Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/206

182 fessor Newell's summary of the Chevalier au Lion (which gives the essential incidents faithfully, so far as I have tested it) with The Lady of the Fountain. The length of both is about the same, equal, roughly speaking, to one-fourth of the French romance. I very much doubt if the comparison will lead any one, whose mind is not already made up, to regard Crestien as the direct and sole source of the Welsh tale. I can only say that renewed reading of the French in Professor Newell's, and of the Welsh in Lady Charlotte Guest's translation, has strengthened my conviction that the one is not the source of the other, but that both are derived from some earlier form of the story.

Professor Newell is of a directly opposite opinion. For him Crestien's and other French romances of the same date are mainly deliberate inventions, and not retellings of much older traditional material. Traits lacking in Crestien and found in works of a later date are the product of post-Crestien invention. This is the case with the story of Arthur's unknowing incest. It seems to me sufficient to point to the existence of a similar theme in the Irish Cuchulinn saga (Conchobor and Dechtire) and in the Teutonic Siegfried-saga (Siegmund and Signy), and to refuse politely, but firmly, to believe that a thirteenth century French story-teller would have had the idea of saddling with the most awful form of guilt he could conceive the king who by that time had become the exemplar of Christian knighthood.

It would lead me too far to examine in detail Professor Newell's Introduction and Notes. I have read them with interest, but there is hardly a statement respecting the nature and development of Arthurian romance that does not seem to me demonstrably erroneous. It was, perhaps, necessary to insist upon the part played by conscious literary art in the evolution of medieval romance, but Professor Newell has, in my opinion, allowed a comparatively unimportant feature to obscure and distort the real nature of this great body of romantic literature.