Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/329

 Rh women in these rites was of such importance that eventually it gave a name to the Festival. In the Notes to my translation of three visits paid by Gawain to the Grail Castle, I remarked on the persistent recurrence in these stories of a weeping maiden or maidens, the cause of whose grief is never made clear. In Diû Crône, where, as we have seen, the Maimed King and his court have but the semblance of life and are in very truth dead, the Grail-bearer and her companions are the only living beings in the castle, and their grief is, in a measure, comprehensible; they desire the breaking of the spell which binds them to this uncanny company. In what, in the Perceval Studies, I have designated as the Chastel Merveilleus version, a version midway between that of Bleheris and of Chrétien, there is but one weeping maiden, the Grail-bearer. In the curious interpolation of the Heralds' College MS., when the broken sword is restored to the Fisher King, he mentions among the results of the successful achievement of the quest, that the hero shall know why the maiden weeps. I doubt very much whether the writer of the lines himself knew the reason! In the visit paid by Bohort to castle Corbenic, it is Elaine, daughter of King Pelles, who weeps, because, being no longer a maiden, she may no longer be Grail-bearer. As she is about to become the mother of the Grail winner, and knows to what honour her son is predestined, the explanation is not convincing; but there had to be a weeping maiden in the story. The most curious instance of the persistence of this part of the original tradition is to be found in Gawain's visit to Corbenic, in the prose Lancelot, where he sees not one, but twelve maidens kneeling at the closed door of the Grail chamber, weeping bitterly, and praying to be delivered from their torment. But the dwellers in Castle Corbenic, so far from being in torment, have all that heart can desire, and, moreover, the honour