Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/336

 300 it not be the vessel of the common quasi-sacramental feast always connected with these rites? It is interesting that the MS. which gives us the best Bleheris text also, in the same section of the work, offers us the only other instance I know of the use of the word Grail. When Gawain enters the castle of Brandelis, he finds a feast prepared, and boars' heads upon Grails of silver. The other MSS. have here substituted for Grail the word Tailléor. It is thus practically certain that the writer of these tales, when he used the word Grail, meant a Dish, and not a Cup. The magical features, the automatic service, the feeding of the guests with all kinds of meat, were probably later additions, borrowed by the story-tellers from the numerous food-providing talismans of folk lore. For we must ask ourselves how was the story told, from the inside or from the outside? That is, was it intended to be a method of preserving, and handing on, the tradition of these rites; or was it simply a story composed round this ritual as a centre? The first hypothesis would appear to involve the admission that the minstrels were the conscious guardians and transmitters of an occult tradition; a view which, in face of the close connection now proved to exist between the minstrel guilds and the monasteries, I do not feel able to accept. Also, we should then expect to find one clear and consistent version; and I suspect that that version would have been less susceptible of Christianisation. But if the tale were told from the outside, if it were a story based upon, quite possibly, the genuine experience of one who assisted by chance at the celebration of these rites, ignorant of their nature and meaning, we can understand how it would take and keep this particular form. One admitted to the full participation in this ritual might not talk about it, where one possessed of but a partial and outside