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212 underworld, so he might not speak lest he lose the power to return to the land of the living. One tale we have seen (supra, p. 195) does contain this very injunction to say no word whilst in company of the dwellers in the Bespelled Castle. In this case we should have to assume that two varying redactions of the theme have been maladroitly fused into one in the romances—that, namely, which bids the visitor to the otherworld abstain from a certain act, and that which, on the contrary, bids him perform a certain act, failure of compliance with the injunction being punished in either case. The positive injunction of one form of the story is used as an explanation of the hero's failure in another.

An alternative hypothesis is that whilst the hero's unreadiness of speech, the cause of his want of success at his first visit, comes wholly from the unspelling quest, the motive by which the romances seek to account for that unreadiness comes from the feud quest. The latter, as has been shown, is closely akin to many task-stories; and it is a frequent feature in such stories, especially in the Celtic ones, that the hero has to accomplish his quest in spite of all sorts of odd restrictions which are laid upon him by an enemy, generally by a step-mother or some other evil-disposed relative. In the language of Irish mythic tradition Perceval would be under geasa to ask no questions, and Gonemans' advice would be the last faint echo of such an incident. The form which such prohibitions take in Celtic folk-tales is very curious. The gess is generally embodied in a magical formula, the language of which is very old and frequently unintelligible to the narrators themselves. As a rule, the hero, by advice of a friendly supernatural being, lays a counterspell upon his enemy. Thus, in "How the Great Tuairsgeul was put to Death" (Scot. Celt. Rev. I., p. 70) the magician "lays it as crosses and charms that water leave not your shoe until you found out how the Great Tuairsgeul was put to death." The hero retorts by laying the same charms that the magician leave not the hillock until he return. In Campbell, No. XLVII., Mac Iain Direach, the stepmother, "sets it as crosses, and as spells, and as the decay of the year upon thee; that thou be not without a pool of water in thy shoe, and that thou be wet, cold, and soiled until, etc.;" and the hero bespells her, "that thou be standing