Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/338

 302 have a summary of the Bleheris visit, given in terms often verbally identical with the text of Wauchier de Denain.

Some time ago, in the course of my Perceval studies, I came to the conclusion that the text at the root of the Elucidation was another, and apparently later, form of that used by Wauchier, and that in our English Gawain poems we had fragments of the same collection. Now, it appears to me, that we can suggest even a closer link. What if this text be really what it purports to be, the introduction to all the Grail stories? If it be the record of an insult offered by a local chieftain to a priestess of these rites, in consequence of which they were no longer openly celebrated in that land, and, as the writer puts it, "the court of the Fisher King (the Priest of this ritual) could no longer be found?" Would not that be the logical introduction to the tale of one who found, and knew not what he found? It may be that after all the Elucidation is not so badly named!

So far as the Christian aspect of the story is concerned, it is now beyond doubt that a legend, similar in all respects to that of the Grail, was widely current at a date long anterior to any of our extant Grail texts. The story, with Nicodemus instead of Joseph as protagonist, is told of two of the most famous of Continental relics, the Saint Sang of Fescamp and the Volto Santo of Lucca. The most complete MSS. of the Perceval refer, as authority, to a book written at Fescamp. Who was the first to utilise the pseudo-Gospels as material for the history of mediaeval relics we cannot say, but, given the trend of popular thought, it was practically inevitable that if the Grail were to receive the Christian pedigree which in the natural process of development in