But it is to be remembered that for Chrétien's contemporaries this. feature of Guinevere's story was a new thing a quite recent - and did not possess the authority that it now possesses. So, if a writer wished to introduce into a romance about Lancelot the abduction incident, in which the queen had long figured, he would not feel it necessary, as a modern poet, doubtless, would, to connect the episode with Lancelot as the lover and rescuer. Above all, however, it is to be observed that the narratives of their predecessors had no sanctity for the mediaeval romancers. If the author of the Queste del Saint Graal could displace Perceval by Galahad as the Grail hero and still retain the former as a prominent actor in the story, there is, surely, no reason why the author of the French original of the Lanzelet should not have displaced Guinevere by Iblis (the most prominent of Lancelot's lady-loves in the Lanzelet), say, and still have kept the hero as the queen's rescuer, although he is no longer her lover. An adequate motive for the change would be that the romances regularly end with the marriage of the hero and the heroine, yet this, of course, would have been impossible, if Arthur's consort had continued to be Lancelot's lady-love.37 Thus, the French poet whom Ulrich translated may, after all, have been attracted to Lancelot by Chrétien's poem, although he chose to ascribe to him a new set of adventures, gathered, for the most part, here and there, from traditions or contemporary romances relating to other heroes. In any event, there is only one feature of Lancelot's story, as we find it in the various Arthurian romances, of which we can assert that it was 37 The considerations here advanced meet sufficiently, I believe, Brown's criticism, MPh. XVII, 363. Important in this connection, also, are the instances of violent departure from Arthurian tradition which I have cited elsewhere in the present work. Furthermore, despite Brown's objection, loc. cit., I cannot regard the parallel of Escanor, for example, as without value. The author of this poem uses as one of his sources the prose Lancelot, in which the great theme is the hero's passion for the queen, yet he not only ignores that famous love-story, though retaining Lancelot as a minor character in his poem, but says explicitly, 1. 7344, that Guinevere loved Gawain most of all men, except her husband. unquestionably connected with him in oral tradition namely, the one according to which he was stolen when a child and brought up by a water-fairy. This account is first found in an explicit form in Ulrich's Lanzelet, but the name given the character in Chrétien's poems Lancelot del Lac presupposes this feature. From the French source of the Lanzelet it passed into the great Lancelot in prose,38 and thence into general tradition. It was through this prose Lancelot composed in its earliest form, it would seem, near the end of the twelfth century that the fame of Lancelot was spread far and wide. Although so important in the development of the history of the character, Chrétien's poem does not seem to have been much read, if we are to judge by the paucity of allusions to it in mediaeval literature.39 It was otherwise, however, with the prose-romance, which, as we shall see, was destined to exercise a profound influence on the prosefiction of Europe. To separate this romance, as it was originally written, from the additions and interpolations with which it has been overloaded in our relatively late cyclic MSS. is a difficult } task. 40 Nevertheless, it is virtually certain that even in its unencumbered form the prose work was based, to a considerable ex 38 Cp. Sommer, III, 14. Foerster, Lancelot, p. XXXIX, ascribes to Lancelot, also, in popular tradition the rôle of Guinevere's rescuer, but as Miss Weston, pp. 15f., has shown, this is due to an erroneous interpretation of Ulrich's poem. The German scholar has remarked, moreover, that the temporary release of Lancelot from captivity, in order that he may attend a tourney, occurring in both Chrétien and Ulrich, was probably in the oral tradition; but one cannot shut out the suspicion that Ulrich's original was here borrowing from Chrétien. Miss L. A. Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian Romance, pp. 188f. (Boston, 1903) suggested that the lake-fairy was, doubtless, originally not Lancelot's foster-mother, but his amie. A. C. L. Brown, MPh. XVII, 361 ff., adopts this hypothesis, which figures largely in his discussion of the Lanzelet. It has, however, no support whatever in the extant texts and, in my own opinion, should be rejected. Cp. Foerster, Lancelot, pp. XLVIII ff. 89 40 The present writer has attempted this in his study, "The Composition of the Old French prose Lancelot". Romanic Review, vols. IX, (1918) and X, (1919). most of them lost tent, on earlier romances in verse11 and there is no reason to believe that it drew at all from oral tradition. We shall return, however, to the prose Lancelot in a later chapter of the present treatise. 41 Miss Weston's assumption (cp. her Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac, pp. 89 ff.) that her hypothetical body of oral tradition concerning Lancelot affected independently the Arthurian romances like the prose Merlin and Tristan is baseless. The romances, just named, know nothing about this hero, except what they derive from the prose Lancelot. Equally groundless is the notion, first advanced in her book on The Legend of Sir Gawain (London, 1897) and repeated here, that Gawain was originally Guinevere's lover in Celtic tradition and that features of his story have descended to Lancelot. In the scores of Arthurian texts there is not a trace of any such relation between Gawain and Guinevere. |