Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/340

 304 von Eschenbach), have dared to turn it into a mere magical stone, a Baetylus? For if there be one thing certain, it is that the Grail had been Christianised before the day of Chrétien and Kiot. If, on the other hand, the vessel were a mere food-providing Pagan talisman, how, and why, did it become so suddenly Christianised? what was there about it, more than about the countless similar talismans, that would suggest such a development? But if the Grail were from the first connected with a form of religious worship, from the first surrounded with a halo of awe and reverence, we can understand that it would lend itself with admirable readiness to the process of Christianisation. Even as we can understand how Kiot, who was certainly a man of unusual learning, while he might shrink from Paganising a fundamentally Christian relic, would have no scruple in substituting the object of one mysterious Pagan cult for that of another, and in replacing the vessel of the Adonis Rites by a Baetylus. One who knew so much may well have known what was the real character of the Grail. It seems to me that on this theory, and on this theory alone, can we account logically and harmoniously, alike for the development and the diversities of the Grail romances.

It is scarcely necessary to remind members of this Society that, in the interesting series of papers on the European Sky-God, contributed by Mr. Cook to the pages of Folk-Lore, certain stories connected alike with Cuchullin and Gawain, are claimed as dependent on, and to be explained by, precisely the set of customs and beliefs with which I am here dealing. If the Green Knight be a survival of the Vegetation god, why not the Maimed King? I do not know how far Mr. Cook's theories have met with the approval of folk-lore experts, but it does seem to me that when two enquirers, starting from different points, and travelling by different roads, reach precisely the same goal, there is at least an