Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/79

 The European Sky -God. 51

its dependence on Chretien's poem, describes the tree as a ' thorne ' :

pare I fand })e fayrest thorne, pat ever groued, sen God was born : So thik it was with leves grene. Might no rayn cum parbytwene ; And J)at grenes lastes ay. For no winter dere yt may.^

Presumably the species of the tree varies according to the flora of the district in which the myth is localised.

The Anglo-Norman tale underlying Yvain and The Lady of the Fountain may be regarded as the source of several episodes contained in the old French prose- romance called the Livre dArtus? This work, which supplies us with a collateral version of Kalogrenant's adventure,^ confirms in a remarkable way several of the conclusions already drawn from a comparison of Yvain and The Lady of the Fountain with TJie Slothfid Gillie and other definitely Celtic sources. The monstrous herdsman is here expressly said to be Merlin in disguise, who tells Kalogrenant that he is lord of the forest and that the fountain is defended by one of his relatives and friends. This to some extent supports my conjecture^ that the giant herdsman was originally a god, viz. the Otherworld king, whose human repre- sentative, king of the district, had a fighting deputy or champion at the fountain. Again, this champion is said in the Livre d'Artus to be Brehus-sans-pitie,^ a lover


 * Ywain and Gawain 353 ff., cp. ib. 627.

2 E. Freymond ' Beitrage zur Kenntnis der altfranzosischen Artusromane in Prosa' in the Zeitschri/t fur franzosische Sprache und Litter atur Berlin 1895 xvii. I ff. summarises the Livre d^ Arties from a Paris MS. of the thirteenth century.

^Id. ib. p. S3 ff. * Supra p. 47.

^On whom see E. Freymond ' Zum Livre d'Artus' in the Zeitschrift fUr romanische Philologie 1892 xvi. 125 f., E. Loseth Le roman en prose de Tristan Paris 1891 p. 500 f. s.v. ' Brehu(s), [Brun),' P. Rajna Le fonti delV Orlando Furioso Firenze 1876 p. 106 ff.