Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/390

356 Reviews. itself completely in a folk-tale of prehistoric origin I cannot believe, any more than I can believe the primitive figures of the Mabinogion with their yellow satin robes, gold-clasped sandals, ivory bows and gold-headed arrows — the warriors who during their king's slumber solace themselves with goblets of mead and lumps of flesh on skewers — to be the descendants, instead of the ancestors, of Chrétien's courtly, self-communing knights.

On this point Herr Wechssler's position is eminently unsatisfactory. He believes in the existence of an insular (Welsh) as well as a Continental (Breton-French) tradition; he even goes so far as to assert that the first romances were written in Wales; yet at the same time he would have us believe that all the Arthurian romances now extant in that country are not survivals of national tradition, but directly derived from French sources. There seems no necessity for postulating the insular tradition, if we are to consider it as having so completely disappeared that it can play no practical part in the critical examination of the extant romances. That there were two such streams of tradition, both rising in Wales, I quite believe. Further, I am ready to grant the disappearance, in some cases, in the insular versions of certain features which were preserved in the continental. The Gawain legend is a case in type. There are leading traits in his story, demonstrably Celtic in origin, which we find in the French romances and not in the Welsh tradition. But though Wales lost and forgot much, she did not lose all. That the two streams have long ago mingled may be freely admitted, that one stream (and that at an early date) completely swallowed up and effaced the other I do not believe.

One feature in the sketch given above of the Perceval story deserves note. It will be remembered that Herr Wechssler believes the hero's mother to have been a Wald-fee, thus closely connecting the story with the Libeaus Desconus group. Dr. Schofield has already contended (Harvard Studies, vol. iv.) that the original source of these last was the Perceval story. In my Legend of Sir Gawain I carried the identification a step further, suggesting the possibility that these two heroes at one time occupied the position of father and son, a relationship which would help to account for the close connection of their stories. If Perceval's mother really was a fairy, it would of course much strengthen the supposition, Gawain's amours with a lady