Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/280

 244 Reviews.

Like most scholars brought into contact with the fascinating mystery of the Grail, Dr. Evans has felt its alluring charm, and tc Peredur he devotes one-third of his Introduction.

To the elucidation of the Grail problems he makes one contri- bution which, if well founded, is of capital and decisive importance. As is well known, the central incident of the Grail legend is the healing or deliverance of the Grail guardian by the Grail quester. In the Cotite del Graal the latter is Perceval (the Welsh Peredur). Now in the, seemingly, very archaic Verses of the Graves found in the twelfth century Black Book of Carmarthen, and- commemorating all the great heroes of Welsh legend, (many of whom are otherwise unknown to us), Peredur has, according to Dr. Evans, the epithet /^^ze^^/zV, which signifies chief physician. Dr. Evans maintains that this epithet carries with it the definite Grail legend in a Welsh form, and with Peredur as hero. He is thus in disaccord with the German school, which looks upon the Welsh tale as secondary and derivative, and also with Miss Weston, who holds that Gawain was the earliest Welsh Grail hero.

The stanza of the Verses of the Graves in which this pregnant epithet occurs refers not to Peredur himself, but to his son, Mor, who has the epithet diessic (unbruised). As Miss Weston has pointed out, this Mor seems to be the original of the Morien, son of Perceval, in a romance now only extant in a mediaeval Dutch version, and of the Feirefis, son of Parzival, in Wolfram. Both of these heroes are Eastern on the mother's side, and it is conjectured that this Eastern origin is due to a misinterpre- tation of Mor as Maure. Of two things, one : the stanza of the Verses of the Graves must be posterior to the development of the Perceval story which gave him an Eastern son, i.e. posterior to Kiot, author of the lost French romance underlying the Parzival, whose date can hardly be put before 1190, and the Welsh Mor must be due to misinterpretation by the Welsh poet of the French Maure ; or else it must be anterior, and if anterior to that, also, as a necessary consequence, to Crestien, indeed to the entire French or Anglo-Norman treatment of the legend. I do not think that even Professor Forster and his pupils, reckless and wilfully blind to evidence as they have shown themselves,