Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/67

 Rh was the easier it was for the subsequent author to introduce into it what was nearest to him, and to give to it either a material or a spiritual meaning; the whole history of the legend points to such a kind of development as that which it really did undergo.

But whence comes that fundamental motive, an adventurous knight endowed with superior gifts, striving after an undertaking quite unique, never attempted before and never afterwards?

A glance over the literary activity in France at the time will give us the answer.

It was in the middle of the twelfth century that the Trojan war had been made the theme of an elaborate epos of 30,000 verses by Benoît de St. More, who, basing his work upon that of Dares Phrygius, Paulus Orosius, Ovid, etc., wrote his Roman de Troie. At about the same time the fabulous history of Alexander the Great was changed into a national epos by Alberic de Besançon, Alexander de Bernay (c. 1150), and very much amplified by Lambert li Tort (c. 1190–1200), the contemporary of Chrestien. One has only to see how they dealt with their originals, how they transferred the whole scenery from hoary antiquity to their own time, and to their own courts, to understand the liberty a poet of those times could take with his originals.

Seeing the manner in which the old kings and heroes were changed into knights and squires, the old gods into magicians and fairies, I do not think that I shall be considered very bold if I say that the legend of the Quest is nothing else but also a transformation of the most interesting episodes of that very legend of Alexander; the hero of the Grail romance is none else but Alexander, the Quest the counterpart of his attempt to force the Gates of Paradise, and the wonderful castle or temple, the one that Alexander saw in his marvellous expedition.

There is not one old version in which that journey—the Iter ad Paradisum—is not contained either in an