Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/389

Reviews. 355 whereas the position of Perceval in the Queste is quite consistent with his having been deposed from the leading position in favour of Galahad. As I have pointed out in my Legend of Sir Gawain, the writer of the Queste certainly knew the original Perceval story.

Again, if the Grail legend had been originally and essentially Christian, if the vessel had been from the first connected with the Passion, either as the vessel of the Last Supper or as the first receptacle of the Holy Blood, it is difficult to understand how in the three principal Perceval romances, Chrétien's poem, the Parzival, and the Peredur, we should find such divergent views, such obvious confusion, as to the nature of the Grail. Wechssler's attempt to bring Wolfram's poem into line by making his stone = monstrance is ingenious, but not convincing. Wolfram distinctly says the oblât was laid ûf dem stein; to replace ûf by in, as Wechssler does, is disingenuous. No one reading Wolfram's account of the stone can have any doubt as to his meaning — there is no vessel wrought from a precious stone here.

I prefer to believe that the history of the Grail is that of a folk-tale, containing originally a wondrous talisman, becoming gradually christianised, not by any violent wrenching of the story or introduction of foreign element, but by a natural process of evolution and adjustment to the mind of a christianised folk. When the story had become generally accepted and widely popular, a demand for the previous history of this talisman gave the opportunity for constructing a more directly Christian and edifying legend, as distinct from the Perceval Saga. (With Hertz I think we may well make a distinction between these two elements.) Thus to my mind the three romances named above represent the earliest stage, when the Grail was still hovering on the borderland between heathendom and Christianity, the tellers of the story inclining now to one side, now to the other, or as in the Parzival trying to combine the two ideas.

The second stage is reached in the prose romances of Perceval, and Perceval li Gallois, where there is no doubt as to the nature of the talisman, and Perceval still remains the hero, shreds and fragments of his old story clinging to him, as they do throughout. When Galahad comes on the scene the final stage is reached, heathendom has practically vanished, and medieval Christianity reigns triumphant.

That a legend, Christian in inception and development, lost 2 A 2