Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/667

Rh ROMANCE 643 Welsh as their own man, a champion of the beaten Celts retiring westward to the mountain-fastnesses before the victorious Saxons. They have lost sight of the fact that there were always Cymry in Wales, who must have re- garded their brothers in Loegria (England) much in the same way as they did those of Strathclyde, namely, as kinsmen and allies sometimes, as fair game for attack and plunder more frequently. The struggle between the Celtic and Germanic race was a long one, and it can only have been after the power of the Romanized Britons of Loegria and of the men of Strathclyde was broken, in the battles to which we may attach the name of Arthur, that the tide of war reached Wales along with the British fugitives who crowded thither and to Brittany ; hence the appearance of Roman names among the British warriors. It may be surmised that Arthur is not a name but a title given to a Strathclyde warrior, corresponding to the Latin imperator. 1 The traces of Roman occupation and of Roman culture were not wholly effaced for many centuries in the west of England, and, besides the Latin quasi-historical writings attributed to Gildas and Nennius, there must have been something like a British Livy and a British Virgil in existence between the time of Constantino and that of the pseudo classical compositions of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Joseph of Exeter. It is quite certain that the work we call by the name of Nennius did not furnish all the sub- ject-matter of Geoffrey's Historia, and the mysterious old volume which his friend William of Wallingford brought to him from Brittany about 1130 must have contained poetic legends as well as prose pseudo-history. Another mysterious volume is the " Latin book " in the monas- tery at Salisbury, to which the romancists of 1160-1220 professed to have resorted for their narratives. In Geof- frey's Historia, compiled, as he says, from William of Wallingf orcl's book, we find three elements blended (1) the epic of Brutus (which must have been written in Britain before 300) ; (2) a record of British kings down to the Saxon invasion (probably a corrupt version of the same real history that appears distorted and truncated in Nennius) ; (3) the lives of Arthur, Guenhumara, and Merlin (old British popular legends, wrought into union with a later Cymric tradition in which the British or Gadelic Arth-vaur, Art-vor, or Ard-tur had been converted into a Welsh king Arthur). The Round Table romances had their starting-point in )riginof Geoffrey's Astoria, first published in 1138-39, revised and ^ nd republished in its present form in 1147. 2 Yet there is no o mances mention in Geoffrey of Lancelot and Tristan, two heroes of much greater importance in the romances than Arthur himself. It does not seem to have been observed before that there is a curious set of resemblances between the personages of the romances and those of the Homeric siege of Troy. The names of Arthur and liter suggest Atrides (Menelaus and Agamemnon rolled into one); Mark, again, is Menelaus; Guenhumara and Yseult are 1 The name Arthur is found for the first time in Nennius (where the hero is said not to be a king but only dux bellorum). He explains it as meaning either the "dreadful bear" or the "iron hammer." Now, although the former may refer equally well to Cymric and to Gaelic, i.e., arth-vaur or art-vor, the alternative sense is better sought in Gaelic, ord, a hammer, being a known word in that language, while there is no trace of it in Cymric. The second syllable of ord- dur is common to both languages, equivalent to the Latin durus, and has assumed in Welsh the meaning of " steel. " It probably also meant " iron." This observation shows that Nennius did not know whether the name was a Gaelic or a Cymric one, and the mere uncertainty is in itself an argument that Arthur was distinctly not Cambrian. If it were permissible to seek a purely Gaelic etymology for Arthur we should find it in ard-tur = altus dux, high chief or generalissimo. In the two early authorities Gildas and Bede the British champion of the 5th century is named Ambrosius Aurelius, a man of Roman family. work, published in 1136-37 and again in 1149. like Helen, Guenhumara also resembling Chryseis and Briseis ; Lancelot and Tristan are like Achilles and Paris. Lancelot becomes for a time the enemy of his king (Arthur = Atrides) and stands aloof from him ; he is un- successful in his quest of the Grail, as Achilles dies before Troy is taken ; his son Galaad, like the Achilleid Neo- ptolemus, achieves the father's unfinished task. Lancelot (lanc-e-loc = child of the lake) is brought up in conceal- ment by the Lady of the Lake, just as Thetis (the goddess of the sea) brings up her son Achilles, disguised as a girl, in obscurity. Chiron, to whose care the young Achilles is at first entrusted by Thetis, resembles Merlin, the friend or lover of the Lady of the Lake, in his half divine, half human nature. 3 Again, not only does Galaad by his name remind us of the hero of the Achilleidos (it must have been as usual to give this genitive name to the poem of Statius as that of Eneydos to Virgil's), but there are other curious similitudes. The name of King Perles or Pelles, by whose daughter Lancelot becomes the father of Galaad, is suggestive of, or may have been suggested by, the Graeco-Latin appellation of Achilles, Pelides son of Peleus. One of the meanings that has been suggested for the name of Lancelot is Vancelot the serving man, in ref er^ ence to one of the incidents of his story. Although a dif- ferent origin is hinted at above, it would not be inappro- priate to designate Achilles in his female disguise at Delos Vancillet ( = the male damsel, in attendance on Deidamia). As in the old Greek poems we have Atrides and Pelides contesting for Briseis, and the minor Atrides, Menelaus, similarly contending with Paris the ravisher of Helen, so in the romances we find Guenhumara the object of mutual strife between her lover Lancelot and her husband Arthur, son of Uter Pendragon, and Yseult the cause of war between King Mark and Tristan. Again, a resemblance is to be found in the incidents of fabulous birth between Arthur and Hercules, Arthur and Alexander the Great. These observations are not intended to contradict the claims of the Cymric people to have furnished the romances with much of their material ; for it would be difficult to resist the evidence of such names as Tristan and Yseult, which indicate sufficiently their British or Breton origin, and even Lancelot might have been, as first suggested above, a Welsh or British translation of an epithet which would apply to Achilles in connexion with the following words from Statius. 4 Thetis says (as the Lady of the Lake might have said of Lancelot) " Ssepe ipsa (nefas ! ) sub inania natum Tartara et ad Stygios iterum fero mergere fontes ; " while her son's guardian, Chiron, is named in the same place " Carpathius vates," which at once reminds us of the "Caledonius vates " (Merlin) of Geoffrey of Monmouth. At the same time the name of Guenhumara (Guinevere) makes one think of Thetis, the white -footed lady of the sea. As the name Guenhumara certainly preceded in date all the Anglo-French romances and is undoubtedly an old one, we may as well say at once that the intention is here to suggest an hypothesis that Britain produced Latin poets during the time of the Roman occupation, who wrote works not only on the fable of a British descent from the Trojans through Brutus, a fabled kinsman of ^Eneas, but also on the various subjects of classic mythology, the stories of Thebes, Troy, the Golden Fleece, and Alexander. 5 This 3 The names of several beings of this mixed nature in the early romances begin with the same word, mer, merhl, or mel, as Merlin, Melusine, Melior, Melion. 4 Hugh of Rutland's poem of Ipomedon (written in 1185) evinces by the names of its personages such an. acquaintance with the Thebais of Statius as the maker of the Lancelot seems to have had with the Achilleis of the same poet. He usually calls his King Arthur Atreus. 5 Yguerne, the name of Arthur's mother, was perhaps akin in its original British sense (although in Cymric it means " the true " or " the
 * His poem on the Life and Prophecies of Merlin was a separate