Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/391

Reviews. 357 of supernatural birth (fairy or magician's daughter) being a leading feature in his story. But I do not think there is any evidence to point to such a conclusion. The only romance which hints at fairy descent is the Parzival, and there the connection is on the father's side. A glance at the formula of the Aryan expulsion and return group (cf. Nutt, Folklore Record, vol. iv.) will show that this represents the more primitive form. In my chapter on the subject I have given reasons for thinking that the fairy element was a later introduction into the group, due to contamination by the Gawain legend, and did not affect the Perceval story proper.

With Herr Wechssler's treatment of the Chrétien-Wolfram question I am much more in accord ; but I think he is mistaken in considering Kiot's poem to have been simply an enlargement of Chrétien's unfinished work. The most natural interpretation of Wolfram's words is surely that Kiot's poem having been written first and containing the true story, he might well be angry with Chrétien for having told it wrong. I still think, as when I wrote my excursus to the English translation of the Parzival, that the most probable theory, and that which meets alike the agreements and divergences of the poems, is that both were derived ultimately from the same source, a source from which Chrétien drew at first, Wolfram at second hand, the intervening element in Wolfram's case being the poem of Kiot.

Herr Wechssler does not see that his own argument does not work out satisfactorily. His suggestion that the object of Chrétien's poem was to compliment the widowed queen Alix of France and her son Philip Augustus, between whose history and that of Perceval and his widowed mother an analogy might be found, is ingenious and does not appear improbable; but, as he clearly sees, there was another mother and son of whom this was even more true, i.e. Matilda, widow of Geoffrey of Anjou and mother of Henry Fitz-Empress. If Kiot's poem, with its Angevin allusions, was written to compliment these two, it would hardly have been when the mother had been dead almost twenty years (Matilda died in 1165), and the son was nearing the end of his reign, an end shadowed by heavy sorrows and family dissension. Nor would the suggestion (brought forward by me four years ago) that such a poem would find ready welcome in Germany out of compliment to Matilda be of equal force, supposing her connection with that country had ceased so many years previously. Judging from