Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/145

Rh wrote before Chrestien, and must have been at least thirty years older than Hélie, who in the Guiron (written about 1220) calls himself a young man. How is it with the testimony of the MSS.? Those of the Lancelot have unfortunately lost their colophon, owing to the Queste being almost invariably added; those of the Queste show as a rule a colophon such as the one quoted by Paulin Paris from the Bibl. Nat., MS. 6,963 (MSS. Franç II., p. 361): "Maistre Gautiers Map les estrait pour son livre faire dou Saint-Graal, pour l'amor del roy Henri son seignor, qui fist l'estore translater dou latin en françois." A similar statement occurs in a MS. of the Mort Artur (Bib. Nat. 6,782.). Both are equally credible. Now as the King can only be Henry II (+1189) and as the Queste preceded the Mort Artur it must be put about 1185, and Chrestien's Conte du Graal about 1180, an improbably early date when it is recollected that the Conte du Graal is Chrestien's last work. The form, too, of these colophons, expressed as they are in the third person, so different from the garrulous first person complacency with which Luces de Gast and Hélie de Borron announce their authorship, excites the suspicion that we have here not the author's own statement, but that of a copyist following a traditional ascription. Whether or no Map wrote the Lancelot, it may safely be assumed that he did not write the Queste, or a fortiori the Grand St. Graal. The tradition as to his authorship of these romances may have originated in Geoffrey's mention of the Gualterus archidiaconus Oxenfordensis, to whom he owed his MS. of the Historia Regum Britanniae. A similar instance of traditional ascription on the part of the copyist may be noted in the MSS. of the Grand St. Graal, the author of which is declared to be Robert de Borron. The ordinary formulæ (quoted supra, p. 5) should be compared with Borron's own words in the Joseph (supra, p. 5) and the difference in form noted. What proves these passages to be interpolations is that the author of the Grand St. Graal especially declares in his prologue that his name must remain a secret. The colophons in question are simply to be looked upon as taken over from the genuine ascription of Borron's poem, and there is no positive evidence as to the authorship of either the Queste or the Grand St. Graal; both works are