Jessie Weston - The Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac

Now, without accepting the mechanical theory of Herr Brugger, 67 67 Ueber die Bedeutung von Bretagne, Breton , Zeitschrift für französische Sprache, xx. 79-162. which would make the first Arthurian romances consist of continental lais automatically strung together, I certainly think that the lais played a more important part in the evolution of these romances than we generally realise. In a previous chapter 68 68 Cf. chap. ii . I have indicated what would probably be the method of procedure. The original lai would be expanded by the introduction of isolated adventures; other lais , which through demerit of style or music had failed to win popularity, would be drawn upon for incident, or incorporated bodily; one or more popular lais would be added, and the whole worked over and polished up into a complete and finished romance. At first the parts would hang but loosely together, and there would be a good deal of re-selection and discarding of incident before the work crystallised into shape, though the form of the original tale, which was the kernel of the subsequent romance, would not be likely to vary much.

The Lanzelet of Ulrich von Zatzikhoven is, as I suggested above, an example of a romance arrested in development: the kernel of the whole can be detected, but the parts fit badly, and it has never been really worked up into shape. But, unless I am much mistaken, we have in the Welsh tale of The Lady of the Fountain a specimen of the same process at work, of capital importance for critical purposes, since we also possess the completed work, i.e. the Mabinogi has preserved Chrétien's Yvain in process of making . The adventures are practically identical, sequence and incident agree in the main, but in the Welsh version they are much more loosely connected, and there are significant breaks which seem to show where the successive redactions ended. If we follow the indications of the version we shall conclude that as first told the story ended with Yvain's achievement of the 'spring' adventure and his marriage with the lady. This would, I think, represent the original lai , which in its primitive form might well be unconnected with Arthur's court: the king was probably anonymous. The next step would be to Arthurise the story; Yvain must start from Arthur's court, and naturally the court must learn of his success: this was arranged by bringing Arthur and his knights to the spring where they are themselves witnesses, and victims, of Yvain's prowess. It is significant that in all the versions extant Yvain is influenced in his secret departure from court by the conviction that Gawain will demand the adventure of the spring, and thus forestall him; but in the Welsh variant alone is this forecast literally fulfilled and the undecided conflict between Yvain and Gawain fought at the spring. And here the Welsh version breaks again. This was evidently the end of the Arthurised lai , and the point where the conflict between the friends was originally placed. All the variants bear the trace of this second redaction; the Welsh tale alone indicates clearly what was the primitive form. Yvain's transgression of his lady's command (probably first introduced for this purpose), a transgression much more serious in the Welsh, where he stays away for three years, than in the other versions, offered an elastic framework for the introduction of isolated adventures; finally, when the whole was worked over in romance form, his combat with King Arthur's invincible nephew was transferred to the end of the poem, where it formed an appropriate and fitting climax to his feats.

The theory suggested above is based upon certain recognised peculiarities in the evolution of the Breton lais ; but the question whether we are justified in making such use of ascertained facts naturally depends upon whether the story related in the romance in question was in its origin one that we might expect to find related in a lai ; if it were not , then, however rational the hypothesis may otherwise appear, we should regard it with suspicion as lacking solid foundation.

Granting then that a considerable share in the completion of Arthurian romantic tradition was due to the influence of lais originally independent of that tradition, that the process of fusion had already commenced when Chrétien wrote his poems, and that he was himself familiar with such lais , each of the above points having been already proved, our next step must be to examine the character of the stories related by Chrétien.

Two of the five works we possess (I do not count the Guillaume , which whether it be by Chrétien or not lies outside the scope of our inquiry) must at once be put on one side. Neither Cligés nor the Charrette story (in the form Chrétien tells it) can be based upon lais . But the character of the three more famous poems, Erec , Yvain , and Perceval , is precisely that of a romance composed of traditional and folk-lore themes. In the case of Erec and Perceval this is partially admitted even by the most thoroughgoing advocate of Chrétien's originality, though Professor Foerster would limit the element to the Sparrow-hawk and Joie de la Court adventures in the first, and to Perceval's Enfances as representing a Dümmling folk-tale in the second. 69 69 Cf. Charrette , lxxxi. and cxli.

On this subject I shall have more to say later on; for the present I will confine my remarks to Yvain , on the construction of which Professor Foerster holds a theory, highly complicated in itself, and excluding, as a necessary consequence, any genuine folk-lore element. 70 70 Cf. on this point Professor Foerster's Introductions to his editions of the Yvain , 1887 (large ed.), 1891 (small ed.).

According to this view the main idea of the poem is borrowed from the story of The Widow of Ephesus , a tale of world-wide popularity, the oldest version of which appears to be Oriental (Grisebach considered it to be Chinese), and which in Latin form, as told first by Phædrus and then at greater length in the compilation of The Seven Sages of Rome , was well known in mediæval times. 71 71 Cf. Grisebach, Die Treulose Witwe : Wien, 1873. With this is combined other elements: a Breton local tradition, classical stories (the Ring of Gyges and the Lion of Androcles), and other stories of unspecified origin.

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Brut , ed. Leroux de Lincy, vol. ii. ll. 10158-10360. These remarks also apply to Layamon.

Described and illustrated by Zimmerman in Oberitalische Plastik im frühen und hohen Mittelalter : Leipzig, 1897. Cf. also Romania , xxvii. p. 510.