Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/412

404 of Dr. Sommer's researches into the sources of Malory's Morte Darthur. Malory is the latest in date of the mediæval writers who worked up the Arthurian stories into a cyclic whole. The compilers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries had welded the enormous mass of episodic incident that lay to their hand into four or five well-defined branches or sub-cycles, and had connected these in a more or less artificial way. This process was continued by Malory, who practically gives us an abridgment of the whole story cycle in one continuous narrative. What was the relation of this fifteenth-century compilation to the older compilations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? In how far could it be used for the purpose of recovering the earliest forms of the stories? Questions these not seriously attempted, save in the case of the Lancelot story by M. Gaston Paris, until Dr. Sommer took them in hand and now finally answered. Henceforth Malory can be used by the student, or rather must be used by the student in conjunction with Dr. Sommer's Commentary, if he wishes to obtain in the quickest and pleasantest mode possible a general knowledge of the Arthurian romance.

Whilst this storehouse of legend, which is also one of the noblest monuments of our literature, has been edited with a special view to the requirements of the scholar, the foundations of early Welsh history have been laid afresh by Mr. Egerton Phillimore in his edition of the Annales Cambriæ and Old Welsh Genealogies, from Harl. MS. 3859 (Y Cymmrodor, ix, 141), in the notes which he has added to the articles by Mr. J. E. Lloyd and Mr. William Edwards (Y Cymmrodor, xi, pp. 15-101), and in the masterly article on the publication of Welsh Historical Records (Y Cymmrodor, xi, pp. 133-175). Research into the origins of the Arthurian romance must always be based in part upon the early Welsh historical documents,