Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/62

 54 drawn from various quarters, could have been added afterwards by the continuator and amplifier of the tale.

But that primary one must already contain the most important incidents, and at the same time this primitive tale must contain that of the Grail as one of its incidents, but only in a vague, indefinite form, so as to afford the possibility for the double interpretation of the Grail as presented on one side by Chrestien, and on the other by Wolfram.

The problem, therefore, is to find a tale containing some of the principal elements of the Quest, the Grail or something akin to it being an important one; this Grail, or whatever would be standing for it, must be conceived in a vague, indefinite form, so as to be able to be filled with any kind of interpretation—religious, material, metaphysical, according to the poetical bent and the intentions of the poets. It is, further, an absolute necessity that such a tale should be of an older date than the time of Chrestien, and also it will have to be shown that it was, or could have been, accessible to him.

Before I proceed further, let us first examine the state of things as they existed in Europe at the end of the twelfth century, the psychological condition, in the midst of which Chrestien lived, and moved, and wrote.

It is in the twelfth century that the great French epical poetry flourished. Through patient investigation it has been proved that the history of the old Merovingian period was changed by the trouveur in some of these epopees into the history of Charlemagne. A battle at Roncevalles became the theme of one of the most celebrated old French romances, the chanson de Roland, and this was soon followed by a stately line of Chansons de Geste. Once started on the line of changing old history into modern, poets took a bolder course, and changed heroes of antiquity into national ones. Very well known is the tendency of the age to connect their own national history with that of the Greeks and Romans. The Roman de Brut of Wace, the old chronicles of Geoffrey and others,