Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/312



BY M. GASTER, PH.D.

the manuscripts in the Vatican (Urb. 48) there is a fragment of a Hebrew version of the history of King Arthur which might be called a Morte d' Arthur. Unfortunately the translator, or rather perhaps the copyist, has broken off in the middle, and the history itself is very brief. Practically it contains only two episodes of the Arthurian legends,—the history of Uther Pendragon and the birth of Arthur, and the history of Lancelot,—both much shortened. Prof. Berliner published the Hebrew text in his Otsar Tob, 1885, pp. i-ii, and refers briefly to it in his Magazin f. d. Wissenschaft d. Judenthums, 1885, p. 225. He states that there is no doubt about the date of the manuscript, which is supported by internal evidence. The manuscript mentions only the year –39, which according to Hebrew computation is equivalent to 1279. The full figures in Hebrew would be 5039, the thousands being omitted. The text is published from the copy made by Dr. Berliner from the unique original. There are various mistakes in the spelling of the names, and other orthographical inaccuracies, which may be due to errors either of the modern copyist or made by the former copyist owing to carelessness or difficulty of reading the lost original. It is a pity that the editor has not informed us