Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/410

402 cleared up during the last few months. Readers of may recollect that one of the sins which Prof. Zimmer laid to my charge was that I used the Gaelic story of the Great Fool as evidence of the Celtic origin of the incident, similar to it, found in the Conte du Graal and in the Welsh tale of Peredur. I promised to investigate this charge. The Gaelic story has hitherto been known in two portions, one the lay proper, in verse, the other a prose introduction to the lay, printed by Campbell from oral tradition (Popular Tales, vol. iii). It was from this prose introduction that I chiefly drew my parallels between the Gaelic and French stories. But the Irish text of 1716, to which Prof. Zimmer drew my attention afresh, turns out, as my friend Dr. Hyde reports, to be a prose version, comprising both Campbell's introduction and the lay, and to be obviously dependent, in the first portion at least, upon some Arthurian romance akin to the English Sir Perceval. Until the whole is translated it would be unsafe to say if this prose text represents the original of the lay of the Great Fool, or if it be not rather a welding together of the lay and an Arthurian romance. In any case, Campbell's oral version is closely akin to the Irish text of 1716, and as this may possibly be a mere translation from the English or French, it cannot be accepted, for the present at least, as an independent variant of the Perceval story. Any arguments which I have based upon the Campbell fragment, whether in my "Aryan Expulsion and Return Formula among the Celts" (Folk-lore Record, iv) or in my "Legend of the Grail", must therefore be considered invalid, whilst arguments based upon the lay (of which I still doubt the Arthurian origin) should for the present be left out of account.

In Romania for January 1892, M. F. Lot, discussing the swan-children incident in the "Children of Lir", and the parallel between Diarmaid's combat in the "Pursuit