Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/250

224 writings themselves, and thus the gear of the old Celtic gods became transformed into such objects as were most prominent in the story of the Passion and of the scene that immediately preceded it. The spear became that one wherewith Christ's side was pierced. As for the vessel, the sacramental nature is the last stage of its Christian development; its original object was merely to explain the sustenance of Joseph in prison, and to provide a miraculous refreshment for the Grail host, as is shown by the Early History portion of the Conte du Graal and by the Queste. In a dim and confused way the circumstances of the Resurrection helped to effect the change of the pagan resuscitation-cauldron into a symbol of the risen Lord. And some now lost feature of the original legend—some insistence upon the contents of the vessel, some assimilation of them to blood—may have suggested the use to which the vessel was first put.

This hypothesis assumes many things. It assumes a Bran conversion legend, of which the only evidence of anything like the same date as the romances is a single epithet; it assumes that the hero of this legend was originally an old Celtic divinity; it assumes a Joseph conversion legend, for which there is really no other evidence than that of the romances; it assumes the amalgamation of the two legends, and that Joseph took over in a large measure the rôle and characteristics of Brons. And when it is recollected that the primary assumption, the identification of the two Brans, rests in a large measure upon the appearance of the fish in the Brons legend, that this fish is nowhere in Celtic tradition associated with Bran, that it is associated on the other hand with a being, Fionn, whom we have compared with Peredur, but that it is absent from the Peredur-saga, the hypothesis must be admitted to be of a tentative nature. I fully appreciate the force of the objections that can be urged against it; at the same time it has the merit of accounting for many puzzling features in the legend. When in the same story two personages can be distinguished whose rôle is more or less of the same nature, when the one personage is subordinated in one version and has disappeared altogether from the other, it is quite legitimate to conclude that two originally independent accounts have become blended, and that one has absorbed the