Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/221

 Rh exactly how a mediæval poet would have acted. In this very cycle we have an instance which could not well be bettered. Wolfram von Eschenbach lays the scene of his Parzival at Arthur's court, or in the Arthurian region, but the father of his Arthurian hero is a knight-errant in the pay of the Soldar of Babylon. Not the least attempt is made to disguise the Oriental locale. It may safely be said that if any mediæval poet had formed the idea of the Grail legend in the Alexander cycle, he would have retained some, if not most, of the names of persons and places.

I pass from this preliminary objection to the consideration of the episode which Dr. Gaster seeks to equate with the Grail Quest. And I would at once ask Dr. Gaster why he quotes from Pseudo-Callisthenes and from Julius Valerius instead of from the French romances based upon these works, and which alone could have been used by Chrestien or any other of the Grail romance writers? I think I shall have little difficulty in answering the question presently. In Pseudo-Callisthenes the episode forms part of Alexander's account, in his letter to his mother, of the marvels he witnesses and the adventures he passes through after he has overcome the Amazons; he describes this struggle, then his visit to the temple of the sun, to the mountain of Nysa, and to the palace of Cyrus (the passages quoted by Dr. Gaster), then his strife with the cannibals, and his walling up of them and their leaders, Gog and Magog, and finally his delivery of Candaules, son of the Indian queen Candace, from the Turks and Armenians, The letter fills seven pages in Weismann's edition, of which two are devoted to the temple of the sun and to Mount Nysa, and half-a-page to Cyrus' palace. In Julius Valerius the letter fills a page only in Weismann's edition, the sun temple is described in four lines, Xerxes' palace in five, Alexander's visit to Paradise, the marvels of which he beholds quite at his ease, had already been described, as in Pseudo-Callisthenes, at a much earlier period and in a quite