Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/141

Rh of chapter iii. alone, Mr. Griffith may be held to have proved his case.

this brief Study Professor Brown, who is an ardent advocate of the Celtic (specifically Irish) origin of the Arthurian stories, attempts to demonstrate such an origin for the Bleeding Lance of the Grail tradition, which he equates with the fiery and poisonous Luin of the Bruden dá Derga. That the talismans of the Grail castle, taken as a group, may be paralleled with the Four Treasures of the Tuatha Dé Danann I am quite prepared to admit; I believe the Grail symbols will be eventually recognised as being of extreme antiquity and world-wide diffusion, and that, wherever found, they are connected with a Nature ritual the object of which was to promote, or restore, fertility. The Tuatha Dé Danann were, as Mr. Alfred Nutt pointed out in his Voyage of Bran, deities of growth and fertility, and that such symbols should be connected with them is only to be expected. But to trace, as Professor Brown attempts to do, a direct connection between the Irish stories and the Arthurian legend, is another matter. For my own part I can see no connecting link. The parallelism is faint, and the efforts made to press the Irish tales into the service of Arthurian criticism seem to me often overstrained and unwise. The opponents of the Celtic view seize on the exaggerations, and make of them an excuse for ignoring the traces of possible relationship. The two groups are doubtless offshoots from a kindred stock, but of independent growth and development. The value placed by Professor Brown on the Balan story is, I think exaggerated; the version is manifestly a late piecing together of motifs taken from different sources, and the only text in which it occurs, the 'Huth' Merlin Suite, is a part of the latest and most contaminated version of the Arthurian cycle (cf. note 4, p. 117 supra). While agreeing in the main with the writer's views as to the ultimate origin of the Arthurian