Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/136

108 first English representative and to the doctrines of which Miss Weston has made such brilliant and decisive contributions. Indeed, his study may be described as a confirmatory complement to Miss Weston's article, The Grail and the Rites of Adonis (Folk-Lore, vol. xviii., pp. 283-305). For Dr. Nitze the stuff of the Grail legends is no mere literary hotch-potch worked up under the impulse of definite artistic or edificatory considerations by twelfth-century storytellers, but is of immemorial antiquity, and is in its essence mythic and ritualistic; for him, the Celtic factor in the formation of the cycle is not secondary and unimportant, but primary and dominant.

The special contribution made by Dr. Nitze to the elucidation of the legend is of a two-fold nature. He seeks to show that previous investigators have erred in the emphasis laid upon particular features of the legend; according to him the "Fisher King [and not the Grail itself] is the central figure of the Grail story, and thus probably the crux of the Grail problem." He further illustrates the essence of the legend by a more detailed comparison with the Mysteries of Antiquity than was made by Miss Weston, and this in order "to ascertain, if possible, the organic meaning of the Grail theme."

Dr. Nitze regards the Fisher King as "an intermediary between the two planes of existence, the present and the hereafter, the symbol of the creative, fructifying force in nature, specifically associated with water or moisture" (p. 395); the act of fishing dwelt upon in the romances, but of which, as is obvious to any unprejudiced observer, the romancers could make neither head nor tail, "symbolizes the recovery of the life-principle from the water, and as a piece of sympathetic magic doubtless had its practical value." He is also "the representative of the other world"; "his weakness or infirmity agrees with Nature's declining strength." His recovery depends upon a ceremony which, when successfully performed by the "initiate" Grail Knight, enables the latter to become his successor. In this ceremony, these rites "required to restore the strength of the Fisher King," the Grail is "the receptacle for the divine food, wafer or blood, by partaking of which the mortal establishes a blood-bond with the god" (p. 400). This function is important,