Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/324

288 Now, there are certain points in this story which cannot fail to strike those familiar with the Grail legend. Who are the two dead men of the tale, the knight so mysteriously slain and the Body on the bier? We never learn. Nor do we ever hear the nature of the quest—Was it to avenge the dead knight of the castle? Was it to break the spell upon the land? Manessier, who about fifty years later brought the Perceval compilation to a final conclusion, gives, indeed, what purports to be a continuation of the tale, Gawain is here besought by the sister of the knight slain in his company to come to her aid against a foe, but the story is banale to the last degree. There are points of contact with other versions: the maiden's name is 'la sore pucele,' the name Chrétien gives to the Grail King's niece; her foe is King Mangons, or Amangons, the name of the oppressor of the maidens in the Elucidation, to which we shall refer presently; but if there be any original connection with the Bleheris version, that connection has become completely obscured. Manessier, too, makes no attempt at solving the mystery of the Body upon the bier: certain scholars have indeed identified the slain man with Goon-Desert, or Gondefer, the brother of Manessier's Grail King, whose death by treachery Perceval avenges. But this identification is purely arbitrary; there is no bier in Manessier, it is, in fact, distinctively a feature of the Gawain version.

The connection of the wasting of the land with the death of the knight, if knight he were, is also uncertain; indeed this is a part of the story which appears to have been designedly left in obscurity—it is at this point that Gawain falls asleep. I am tempted to believe that those who told the tale were themselves at a loss here. Then the Grail is no Christian relic, it acts simply as a food-providing talisman, coming and going without visible agency. It is called the rich, not the holy, Grail.