Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/343

 REVIEWS.

The Three Days' Tournament. A Study in Romance and Folklore. Being an Appendix to the Author's " Legend of Sir Lancelot." By Jessie L. Weston. D. Nutt. 1902.

This addition to Miss Weston's Sir La?icelot is mainly an ampli- fied rendering of Mr. Ward's note on Ipomedon in his Catalogue of Romances (p. 728 sqq^. Hue de Rotelande, the author of Ipomedon (about 1185) refers to Walter Map apparently as a fellow-romancer, though the phrasing is ambiguous : " I am not the only one who knows the art of lying ; Walter Map knows well his part of it." Mr. Ward draws from this the following con- clusions. Walter Map, who is traditionally credited with author- ship of a Lancelot romance, may very possibly have been known to Hue de Rotelande in this capacity. The prose Lancelot con- tains an adventure, the Three Days' Tournament, which is also found in Ipomedon, and the reference to Walter Map by the author of the latter poem can be interpreted without much difficulty as a sort of acknowledgment of debt. The Lancelot of Walter Map may have been a short poem, with the Three Days' Tournament as a chief part of its story, afterwards imitated by Hue de Rote- lande in his Lpo?nedon, and paraphrased in the prose Lancelot which still bears the name of Walter Map as its author.

Mr. Ward had pointed out the resemblance between the Tourna- ments of Ipomedon and certain adventures repeated in a number of popular tales. "Thus in No. 43 of the Contes Lorrains of Emmanuel Cosquin .... a shepherd boy wins a tournament for a princess, appearing on three successive days in steel, in silver, and in gold armour." Miss Weston follows in the same line, and by comparing some of the adventures of Lancelot with some inci- dents in fairy tales, arrives at an ingenious theory of the early stages of the Lancelot romance. The story which provides most of the resemblances is the Sea Maiden in the West Highland Tales (No. 4). Miss Weston's comparison shows not only that the chief events of this tale are found in the earlier records of Lancelot, but further, that they may possibly explain how Lancelot