Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/485

 Reviews. 443

nificant that her son is never called either fih Urien or chevalier au lion.

On p. 231 Miss Paton says that the maiden who has carried off the stag's head is the Fisher King's daughter. The Fisher King in Gautier has no daughter, we only find her in Manessier.

It is only fair to Miss Paton to say, while pointing out the defects in her study, that I believe she is not altogether respon- sible for those defects ; while the vast majority of Arthurian MSS. remain a terra incognita, unexamined, and unedited, the attempt at a complete and exhaustive study of any incident or character of the cycle is practically fore-doomed to failure, though our thanks are none the less due to those who are willing to act as pioneers in clearing the way for others to follow.

Jessie L. Weston.

Whilst grateful to Miss Paton for her valuable collection of material and for much suggestive investigation, I cannot, any more than Miss Weston, accept the Morgain-Morrigan equation. But I must point out to Miss Weston that the Morrigan belongs to the same divine clan as Fand. There is no reason why she should not, like others of the Tuatha de Danaan goddesses, have developed into a " fairy queen ; " but as a matter of fact she belongs to the earliest and rudest stage of Irish saga, and the form under which that saga has come down to us is obviously a survival from an older and more savage world. Miss Paton's equation necessarily carries with it the implication (or so it seems to me) that the figure of the Morrigan went over from Irish into Welsh literature in the xoth-iith centuries. It strikes me as untenable that the Morrigan story as we know it in Irish tales of the 7th-i2th centuries could originate or account for the Morgain story as we find it in the 12th-century French and Latin romances.

Alfred Nutt.