Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/251

Rh other. The hypothesis is on safe ground so far. It thus explains the presence of Brons in the legend, as well as his absence from some versions of it; it has something to say in explanation of the connection with Glastonbury; it explains in what way the Celtic traditions were started on their path of transformation; and it provides for that transformation taking the very course it did. There is nothing to be urged against it on a priori grounds; once admit the premisses, and the rest follows easily and naturally. Its conjectural character (the main objection to it) is shared in an even higher degree by the other hypotheses, which have essayed to account for the growth and origin of the legend, and they have the disadvantage of being inherently impossible.

In the light of the foregoing investigations and hypotheses we may now amplify the sketch history of the whole cycle given in Chapter III. The Peredur-saga probably came into existence in much its later form at an early date in the Middle Ages. A number of older mythical tales centered in a, perhaps, historical personage. The circumstances of his life and adventures may have given them not only cohesion, but may also have coloured and distorted them; nevertheless they remained, in the main, mythical tales of the same kind as those found all over the world. One of these tales was undoubtedly a Cymric variant of the Celtic form of the Expulsion and Return formula; another dealt with the hero's journey to the Land of Shades; traces of many others are to be found in the Mabinogi. Another Celtic worthy, Gwalchmai, was early associated with Peredur, and the two stood in some such relation to each other as the twin brethren of a widely spread folk-tale group. Curiously enough, whilst comparatively few incidents in the Peredur-saga were worked up into the version which served as immediate model to the North French romances, that version contained many adventures of Gwalchmai's which have not been preserved in Welsh. We can trace three main crystallizations of the original saga-mass; one represented by the Proto-Mabinogi contained the feud quest, and, probably, some only of the other adventures found in the present Mabinogi; the second, based more on the lines of the Expulsion and Return formula, is represented by the Thornton MS. romance; in the