Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/140

112 he is the Mikado of the myth, the supersanct representative, nay the actual manifestation, of the life-god, the Fisher King being the Shogun, the active, visible, intermediating link between the deity and mankind. As such, the former is even more rebellious than the Fisher King to Christian transformation, and his personality is even more enshrouded in obscurity. He seems more especially to stand for the god when the weakness of the latter is figured as the result of a wound "in the vital (generative part)," and Dr. Nitze claims that "he is not so much to be avenged as healed" (p. 399). But may not, as I implicitly argued in 1888, the two processes be ultimately one, may not "vengeance" be the indispensable prerequisite, nay the effective means, of "healing" in the mythic drama? Compare in this light the march of events in the Mabinogi of Math: Llew is not reinstated in his lordship, i.e. fully restored, until he is avenged on Gronw Pebr. I am still of opinion that in the complex mass of the cycle two allied versions of an originally similar theme are interwoven, one insisting upon the healing and one upon the avenging function of the Grail quester.

Dr. Nitze is thus a firm believer in the mythic nature of the Grail legend. But diverse explanations of the emergence in mediæval Christendom of a myth originally and essentially pre-Christian are possible. That which commends itself on the whole to Dr. Nitze is substantially the one which I have championed: for him the Grail legend is, in the main, the outcome of mythic conceptions, rites, and fancies current among the Celtic-speaking populations of Britain and Ireland. He expresses himself cautiously, it is true; thus, à propos of the Mysteries evidence, he remarks (p. 381),—"Though we now know that the cults were carried into Gaul and even Britain in the stream of Roman colonization, and that Mithraism in the form of Manicheism had a recrudescence in France in the heresies of the Middle Ages, yet it is doubtful whether these influences were operative in forming, though they might have been a contributing element, especially later on." Again, in referring to Burdach's theory respecting the influence of the Mysteries ritual upon the liturgy of the Eastern Church, he remarks (p. 380, n. 6),—"This line of investigation seems especially promising with respect to Wolfram, in fact to all