Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/71

 Rh sacred place, and that I should not expose myself to the dangers awaiting the intruder."

It is obvious that this passage here belongs to the description of the temple, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the palace of Xerxes; and so we find it also afterwards in the Latin and French versions of the Alexander legend.

Substituting Perceval for Alexander, we have in this chapter the central motives of the Grail legend: the marvellous castle or temple Alexander had been the onlymortal who could reach after long and severe hardship; the mysterious old man on the couch, who appears in the romances as the maimed, sick king; the marvellous stone or cage, with the mysterious dove endowed with supernatural gifts—what could be more welcome for a poet than such a figure as that of the unknown powerful and yet half-concealed man lying on a couch? Fancy was quite free to picture in him either an ideal or a physical sufferer, tortured by a wound, inflicted either by a shaft, or by the dart of sin. Nothing could therefore adapt itself better to another cycle of tales and legends than the things seen in the temple; the jewel, or the dove, the huge amphoras and cauldrons, the numerous demi-gods and mystics, they could afterwards be substituted by Christian emblems or by other conceptions, drawn from different sources. The vagueness of the objects beheld in the temple, which can be seen already in the Latin versions of Valerius, whose words (almost unintelligible) I have retained, is the same which clings to the Grail, to the castle, its inmates, and the task of the hero.

It is, therefore, neither a feud-quest nor an unspelling-quest, to which two formulas Mr. Nutt has reduced the legend (p. 181), but simply the journey to the earthly Paradise, and the marvellous castle or temple of the sun, which form the primitive nucleus of the romance.

Following up that clue we shall be able to explain many an incident in the romance through the legend of Alexander. There is in the romance the chief fisher standing by