Page:Le Morte d'Arthur - Volume 1.djvu/11

Rh in French, which he, as a rule, reduced greatly in length in the process of giving the work an English garb. His sources, however, were not exclusively French; thus, for instance, he used for his fifth book of the Morte Darthur, a poem composed by the Scotch poet Huchown, which is extant in a manuscript of Thornton’s in the library of Lincoln Cathedral. Here and there Malory alters the sequence of the incidents given in his originals, and in some cases he interpolates facts not contained in them, while in other instances he omits certain incidents which he did not find to his purpose; but he is rarely found to have inserted entire chapters of his own. Taking the work as a whole, Dr. Sommer has succeeded in assigning with more or less precision the originals forming the groundwork of the whole, with one remarkable exception: I allude to Malory’s seventh book, which relates the adventures of Sir Gareth, the story of his first coming to Arthur’s court, of his being fed for a year in the kitchen, and of his receiving the nickname of Beaumayns at the hands of Syr Kay. Dr. Sommer admits that he has failed to trace any part of the contents of this book in any of the numerous manuscripts studied by him. He is inclined to regard it as a folk-tale which had no connection with the Arthurian cycle, until Malory, or some unknown writer before him, adapted it from a French poem now lost, as he conjectures.

After this brief reference to the works used by Malory, we come to a much larger and harder question of source, namely, the origin of the whole cycle of Arthurian stories and romances. For the most fruitful speculations on this subject in our day, one has to thank Dr. Zimmer, professor of Sanskrit in the University of Greifswald. He believes the romances to be based on stories of Breton rather than of Welsh origin. Briefly described, his theory sets out with the facts of the permanent conquest of a considerable tract of the east of Brittany by the Normans in the first half of the tenth century, and the intimate relationship which eventually grew up between the great families of Brittany and Normandy. Now, if we suppose the Bretons in their migration from Great Britain to their new country, called after them the Lesser Britain, to have