Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/141

Rh the later works with oriental colouring. But I do not see its bearing on the Conte del Graal, Perlesvaus, or indeed Borron's Joseph."

I am quite prepared to associate myself with this cautious mode of expression, and with the reserves expressly formulated (which I have italicised) in these passages. I hold, as must, I think, every impartial and serious investigator of the Grail cycle, that the original (Celtic) non-Christian elements were reinforced at the end of the twelfth century by others which made their presence felt in the lost French romance upon which Wolfram founded his Parzival. Whilst at first blush these other elements seem to me to come from the trans-Byzantine East and to be definitely referable to the Crusading movements in general, and to the Temple organisation in particular, I fully admit the possible survival, alike in the Byzantine area of influence and amongst the heretical communities of the West, of conceptions and practices deriving directly from pagan syncretism of the Empire. But these other non-Christian features of the legend are, I repeat, secondary and contributory; the primary, the formative, non-Christian elements are Celtic.

Dr. Nitze's whole argument implicitly accepts, nay, indeed, rests upon, certain postulates to the vindication of which much of my work has been devoted. For him, as for me, the "primitive Celts in Gaul, Wales and Ireland" had reached such a stage of culture as permitted the formation of a ritual, a mythology, and a resultant mythico-romantic body of artistry. I use this clumsy phrase to avoid the word literature with its implication of a written product. Let me add that what is premised above of the primitive Celts is by me, and, I have little doubt, by Dr. Nitze, to be premised likewise of the primitive Teutons. For him, as for me, products of ceremonial practice, of doctrinal belief, or artistic fancy, to be met with in the Celto-Teutonic area of the Middle Ages onwards to the present, which differ in content and purport from the prevailing Christian-Classic higher culture of that area, are, in the first place, to be explained by the hypothesis of possible survival from the primitive Celto-Teutonic past rather than by misinterpreted and deformed borrowing from intrusive higher culture. The one theory postulates not only the possibility