Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/134

 126 W.P.Ker.

, a prosaic adaptation of the pont evage, the underwater bridge, that is known to Crestien in the Chevalier de la CJiarrette? Crestien himself seems hardly to have under- stood the fashion of this bridge, and makes little more of it than the " Irish bridge" of the popular gibe ; z>., a ford in deep water. Whereas, to rival the terrors of the Bridge of the Sword, it must have been originally a bridge through, and in, and made of, the water itself, a tunnel of water through the water, to which the adventurer had to commit himself.

In the second Gaelic version the Princess is the Sun Goddess (or Sunbeam? Campbell, ii, p. 357 «.), daughter of the King of the Gathering of Fionn. This would seem to connect the story with the myth of the quest for the Sunbright unknown maiden, oversea — the story of Frey and Gerd ; of the Danish ballad of Child Svendal, as of its original the Fidlsvinnsmdl ; of Alfhild in Saxo (of. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology, p. 113); of Orendel and Bride, in the middle High-German poem ; of Conall Gulban and his search for " Breast o' Light" ; and of the King's Son of Ireland and the daughter of the King with the Red Cap, in Macdougall's Tales {Celtic Tradition, iii, p. 145). It is the same story that recurs again in Walewein: the princess recognises Gawain, as Svipdag is recognised by Menglad. Even if the story of the various minor quests, for the chessboard, or the blue bird, or the sword of light, have no necessary connexion with the myths of Alfhild or Menglad, which is the myth of Berecynthia (Hjalmar Falk, Martianus Capella og den nordiske Myto- logi, Aarbog for nord. Oldkyndighed, 1891), it was in- evitable that the popular story of these adventures should come, in some of its aberrations, within the orbit of the oldest romance and most famous quest in the world — the story of the Princess at the World's End.

Perhaps the most interesting thing in Walewein is the proof it affords that it was possible to transpose a story of this sort into the form of a long romance, without essential