Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/80

 52 The European Sky -God.

of Lunete, Lunete herself being a cousin of Merlin's inamorata Niniane. Lunete has installed Brehus as defender of the fountain of Breceliande : he is to fight any knight who provokes the storm by pouring water from the basin on to the stone and is to take away his horse ; if he is himself vanquished, the victor is to do with him what he pleases. In other words, Lunete here takes the place of Laudine or the Countess of the Fountain, whose doublet I hold her to be.^ Lastly, instead of a pine growing by the fountain, we hear of a sycomore, to which the basin was attached by a chain,^ though in another passage we are told that Kalogrenant fastened his horse to a pine standing beside the sycomore.^

These and other* variations on the same theme all go back to one common Celtic myth, which itself, if I am not mistaken, implies a ritual practice strictly analogous to that of the rex NetJiorensis. Curoi with his oak- branches foiled by Cuchulain, the Green Knight with his holly branch in the story of Gawain, King Guiromelans 'of the Mistletoe-bough' beaten by Gawain and Perceval, Searbhan Lochlannach who guarded the quicken-tree of Dubhros, the Knight of the Fountain worsted by Diarmuid near the great fruit-tree of Tir-fa-tonn, Esclados le Ros vanquished by Iwain beside the pine-tree of Breceliande, what are they all but mythic echoes of the woodland king whose business it was to fight all comers beneath his sacred tree ?

Nay more, if we accept Mr. A. Nutt's^ acute suggestion

^ Supra p. 49 f. - Livre d^Artus 88 p. 56.

2 lb. 94 p. 58. The same variant, viz. a sycomore for a pine, is found in Christian von Troyes Erec tmd Enide ed. W. Foerster Halle 1890 p. 210 line 5834 : it occurs in the episode of La joie de la Cort, which is summarised by A. C. L. Brown Iwain p. 133 f.


 * E.g. Bojardo Orlando iiinamorato i. i. 27 ed. I'anizzi ii. 8,

^ A. Nutt Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail p. 232 ff. Cp. A. C. L. Brown Iwain p. 26 n. I.