Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/344

 314 Reviews.

in later romance became the rescuer and the lover of Queen Guinevere. The argument summarised in pp. 47-48 of the Three Days' Tournament is well worked out, though it ends in no more than a possibility. What Miss Weston has added to Mr. Ward's inferences from Ipomedon is something distinct and clear. The rise of Lancelot, and his promotion over the Arthurian knights of older established fame, may still remain a problem, but Miss Weston has succeeded at any rate in finding an hypothesis that fits the case and " saves the appearances."

Miss Weston gives some space to a discussion of Cliges, a poem of Chrestien de Troyes which contains the tournaments and has been thought by some historians to have introduced this "machine" into Arthurian romance. Miss Weston spends too much labour in proving that Chrestien was not original. Cliges (about 1165) their authors invented as little and borrowed as freely as Chaucer or Ariosto. Cliges is a story of modern sentiment, with decora- tions from the kingdom of Arthur ; Ipomedon a romance of Britain travestied under Greek names. It was an older school of romance that provided plots and scenery for artists like Chrestien. This older school, with proportions of narrative much the same as in simple fairy-tales, is represented in some extant stories of Lancelot : " Lancelot and the White-foot Deer " is the familiar tale of Ritter Red, the False Claimant. There is nothing unreasonable in Miss Weston's surmise that there may have been an early romance of Lancelot with a plot like that of the Gaelic Sea Maiden. The theory only carries a little further the acknowledged resemblance between certain old-fashioned stories of Lancelot and the plot of a fairy-tale.
 * xr\di Ipomedon (twenty years later) are examples of literary romance :

If there is any want of clearness in Miss Weston's demonstration it may be set down as largely due to the nature of the subject. Miss Weston has not only to interpret the dream, but (in the case of Walter Map's hypothetical story) to discover what the dream was about. Studies of this sort cannot help being shadowy and impalpable. The arguments are not like those of Chaucer's eagle, solid creatures "that you may shake them by the bills." The conclusion is very far short of proof, but it shows one possible way in which the mysterious origin and progress of Lancelot may

be understood.

W. P. Ker.