that the substance of the Lancelot story was given him by his liege lady, Marie de Champagne.

Welsh Tales of Arthur.—It is unnecessary here to go into the vexed questions of the real or imaginary allusions to Arthur in ancient Welsh poems and legends. We now possess in Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion a beautiful English translation of four tales, called the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, found in a 15th-century MS., the Red Book of Hergest. These stories, dating from a much earlier epoch, contain nothing about Arthur; but with them are associated five later stories of the king or his knights, the three already mentioned, Geraint, the Lady of the Fountain, and Peredur, dealing with the themes of three of Chrétien's romances, and two of purely British origin, devoid of the foreign features introduced into these three. Of the two British tales, Kilhwch and Olwen comprises an enormous list of Arthurian names, with incidents that have recognizable connections with history. All are thoroughly Welsh in details, ideas, and atmosphere, even the three apparently reimported from Chrétien, the history of which, enshrining as they do primitive Welsh myths and Welsh names afterwards gallicized, is an obscure problem.

The Holy Grail. The two motives that ultimately transformed Arthurian story into an Arthuriad, giving the miscellaneous congeries of tales a unity more integral than that of mere grouping round a central personage, were the inspiring idea of the Grail quest and the tragic loves of Guenevere and Lancelot. As we have seen, Chrétien introduced this latter element, perhaps borrowing the story from a lost French romance (possibly by Walter Map) that is said to have been the original of the German Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's poem. We have also seen that Chrétien wrote 10,000 lines of a Grail poem, in which the knight of the quest is Perceval, not the saintly Galahad of later romances. But in origin the Grail motive belongs to a remote antiquity. At first, the Grail appears as a heathen talisman, the ultimate provenance and esoteric meaning of which are subjects still of keenest controversy. In the process of time it became identified with the sacred vessel that received the blood of Christ after the Crucifixion, and the quest, which in the Welsh Peredur is simply a story of vengeance, was definitely christianized. The 13th-century metrical romance Sir Percyvelle gives a form of the Perceval story older even than that of Peredur; here it has not yet been combined with the ancient tradition of the Grail.

ANGLO-NORMAN AND ENGLISH ARTHURIAN ROMANCES

Borron's Trilogy. The profoundly mystical character which the story later assumed was due, presumably, to the Anglo-Norman knight, Robert de Borron, who (c. 1170-1212) composed a trilogy of poems in which the story of Arthur, the Round Table, and the Grail becomes an epic of the conversion of Britain. The first and second parts alone have survived, and in a mutilated condition. They were soon

cast into prose, rearranged, and enormously extended. They went on expanding in the hands of later scribes, until they reached the unwieldy dimensions in which they were printed in the 15th and 16th centuries. Probably the missing third part is represented by the French romance known as the "Didot" Perceval, after the owner of the MS. The rude English alliterative romance called Joseph of Arimathea is derived from the Grand Saint Graal, one of the later prose recensions of Borron. Here Galahad is the victorious hero of the quest. Borron's Merlin was worked up and expanded to form an introduction to the huge romance of Lancelot, compiled about 1220.

Prose Romances.The only English prose romances of Arthur were the Merlin, translated from this expansion of Borron's poem, and Malory's great recension of many Arthurian romances, the Morte Darthur. The French prose Lancelot has, however, been claimed for an English writer, Walter Map (see ante, p. 616), author of De Nugis Curialium, a miscellany of satirical anecdotes and legends. The finest part of this romance is the second portion, La Queste del Saint Graal, which tells in noble French prose of Lancelot's failure and Galahad's achievement of the sacred quest. Malory, whose Morte Darthur was printed by Caxton in 1485, drew his materials from a large number of French and English sources and not always from the finest version of a given romance. Thus about a third of it is from a French prose Tristan, which gives an inferior account of its eponymous hero to that in the earlier tales. His first books were "" reduced " from the various MSS. representing the Merlin and its extensions, and the prose Lancelot supplied the main foundation for the latter part, from Book XI. onwards.

English Metrical Romances.-After Layamon, for a century or more, Arthurian romance in English fell into the hands of journeymen minstrels, whose work is of small account in comparison with the finished poems or the strange, mystical prose romances then being written in French. The metrical chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and Peter Langtoft have already been mentioned. More complicated metrical effects were attempted in the Northern poem Sir Tristrem, attributed, perhaps through confusion with the Anglo-Norman Thomas, to the famous Thomas of Ercildoune. The results are, however, not very gratifying, at least to modern ears, especially in comparison with the easy couplets of the French poem. Not much superior in accomplishment are the 10,000 lines that have survived of a Kentish poet's rendering of the Merlin romance, entitled Arthur and Merlin.

Early in the 14th century those worthy renderings of the exquisite Breton lays appeared, Sir Orfeo, Sir Degare, Emarè, and Le Freine. Then, later in the century, there was a fresh outburst of poetic activity, among the firstfruits of which was a fine adaptation of Chrétien's Yvain under the title Ywain and Gawain. 1350-60 a poet of strong national leanings, both in his patriotic fervour and his preference for Old English metre, wrote a poem known as the "Thornton " Morte Arthure after the scrivener, Robert Thornton, who wrote the MS. preserved at

Lincoln. Reasons of a doubtful character have been adduced for identifying the anonymous poet with Huchown of the Awle Ryale, otherwise "The gude Sir Hew of Eglintoun," a Scottish lawyer and statesman mentioned by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makeris. To the same poet, on ingenious but not convincing grounds, have been attributed Pearl, Cleanness and Patience, The Destruction of Troy, and others among the best productions of this era.

This Morte Arthure is a very free paraphrase of Geoffrey of Monmouth's narrative of Arthur's later career, especially the war with Lucius. So free is it in places that the writer inadvertently betrays himself in allusions to contemporary events, talking of "Spanyolis" in his account of the sea-fight, evidently having in mind the recent victory over the Spaniards off Winchelsea, and making Arthur's overthrow of the Emperor a facsimile of Crécy. The poem may, in fact, be regarded as an indirect eulogy of Edward III., whose prowess is reflected in King Arthur. It is one of the most original of our Arthurian poems, and its splendid descriptive passages lent many a magical phrase to Malory. The martial ring of the verse is like that of Layamon and the old Saxon war-epics:

Then Sir Gawain greeted with his grey een,

For grief of his good men that he should guide;
He wist that they wounded were and weary forfought;
And what for wonder and woe all his wit failed.
And then sighing he said with springing tears,
"With Saracens beset are we on every side;

I sigh not for myself, so help our Lord,

But for to see us surprised my sorrow is the more.
Be doughty to-day, yon dukes shall be yours!
For dear God, this day, dread ye no weapon.
We shall end this day as excellent knights,
Heir to endless joy with the stainless angels.
Though we have unwittingly wasted ourselves,
We shall work all weal in the worship of Christ.
We shall, spite yon Saracens, I sicker you my troth,
Sup with our Saviour solemnly in heaven,

In presence of that precious prince of all others,
With prophets, and patriarchs, and apostles full noble,
Before his freelike face that formed us all.

Yonder to yon yieldsoons, he that yields him ever,

Quilst he is quick and unquelled with hands,
Be he nevermore saved nor succoured of Christ,

But Satan his soul may sink into hell."
Then grimly Sir Gawain grips his weapon,
Against that great battle he graiths him soon;
Readily of his rich sword he rights the chains,
In he shocks his shield, shrinks he no longer.

He rives the rank steel, he rips the mail;

There might he renk him arrest, his reason was passed!

He fell in a frenzy for fierceness of heart 2

1 I. Gollancz, Pearl, pp. xliii-xlv; G. Neilson, Huchown of the Awle Ryale (Glasgow, Maclehose, 1902); Cambridge History of English Literature, I., pp. 320-34, II., pp. 115-24.

2 Freely modernized.

(2,352)

21 a

Gawain and the Grene Knight.--A still finer poem, assigned by some critics to the same author, is the romance of Gawain and the Grene Knight, in alliterative verse relieved by short lyrical rhyming lines. This is the best piece of story-telling among them all, and the most spirited portrayal of the rich and crowded life of Arthur's court, as a courtier of the Angevin kings conceived it.

Synopsis. At Camelot, where Arthur and his knights are assembled, a gigantic unknown knight, clad in green and carrying a Danish axe, challenges any knight present to an exchange of blows, on the condition, clinched by an oath, that if the stranger submit to the first blow he shall have the right to return it at the end of a year. Gawain accepts the challenge, and with one blow strikes off the giant's head. The Green Knight picks up the head, and rides off with it under his arm, reminding Gawain of his engagement. Gawain keeps the tryst appointed, and is entertained at a castle, where his host leaves him for three days in charge of his wife. This beautiful lady subjects Gawain to a severe trial of his truth and loyalty, but her temptations prove unavailing. When the time comes for him to submit his neck to the Green Knight's axe, he receives a mere scratch, and the stranger reveals himself as Gawain's host, the fair lady's husband, and declares that Gawain has proved himself the most faultless knight on earth. In singular contrast with this is Tennyson's description of the favourite hero of the English romancers as "false and adulterous.”

The Awntyrs (Adventures) of Arthur at the Tarn Wathelyne and Golagros and Gawain are two romances of about the same date (c. 1370), and not unsimilar in general character. The former gives a thrilling picture of a fearful shape emerging from a Cumberland tarn, and revealing itself to Guenevere and Gawain as Guenevere's mother suffering torments for her sins. In the other, the chief subject is a knightly encounter between Gawain and a powerful foe, followed by an act of exalted magnanimity on the part of Gawain, who prefers to accept shame rather than act ungenerously. In The Wedding of Sir Gawain, this chivalrous knight appears again in a noble rôle.

Lovelich and other Versifiers.-Most of the other Arthurian romances were the work of ruder minstrels. Such was the indefatigable skinner, Henry Lovelich, who turned the elephantine Grand Saint Graal into jog-trot couplets (c. 1450), and rendered the overgrown romance of Merlin into a wooden kind of verse. Lovelich bequeathed us more than 50,000 lines of this sort:

So whanne this Feste tho comen was,
The peple gan semblen into that place,
And hit assaiedon there everychon,
But of al that peple was there not on

That the sword there owt taken myhte;

Hit was the lasse wondyr: they hadden non rhyte.

Harking back to the previous century, we find another Morte Arthure, a decade or two later than the Thornton poem, not epical and Anglo-Saxon in tone, but romantic, and not alliterative but in stanzas, like the following, which have no splendour of style but at any rate flow pleasantly:

The kynge tornyd hym there he stode,

To syr Bedwere with wordys kene : "Have Excalaber, my swerde good, A better brond was neuyr sene,

Go, caste it in the salt flode

And thou shalt se wonder, as I wene.
Hye the faste, for crosse on Rode,

And telle me what thou hast ther sene."

This poem, like its earlier namesake, was much used by Malory, and the reader has, of course, recognized the incident immortalized by Tennyson. It was also the source of that exquisite idyll, the love-tragedy of Elaine.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING LIST

Texts.-GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH: Historia Regum Britannia, trans. S. Evans (Dent, 1903).— LAYAMON: Brut, ed. Sir F. Madden (1847, o.p.).—Mabinogion, trans. Lady C. Guest, with notes by A. Nutt (Nutt, 3rd ed. 1910).—Merlin, ed. H. B. Wheatley (E.E.T.S., 1865-89).-Morte Arthure, an alliterative poem, ed. M. Banks (Longmans, 1900).—Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, ed. R. Morris (E.E.T.S., 1864). ELLIS, G.: Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (Bohn, o.p.).—RITSON, J.: Ancient English Metrical Romances (3 vols., 1802, Edinburgh, 1884).—WEBER, H. W.: Metrical Romances (Longmans, o.p.).—MALORY, Sir T.: Morte Darthur, ed. H. O. Sommer (3 vols., Nutt, 1888-91); ed. for modern use by Sir E. Strachey (Macmillan, Globe " ed., 1884).

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Studies.-FLETCHER, R. H.: Arthurian Material in the Chronicles (Ginn, 1906).—MAYNADIER, G. H. : The Arthur of the English Poets (Constable, 1907).-SCUDDER, V. D.: La Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory and its Sources (Dent, 1921).-NUTT, A., ed.: Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance, and Folklore (14 parts, Nutt, 1899-1902).-RнYS, Sir J. Studies in the Arthurian Legend (Clarendon Press, 1891).— WESTON, JESSIE L.: The Quest of the Holy Grail (Bell, 1913); From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge University Press, 1920).