Chapter V.

Sir Perceval of Galles.

Besides the great Conte del Graal of Chrétien and his successors, there are three other important works that deal with the story of Perceval or the Grail, viz. the Middle English metrical romance, Sir Perceval of Galles (composed about 1370), the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach, composed early in the thirteenth century, and the Welsh tale, Peredur, which was probably written somewhere about the year 1300. The fiercest controversies have raged in regard to these works, but, in the present writer's opinion, this is due to the baleful assumption that has come down from the Romantic Era to the effect that mediaeval poets were incapable of inventing anything themselves - they were always merely transcribing hypothetical sources. But nobody has ever explained why, if the authors of hypothetical sources were so gifted with invention, the authors of the works actually preserved should be so destitute of this faculty.

Let us take first the Sir Perceval of Galles. The peculiarity of this romance is that it contains nothing about the Grail, though it strongly resembles Chrétien's Perceval in other respects. The authority of Gaston Paris1 gave currency to the view that this poem stood closest of all extant works to the primitive form of the story of Perceval, which, he supposed, belonged to Welsh oral

1

Histoire Littéraire de la France, XXX, 259 ff. G. Paris here expresses strong approval of W. Hertz's discussion of the subject, which antedated his own. The essay on the Grail by the latter is now easily accessible in his Parzival von Wolfram von Eschenbach, neu bearbeitet, pp. 413 ff. For the English poem, see pp. 435 ff.

tradition, so that it represents best the versions of that story which was used both by Chrétien and by the author of the Welsh Peredur. Miss Weston and others have laid stress on some points of supposed agreement even between the English poem and Wolfram's Parzival, which, they argue, go back to a common source. The whole subject has been most fully discussed by R. H. Griffith in his treatise, Sir Perceval of Galles (Chicago, 1919),3 and by A. C. L. Brown in his study, "The Grail and the English Sir Perceval." Griffith endeavors to adduce parallels to the Middle English romance from various Celtic folk-tales, and his conclusion is that the English poem is not only wholly independent of Chrétien, but is merely "an English singer's versification of a folktale that was known in his district of Northwest England."5 His parallels, however, are forced, in the extreme, and, in most cases, bear no essential resemblance to the Middle English poem. This

2

Legend of Sir Perceval, I, 319, Cp. too, A. C. L. Brown, "The Grail and the English Sir Perceval" MPh., XVI, 553ff. (1919). 3 Cp. end of next chapter (note).

4 MPh. XVI, 553ff. (1919), XVII, 361 ff. (1919), XVIII, 661 ff. (1921). For comment on Brown's attempt in the first two sections of his study to connect the English poem with Wolfram aud the Lanzelet cp. note just cited. The third section consists of a collection of supposed Irish parallels to me, unconvincing to incidents in Sir Perceval, cited to prove that the English romance has an Irish source. As I have stated in the text above, however, I see no necessity of looking further than Chrétien for a source.

B

This conclusion is manifestly untenable. Cp. my review of Griffith's book in RR., IV, 125 ff. (1913). So, too, Brugger, Zs. f. frz. Spr. u. Litt.. XLIV, 170ff. (1917); in other respects, he finds much to commend in Griffith's book. The complete agreement in the order of incidents between Chrétien and the English romance and the French nomenclature of the latter prove conclusively that Sir Perceval of Galles is based on a French original. Acheflour, the name of the heroine in Sir Perceval, is, I may remark, in passing, merely a MS corruption of Blancheflor (Blanchefleur), the name of Chrétien's heroine. Nothing is commoner in mediaeval MSS. than the dropping of initial letters in proper names and the loss of n in the same. The latter error is, of course, due to neglect of the stroke (over the preceding vowel), which is so often used in these MSS. to denote n.

poem, however, seems to me plainly a mere adaptation of Chrétien's Perceval with the Grail left out. Moreover, the author had before him not only Chrétien's genuine work, but a spurious prologue, known as the Bliocadrans-prologue, which is found in two MSS. This spurious composition contains an account of the manner in which Perceval's father died and also of his youth. Accor dingly, we have in the English Sir Perceval the story of Perceval's childhood given as well as the incidents of his career after he sets out for Arthur's court. There is in the English poem an episode, not represented in Chrétien, in which the hero rescues a besieged lady and marries her. There are somewhat similar stories in the Latin prose romance of the thirteenth century, De Ortu Waluuanii and in Yder, a French romance in verse of the same century and, no doubt, the English poet drew on some source of this kind for the particular episode. As he approaches the episode of the Grail castle in Chrétien, he abandons his source, describes how, on hearing news of his mother, the hero sought her, found her demented, and going with her to the dwelling of a giant whom he had slain, cured her of insanity by a magic drink. With his mother he returns to his queen and his realm. Afterward he went to the Holy Land and there he was killed.

The motive that actuated the English poet in omitting the Grail incidents from his poem is probably the fact that they differed altogether from the usual material of the romances. The mystery of it all may well have puzzled him. The writer is by

6

Hertz, Parzival, p. 438, cites as evidence that the English Sir Perceval drew from a more primitive source than Chrétien's poem, an approximate agreement between the former and the Italian poem Carduino (second half of the fourteenth century) a romance of the Bel Inconnu type, in a certain detail: In both the hero is a rustic simpleton, brought up in the forest, and in both he begins his martial experience with javelins (in Carduino he has two, in Sir Perceval one). The last detail is not very important, but, most likely, Carduino derived it from a version of the Perceval tale. This is, probably, true, likewise, of the simpleton motif.

7

Cp. my Historia Meriadoci and De Ortu Waluuanii, p. LIX, Baltimore, 1913.

no means devoid of constructive skill, but there is no ground for believing that he, any more than the authors of the other Middle English romances, was very highly educated or that he had a brain for subtleties. These works deal, as a rule, with stock themes

fighting, especially with pagans and giants, witches, etc. and it is quite likely that the author of the present poem balked at so unfamiliar a theme as the Grail. This would be particularly true, if he merely had before him Chrétien's poem with the spurious Bliocadrans-prologue, but none of the continuations. In view of the length of Chrétien's Perceval plus these continuations, and the consequent paucity of copies in circulation, all the probabilities are that such was the case. But Chrétien's work, being unfinished, leaves the Grail unexplained, and one can easily comprehend, then, why the English author should have shirked so difficult a subject. Moreover, it is to be remembered that the English romance was already fairly long (according to English standards), before it reached the Grail episode in Chrétien, and the writer may have concluded, very naturally, that his work was long enough. Surely, in view of all these reasonable considerations we have no cause to be surprised, if we find the Grail theme omitted in this poem alone of all the romances of which Perceval is the hero.8

8

Cp. my review of Griffith's book in RR., IV, 125 ff. (Jan.March, 1913).

It is worth noting that in a romance which was, in reality, a sort of continuation of Chrétien's Perceval and in which the hero was a son of Perceval, the Grail was omitted. I refer to the Morien, which only survives in the Dutch version, Moriaen. Cp. p. 331, note 33, below. G. Paris, Hist. Litt. de la France, XXX, 252f., observed these peculiarities of the Morien.

Chapter VI.
Wolfram's Parzival,

No problem of the Grail literature has excited more active discussion than that of the sources of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.1 Chrétien's poem is represented in its entirety in Wolfram, but the German poet has prefixed to the main narrative an

1

As is customary, my Parzival references will be to Lachmann's divisions of the text, each containing 30 lines. These divisions are indicated in all editions of the poem.

Wolfram was a Bavarian knight (cp. the Parzival, 115, ll and 121, 7) and the Parzival was composed in the first decade of the thirteenth century. At 379,19 there is a reference to an event that took place in 1203-1204, viz. the siege of Erfurt by Wolfram's patron, the Landgrave, Hermann von Thüringen. From the nature of the allusion it appears that that event was comparatively recent. On the other hand, Hermann von Thüringen, who died April 25, 1217, was still alive when Wolfram, at 297, 16ff., addressed him, personally. So this part of the Parzival was certainly composed before the date just given. For other indications respecting the date of the Parzival, cp. R. Lück, Über die Abfassungszeit des Parzival (Halle diss. 1878).

It is nowadays generally agreed that Wolfram's Titurel, which deals with an episode of Chrétien's Perceval, 11, 3390ff. namely the one in which Perceval, after leaving the Grail castle, comes upon his cousin (called Sigune by the German poet), supporting the dead body of her slain lover in her lap was written after the Parzival not improbably, even after the Willehalm. Cp., especially, A. Leitzmann, "Untersuchungen über Wolfram's Titurel," PBB, XXVI, 93 ff. (1901) particularly, pp. 145 ff. The poem was left a fragment doubtless, on account of the author's death.

As regards the Willehalm (also incomplete), which is based on Aliscans, an Old French chanson de geste of the Guillaume d'Orange cycle, Book IX, at least, must have been composed after April 25, 1217, the date of the death of Hermann von Thüringen, as stated above, for in that book (417,12) Wolfram alludes to Hermann as dead.