Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/292

266 lities of coincidence, for the familiar machinery of folklore. The story of Gawain may resemble the story of Cuchulinn in several points and yet be different in origin. There may be no original Gawain at all; he may be merely a name for the "first adventurer," who is necessary at a certain stage in the history of the Round Table and similar institutions. The story of Gawain need not be in its origin a coherent myth of a divine or semi-divine hero; the other alternative is possible, that it may have grown together out of various wandering stories, the common formulas of adventure. This, which was some time a paradox, is now a truism; but, "though a truism, it may nevertheless be true." It is a defect in the argument that these possibilities have been too much ignored. Miss Weston recognises that adventures may be transferred from the credit of one hero to another, from Gawain to Lancelot, from Perceval to Galahad; but that Gawain and Lancelot may both have taken over the adventures of the nameless hero of popular tales, "the Lad" or "the King's Son," is not explicitly recognised. In Arthurian romance this explanation is vera causa. The Lais of Marie and the kindred Lais will show this. Compare Guingamor and Launfal. Both are stories of the Fairy Bride, with some parts of their plot identical. But while the king in Guingamor is without a name—"a King in Britain"—Launfal has been drawn into the Court of Arthur. Arthur, it is true, is in this case merely the shadow of a name, and the Queen is not Guinevere, because here we are just at the beginning of the process; but the set of the tide has begun; it is unmistakable, the change from separate adventures to the heroic system of a king and his paladins; and who shall say what things have not been carried by that movement from the nameless ocean of stories to the port of Cardevyle?

Resemblances between Gawain and Cuchulinn do not require the hypothesis of "an original Gawain legend" to explain them. Where there is the court of a king defined in heroic literature, there will be an adventurer for outlying labours and exploits, some one to play the part of Hercules or Cuchulinn; and there will be appropriated to him the commonplaces of popular tradition which may in this way, accidentally or coincidentally, bring about the semblance of heroic myth, of "an original legend." Gawain may be nothing but a name for a group of favourite adventures united in one hero. There arc strong arguments on the