Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/171

Rh next chapter, the living folk-tale has preserved were left out or their significance was not recognized. What more natural than that the author of the Mabinogi in its present form, knowing Chrestien, should piece out his bare, bald narrative with shreds and patches from the Frenchman's poem? The moment Chrestien fails him, he falls back into the hurried concision of his original. His adaptation of Chrestien is done with singularly little skill, and at times he seems to have misunderstood his model. He confines his borrowing to matters of detail, not allowing, for instance, Chrestien's presentment of the Grail incident to supersede that of his Welsh original. In one point he may, following Chrestien, have made a vital change. It seems doubtful whether the Welsh source of the Mabinogi knew of a maimed king, an uncle to be healed through the hero's agency; the sole task may have been the avenging the cousin's death. True the "lame uncle" appears at the end, but this may be due to some sudden desire for consistency on the arranger's part. But whether or no he was found in the Welsh story preserved in the Mabinogi, he certainly played no such leading part as in the Conte du Graal. The two stories deal with the same cycle of adventures, but the object of the hero is not the same in both, and, consequently, the machinery employed is not quite the same. The present Mabinogi is an unskilful fusion of these two variations upon the one theme.

Light is also thrown by this investigation upon the question of Chrestien's relationship to his continuators. Birch-Hirschfeld's theory that the Didot-Perceval was the source of Chrestien and Gautier has already been set aside. Apart from the reasons already adduced, the fact that it does not explain from whence Manessier got his ending of the story would alone condemn it. It must now be evident that Chrestien and two of his continuators drew from one source, and this a poem of no great length probably, the main outlines of which were nearly the same as those of the Welsh proto-Mabinogi given above, with this difference, that the story turned upon the healing of the uncle and not the avenging the