Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/137

Rh but it has not in the pristine myth the pre-eminent importance assigned to the Holy Vessel in the mediaeval romances. Equally, in the pristine myth the real stress is upon the permanent factor, the representative of the life-force, the Fisher King; the questing initiate is only of importance in so far as he succeeds in duly accomplishing the set ceremonies of the ritual, and thereby becomes himself Fisher King, the necessary link between Man and those Nature Forces which Man masters and exploits, but only on condition of submitting himself thereto. In the mediaeval romances, again, there has been a shifting of interest; the quest has transcended its object, the quester the person whom he seeks.

I have restated in my own way and to some extent amplified Dr. Nitze's theory,—(here and there he does not seem to me to bring out his points with sufficient clearness),—without, I think, altering it. I am quite disposed to believe that the Fisher King was originally of greater and more significant importance than in the Romances; the postulated process by which a material factor in the ceremony,—the Grail,—and the secondary living factor,—the Grail Knight,—came in the Romances to overshadow him, is a natural and inevitable one. As Dr. Nitze remarks, "the least Christian feature in the legend is the Fisher King—his parallelism with Christ apparently stops with the name Fisher" (p. 372). Forcedly, therefore, the process of Christianisation was bound to obscure, even where it did not ignore, the part he played. The Grail itself could not, once that process was begun, escape identification with the Eucharistic Vessel, the means of saving grace; the Grail Knight could not, (though the process is only completed in the very latest phase of the legend's development), escape identification with the Saviour. Necessarily, in the legend as we have it, all the forms of which are to some extent transformed by the Christian ferment, these two elements, lending themselves as they do to Christian interpretation and amplification, have come to overshadow that element which was insusceptible thereto.

All this is at once sound and acutely reasoned. The features in the Fisher King's personality and in the ritual of which he is the centre, adduced by Dr. Nitze to justify the conception