branch contains features of insular origin, reminiscences of the historic Arthur and his fights with the Saxons; but the second and far more important branch, the roma

eory, what now

f Layamon[52] will prove the first point; for the second, we have already noted Professor Rajna's discovery of Arthurian names in Italian documents as proving that such names must have been popular in Italy at the end of the eleventh century. Further, from the testimony of the bas-relief at Modena we see that the traditions

appear to me to ignore Arthur as a mythic hero. Romance and myth are not the same thing; th

esent the Mercurius Artusius of the Gauls, it is not possible to deny that he, and at least one of his knights, Gawain, stand in very close relation to early Irish mythic tradition. The persistence of Irish elements in the Arthurian story is not a theory but an established fact. Where would these stories, Arthurian and Irish, be most likely to meet and mingle, in Great Britain, or in Armorica? The first is a priori the more probable; not only is the distance les

triking parallels in early Irish legend, both are excellently preserved in insular versions, neither is adequately represen

ench, but in no case is the story so well and fully told as in the English poem, which cannot possibly be derived from any known continental source. Of the main point of the second story, the wedding of a young knight to a 'Loathly Lady,' the French poems have no trace, thoug

who, if he does not himself represent a god, is certainly the son of a god. In the second the lady

hem, are of comparatively late date, in neither case can the Irish version be later than the elevent

s of the case. The mention of Bath does not cover the whole ground, it must be taken in connection with ?stiva Regis (Somerset) and Glastonbury. The latter is, if I mistake not, the real point of identification. A confusion between Glastonbury, Avalon, and the abode of the departed had taken place previous to William of Malmesbury: the exact date cannot be asce

Tigern-Mas=Maelwas must have been connected with Glastonbury=Avalon before he was thought of in connection with Bath and ?stiva Regis. It is most probable that such a connection would take place on insular not on continental ground,

nly told in a continental text (Merlin), and located on continental ground, but the identification of the monster with the

onmouth n'a pas accueilli'; while M. Loth, in a note appended to this critique, remarks that the original vanquisher of the cat was certainly not Arthur but Kay. The localisation of

nally localised in these islands; i.e. the evidence of facts is here in favour of an insular rather than a continental origin. Nor do I think we shall be wr

ch stories would be entirely-in Chrétien's days it would still be partially-oral.[59] But in saying this we must have a clear idea of what, in the case of traditional stories, oral transmission implies. It does not mean a game of 'Russian scandal,' where the point is to see how much a story told f

t of the tradition as the substance of the tale.'[61] Therefore when we find two stories of marked traditional and folk-lore character agreeing with each other in sequence of incident, detail, and eve

literary critic, who is too prone to devote attention to the literary form, while he ignores the essential ch

t is easy to exaggerate the necessity for a literary source; it is difficult to e

nt, probably also on our island,[62] was told, or rather sung, in the form of mythical tales or lais. These lais, in the first instance in the Breton

e, the original hero was replaced by one of Arthur's knights. Among the specimens which have been preserved we have examples of all the stages: lais entirely independent of Arthur; lais, the scene o

loyal friend of the hero is Gawain, but nowhere else do we meet with Tyolet as one of Arthur's knights: the inference is that we have here a lai in the first stage of assimilation. The lai co

obability is that it is also anterior to the great popularity of the Perceval story. When Perceval was once universally recognised as the son of the widowed lady of the forest, there would

important variants, agreeing in their main features but differing in detail: the lais of Graalent, Guingamor, and Lanval. Of these three, the scene of the two first is laid at the court of an anonymous king; the action of the third, translated by a cont

e d'Avalo

ui avon

amis Morg

ez provee.'-Er

curs in a list of knights who visit Arthur's court for the marriage of Erec. The passage immediately preceding deals with a certain Maheloas of l'Ile de Voirre.[65] He then

o choose we should have expected the latter; the lai of Graalent stands in far closer connection with that of Lanval (being a variant of the same story) than with that of Guingamor; and Lanval weds the mistress of Avalon. Or, since both were brothers, both might have been r

on rather than on French grounds. They are originally Breton lais; Arthur is a Breton,[66] not a French, hero; where would Breton folk-lore and Breton traditionary

form of short poems in rhymed, eight-syllabic verse, the same metre, in fact, as that adopted by Chrétien himself. It is also certain that he knew these lais; highly probable that he knew some of them, as his cont

what would probably be the method of procedure. The original lai would be expanded by the introduction of isolated adventures; other lais, which through demerit of style or music had failed to win popularity, would be drawn upon for incident, or incorporated bodily; one or more popular lais would be added, and the whole worked over and

told the story ended with Yvain's achievement of the 'spring' adventure and his marriage with the lady. This would, I think, represent the original lai, which in its primitive form might well be unconnected with Arthur's court: the king was probably anonymous. The next step would be to Arthurise the story; Yvain must start from Arthur's court, and naturally the court must learn of his success: this was arranged by bringing Arthur and his knights to the spring where they are themselves witnesses, and victims, of Yvain's prowess. It is significant that in all the versions extant Yvain is influenced in his secret departure from court by the conviction that Gawain will demand the adventure of the spring, and thus forestall him; but in the Welsh variant alone is this forecast literally fulfilled and the undecided confli

ing such use of ascertained facts naturally depends upon whether the story related in the romance in question was in its origin one that we might expect to fin

nt of that tradition, that the process of fusion had already commenced when Chrétien wrote his poems, and that he was himself familiar with suc

be based upon lais. But the character of the three more famous poems, Erec, Yvain, and Perceval, is precisely that of a romance composed of traditional and folk-lore themes. In the case of Erec and Perceval this is partially admitted even by the mo

s to Yvain, on the construction of which Professor Foerster holds a theory, highly complica

(Grisebach considered it to be Chinese), and which in Latin form, as told first by Ph?drus and then at greater length in the compilation of The Seven Sages of Rome, was well known in me

tes marriage with him before she has ever beheld him, influenced by the advice of her servant, who paints in strong colours the defenceless condition of the land, and who is aware of Yvain's passion for her lady. In no variant of the earlier tale does the lady marry the slayer of her husband (a point, I believe, essential to the Yvain story). Indeed, in many her advances are rejected by the object of her passion; in all she is represented as refusing to leave the grave, and none are free from the repulsive details accompanying her new-fledged passion, though these are amplified in the later versions. In insisting on the fact that the lady's re-marriage (often entirely lacking in the earlier story), 'unter h?sslichen unser Gefühl schwer verletzenden Bedingungen,' is the central point of both sto

story, which is certainly not the case. But, as we shall see, the tale in its original form is far older th

at neither Erec, Yvain, nor Perceval were originally Arthurian heroes, and undoubtedly their connection with Arthur's court was of the slightest. If their connection with Arthur marks a secondary stage in the story, and Yvain in the Brut is already an Arthurian knight, it is pretty obvious that the original tale connect

is it but the variant of a motif coeval with the earliest stages of human thought and religious practice-the tale of him 'who slew the slayer, and shall himself be slain'? The ch

is practised even to-day by savages in different parts of the world. Such a story must, by its very nature, have been originally unlocalised, even as it cannot be dated; it could be pos

tainly belongs), the continental story-tellers, finding the Fountain unlocalised, as it naturally was in the original tale, connected it with the Breton forest. But it is obvious that such connection is purely arbitrary, and has no critical value. It

E. S. Hartland says: 'The rain-making incident has always seemed to me a very good evidence of the traditio

mance: the substitution of the slayer for the slain, and the practice of rain-making by the pouring out of water, are customs alive in certain parts of the world to this day. But what would Profes

d and slain; while at the same time he succeeds to his predecessor's relations with the lady of the castle, whose ami he becomes.[76] It will be observed that Herr Ahlstr?m's suggestion that the lady may originally have been a fairy-a suggestion contemptuously scout

related in a lai; and this was, I believe, its original form. It is significant that Chrétien records the fact that there was a lai more or less closely connected with the la

ch I refer, together with that

(An?. fr. 210), fol

z les bar

a mon se

in de son

la dame

ui fu fil

dont len n

7

erster's cri

ses baro

mon seig

n d'un sue

Laudine

ui fu fil

don an no

. 1891, ll

nsla

s beholding,

to my l

nd of her

lady of

was daughte

him of which (who

s beholding,

to my l

d of one h

en Laudine

was daughte

hom (which) o

fer to the wedding quite as well as to the supposed Laudunet, while in no other

s us, in the dialect of Champagne (Chrétien was a Champenois) of the thirteenth centu

rthurian tradition, but at a very advanced stage of its evolution: had there been current at that date, the end of the twelfth century, a lai important enough to be chronicled in this unusual manner (I can recall no other instance in Chrétien's poems), some trace of the hero of the lai, if not the poem itself, would surely have been

y his critics. But here the text had not been worked over, and the result was a confused reading which has baffled more than one commentator. The mere chance that the right reading (here undoubted) has been preserved in a text hitherto unaccountably neglected ha

ade, the running of two or three words into one, eventually read as a proper name,

therefore he concludes that Chrétien based his romance on that story; but in support of his theory he offers no proof whatever: there is no evidence that Chrétien knew the tale, no reference to a book in which it might be contained, no correspondence of n

.' We must have proof that Chrétien knew the lais current in his day-he refers to one of the most famous, Guingamor, and couples the hero with that of another, Graalent. We should like a reference to a lai connected with the story-we have the reference, at the very point where, according to our

two were independent stories and their combination was the work of Chrétien de Troyes. 'Dieser original Gralroman enthielt natürlich keinen Perceval und auch nicht dessen Sagen-motiv, sondern wird den uns sonst bekannten Gral-texten ?hnlich gewesen sein.'[84] 'Sollte das livre aber, aller Unwahrscheinl

clude him in the list of knights of the Round Table;[86] but in Cligés, written some years later than Erec, and according to Professor Foerster himself between twenty and thirty years before the Perceval, the whole position is changed: Per

at Ossenefort, and has on the first two days overthrow

devers

assaus de

li Galoi

Cligés le

n non o?

eval l'o

lui asanbler.'-

lready sung with such marked success? If the story of Perceval li Galois be due to Chrétien, then we must believe that, having conceived the tale in his mind, and paved the way for its reception by the above reference, he yet abstained from presenting it to the public for nearly thirty years! Or could Perceval have been the he

t) and L'Orguelleus de la Lande, both of them noted characters of the Perceval sto

footnote is apt to be overlooked, I draw attention to it here. In the list of the knights of the Round Table given in Erec, Chrétien ranks as eighth Mauduiz li Sages; in Hartman

uotations, and the only adventure known of him, and one which would fully account for his sobriquet li Sages, is

result of a close examination of that poem were to show good reasons for fixing the date of the Perceval story (as

ontend that it was the traditional, folk-lore, popular character of the stories told in Erec, Yvain, and Perceval, which made them so much more popular than Cligés? The Charrette is so manifestly inferior to Chrétien's other works that we will not call it as evidence; it was, and deserved to be, little known. But Cligés stands on a different footing. The stor

be founded as much on folk-lore as on literary data. Nor, I submit, are arguments, which may be sound enough as applied to the rise of the Arthurian romantic legend, of necessity equally sound when applied to stories of independent origin incorporated in that legend. I

rders of Wales. He starts from Carduel en Galles (Kardyf in the English version), and after one night's rest reaches the fountain. It is at Chester, not otherwise an Arthurian town, but one well within the bounds of the story, that his wife's messenger finds him. Erec is 'd'Estregalles'; the towns are Caradigan, Carduel, C?rnant, Nantes. So w

ttany. Here we have Dover, Wallingford, Winchester, Windsor, Southampton, Oxford, Shoreham, Bath, London; while we note a marked omi

first time, why did he shift his mise-en-scène backwards and forwards in this curious manner? Why turn from the geography of Erec to that of Cligés and the Charrette, only to revert to hi

investigation may find grounds to support the theory of a possible Anglo-Nor

ted by those unfamiliar with the character of oral tales. If we once accept as a principle the well-ascertained fact that such stories have a tendency to fall into a set form, a fixed sequence of incident and detail, would always be related in practical

tien's poems, of details not to be found in the best mss. of those poems-may be accounted for by copyists and translators familiar with an oral version of the tale, filling in details which Chrétien had either never heard, or had purposely omitted. If we postulate, as from the character of the stories we are justified in doing, a very

, but when we arrive at some definite and proven conclusion as to the materials with which the earliest compilers of metrical romance were dealing, we shall have made a great step towards unravelling the problem of their successors. So far, I do not think we have arriv

so far as these elements are concerned, be examined and criticised on methods recognised and adopted by experts in those branches of knowledge-and not treated on literary lines and literary evidence alone. Thus it is essential to det

idence of experts in story-transmission, what are the characteristics of tales so told, and what is t

e older the story the less valuable they are as indications of original source, the oldest tales having a strong tendency to a

round for ascribing inventive genius to the poet, whose superiority over his contemporaries was quantitative rather than qualitative. He differed from them in degree, not in kind; he had a keener sense of artistic c

no ground that I can see for crediting him with an inventive genius foreign to

er, and devoted his great literary talent to presenting in more attractive form, with more modern courtly flourishes, the stories already existing. Doubtless he himself made new combinations, and in so doing was guided by a poet's sense of appropriateness, choosing such general and subordinate episodes as would contribute best to the de

cientific criticism will ultimately assign to Chrétien de Troyes: th

certain early metrical romances an origin which Herr Brugger apparently attributes to all Arthurian romances, prose or verse; (b) that when Herr Brugger speaks of origin he uses the word loosely, and in a secondary sense, whereas I use it in a primary; e.g. to say that a story which reached French writers through a Breton source may therefore be accurately described as of Breton or