Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/393

Reviews. 359 hero, as in Perceval li Gallois, or Galahad, as in the Queste, all give him a sister; and the Queste two brothers, Agloval and Lamorak.

I believe myself that in the foster-sister of the Peredur we have the germ of all the later developments of the character. Chrétien and Wolfram alike, while calling the maiden Perceval's cousin, yet insist on the point that she had been brought up in close connection with him. She knows his name, though he himself is ignorant of it. Either Kiot or his sources (very probably Kiot, as Chrétien makes very little of the character) saw the tragic possibilities of the maiden's story, and made her retire to a hermitage with her beloved dead. The idea was seized upon by later modellers of the story, but with a reminiscence of the original relationship they made the recluse maiden Perceval's sister. The writer of the Queste or his source, conversant as he certainly was with Kiot's version, retained the incident of the hero's visit to the hermitage, but made the dweller in it aunt instead of cousin; while at the same time, ignorant of the fact that both characters were originally one and the same, he kept the sister he knew of from other sources. Thus in the one line of tradition the foster-sister of the lonely lad became first his cousin, then his aunt, in the other line his sister, while the Queste preserves the double tradition. Wolfram's dweller in the woodland hermitage is really the first step in the evolution of the cloistered maiden of Malory and Tennyson.

This at least appears to me a probable and logical explanation of a feature in the story which has not hitherto attracted the attention it deserves. While important in its bearing on the relationship between Chrétien and Wolfram, as showing that a character absolutely unknown to the French poet was a part of the tradition handed down both to Wolfram and the writer of the Queste it is not less important as a clue to the relative order of the Grail romances as a whole.

Another point raised by Wechssler, which to my mind operates in a direction contrary to that intended by the writer, is his remark (on p. 24) that it is curious, during the Crusades, in view of the widespread passion for relics, to find no one claiming to have found the Grail itself, though the Lance of Longinus was found. This is certainly rather an awkward problem for those who claim priority for the Early History romances. Herr