Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/138

110 outlined above, are, in part, those noted by previous investigators,—Simrock, Martin, myself, Staerk, and, in especial, Miss Weston. As far as Simrock and Martin are concerned. Dr. Nitze might, indeed should, have noted that their brilliant anticipations necessarily failed to command assent at the time. The theory of the mythic nature and significance of the Fisher King can only be justified if the Grail cycle as a whole is shown to have literary and historic connection with a mythical system as set forth in a mythico-romantic literature. To demonstrate this was largely the object of my 1888 Studies. This demonstration, completed by the independent yet allied investigation of the Irish Elysium and Rebirth conceptions (Voyage of Bran), and reinforced by other scholars, notably Miss Weston and Mr. A. B. Cook, both using, like myself in the Voyage of Bran, the Mannhardt-Frazer theory as a working hypothesis, has, I may claim, definitely indicated the true line of research. Until the connections of the Grail cycle with Celtic myth were established, the legend remained a "sport"; once they were established, it fell into its place in an evolutionary series.

I would note one instance in which a feature insisted upon by me in 1888 has received recent and independent confirmation, the parallelism of the Fisher King theme with an episode in the Finn Saga. I relied upon the Irish romantic tale, the Boyish Exploits of Finn, preserved in a late Middle Irish MS. True, I had in these pages (Folk-Lore Record, vol. iv., pp. 1-44) as early as 1881 urged the archaic nature of this tale. The evidence lay open, nevertheless, as Dr. Nitze has noted, to Professor Zimmer's objection that the Finn Saga, as a whole, is late. Within the last few years Mr. John MacNeill, analysing the historic and genealogical data of the Finn cycle, has shown that the Boyish Exploits belongs to the very earliest stage of that cycle, and cannot have assumed its extant shape much later than the eighth century.

It is, however, the novel evidence and arguments adduced by Dr. Nitze in favour of the mythic nature of the Grail story that give his study its chief interest, and require most searching consideration. Taking the Eleusinia as a type of the Mysteries, being from the start "both agrarian and mystic," he proceeds,—"We may say the mysteries in general served a double purpose: