Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/326

 290 submit, identical with the central idea of the Adonis rites—a death, and failure of vegetation caused by that death. Both here and in the version given by the curious German poem of Diû Crône, where Gawain is again the Grail hero, we are told that the wasting of the land was brought about by the Dolorous Stroke. Thus the central figure, the Body on the bier, whose identity is never made clear, would in this view represent the dead god; the bleeding Lance, the weapon with which he was done to death (I think it more probable that the Dolorous Stroke was dealt by a Lance or Spear, as in the Balin and Balan story, than by a sword).

If we accept this view we can, I think, explain the origin of that mysterious figure of the Grail legend, the Maimed King. The fact that this central figure was at the same time dead and alive must, when the real meaning of the incidents had become obscured, and the story, imperfectly remembered, was told simply as a story, have been a source of perplexity to the tellers. An easy way out of the difficulty—it was a very real difficulty—would be to represent the king, or god, as desperately wounded. That such an idea was in the minds of the romance writers appears, I think, from the peculiar version of Diû Crône, where, when Gawain has asked concerning the Grail, the Maimed King and his attendants vanish at daybreak; they were dead, but preserved a semblance of life till the question was put. If the Gawain versions really represent the older, and primary, group, it is possible that this particular rendering really preceded the Maimed King version, though in the form preserved it is combined with it.

Again, in the very curious and unique Merlin MS., No. 337 of the French MSS. of the Bibliothèque Nationale, we find that Perceval is called the son of the widow lady, while his father, the Maimed King, is yet alive, and it