Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/165

Rh A hero is minded by talismans to avenge the death of a cousin (and the harming of an uncle); it is not stated that the talismans pass into his possession. It is difficult to admit that either of these forms can have served as direct model to the other. If the Mabinogi be a simple copy of the Conte du Graal, whence the altered significance of the talismans? whence also the machinery by means of which the hero is at last brought to his goal, and which is, briefly, as follows? The woe which has befallen Peredur's kindred is caused by supernatural beings, the sorceresses of Gloucester; his ultimate achievement of the task is brought about by his cousin, who, to urge him on, assumes the form (1) of the black and loathly damsel; (2) of the damsel of the chessboard, who incites him to the Ysbydinongyl adventure, reproves him for not slaying the black man at once, and then urges him into the stag hunt; (3) of the lady who carries off the hound and sends him to fight against the black man of the cromlech; "and the cousin it was who came in the hall with the bloody head in the salver and the lance dripping blood." The whole of the incidents connected with the Castle of the Chessboard, which appear at such length in both the Conte du Graal and the Didot-Perceval, but without being in any way connected with the main thread of the story, thus form in the Mabinogi an integral portion of that main thread. Would the authors of the Conte du Graal have neglected the straight-forward version of the Welsh tale had they known it, or could, on the other hand, the author of the Mabinogi have worked up the disconnected incidents of his alleged model into an organic whole? Neither hypothesis is likely. Moreover the Conte du Graal and the Didot-Perceval, if examined with care, show distinct traces of a machinery similar to that of the Welsh story. Thus in Chrestien, Perceval, on arriving at the Fisher King's, sees a squire bringing into the room a sword of such good steel that it might break in but one peril, and this the King's niece (i.e., Perceval's cousin) had sent her uncle to bestow it as he pleased; and the King gives it to the hero for—

After Perceval's first adventure at the Grail Castle it is his