took Arthur anon and bare him quickly to the boat and laid him softly down and forth they gan depart. Then was it accomplished that Merlin formerly said that there should be great care on account of Arthur's departure. The Britons believe yet that he is alive and dwelleth in Avalun with the fairest of all elves; and the Britons yet expect when Arthur shall return." 74

Although translating a French poem which constitutes a sort of spacious antechamber to the vast new palace of Arthurian romance, Layamon is himself thoroughly under the dominion of the old Germanic epic tradition. He inherits its metrical form its stock although admitting into his verse many laxities — of epic formulae, and, above all, its ethical emphasis and its spirit of staunch courage and devotion. His patriotism is so sturdy that Arthur, the scourge of the English according to Celtic tradition, becomes in his work, himself, an Englishman. Despite his diffuseness, which, by its insistent elaboration of detail, made a poem, already long, intolerably longer, Layamon had a larger share of

74 This account of Arthur's end accords, in general, with Geoffrey's Historia and Wace also, with the former's Vita Merlini. There were other legends, however, about his death: 1. He is still asleep with his warriors in a cave, whence he will issue some day to restore the glory of his people. The earliest recorded forms of this legend represent him as in Mount Aetna. Cp. Gervase of Tilbury in his Otia Imperialia (composed about 1211), Secunda Decisio, cap. 12 (ed. F. Liebrecht, Hannover, 1856) and Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum, Distinctio XII, cap. 12, ed. Joseph Strange (Cologne, 1851). Crusaders were, doubtless, responsible for this localization. There are similar legends connected with hills in England, Scotland and Wales. 2. He is the Wild Huntsman of the storm-myth. Cp. Index, below. 3. He was turned into a bird: (a) a chough. Cp. M. A. Courtney's Cornish Feasts and Folk-Lore, p. 58 (Penzance, 1890) and Notes and Queries (7th series), IV, 247. (b) a raven. This superstition is first mentioned by Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part I, ch. 13. See, too, for Cornwall, Notes and Queries (First Series) VII, 618, and for Brittany, Felix Bellamy's Forêt de Bréchéliant, I, 129 (Rennes, 1896). 4. He was killed by the Cath Paluc, a catlike monster. Cp. p. 41, note 9, below. Nos. 1, 2, 3 are mere adaptations to Arthur of widespread motifs. On everything relating to Arthur's end cp. Bruce, Mort Artu, pp. 298 ff. (Halle, 1910). There, inter alia, fuller details concerning the legends just enumerated are given.

the genuine poetic spirit than any other Englishman during the two centuries and a half that followed the Norman Conquest. He was connected, however, with a perishing tradition, and it was this circumstance rather than the defects of his work that caused him to pass away without leaving a trace of influence on English poetry. The author of his French original may seem, at first sight, to have been even more unfortunate, since not a single copy of his work has survived.75 He bequeathed, however, to a man of greater genius than his own the author of the Vulgate Mort Artu the materials for one scene, at least, through which he has merited a reflected immortality namely, the scene of Ar

thur's translation to Avalon near the end of that romance.

There is no profit in following the stream of the Geoffreyan tradition concerning Arthur - his achievements and his tragic end further down than Layamon. As late as the sixteenth century and occasionally even beyond the pseudo-historical fables which had their fountain-head in Geoffrey found a place in all histories of Great Britain. It was through such channels that the story of King Lear, for example, reached Holinshead, and then Shakespeare. The later chroniclers, however, it is evident, contented then elves with copying and combining the accounts of their predecessors. If they made any additions to their sources, it was not from oral tradition that they did so, but from their own

78

Of Layamon's poem only two copies have survived, one dating from the first part of the thirteenth century, the other from the latter part, or, perhaps, even from the first part of the fourteenth. Both are in the Cottonian collection of the British Museum. The second, which is much mutilated by fire is inferior to the first and represents a new recension of Layamon's work. Cp. Rudolf Seyger, Beiträge zu Layamon's Brut (Halle diss., 1912). Layamon's immediate original, after all, was substantially identical with Wace. The ratio of the added lines to those in the original Wace could not have been large. Nevertheless, one has to make allowance for the fact that all apparent expansions in Layamon of any extent were already in his French original. This is neglected by Miss Frances Lytle Gillespy in her, Layamon's Brut: A. Comparative Study in Narrative Art", University of California Publications in Modern Philology, III, 361 ff. (1916).

fancies, mainly in the way of interpreting what seemed to them difficulties of their originals.76

76

In his Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, to which I have already often referred, R. H. Fletcher has sifted this enormous mass of writings in Latin, French and English, in verse and in prose with an industry and judgment that leaves nothing to be desired. If the result for the period subsequent to Layamon is almost wholly negative, he has none the less earned the gratitude of all students of these subjects.

Chapter II.

Origin of the Lays and Romances.

The first French chronicles in verse, based on Geoffrey, which developed the Arthurian theme were somewhat earlier in date than any of the Arthurian romances that have come down to us, the carliest of the extant romances being the Erec of Chrétien de Troyes, which was composed, as was stated above, about 1168. The influence of the chronicles on the new genre is important, but it was not in supplving the latter with specific narrative motifs for development, but rather in giving éclat to Arthur and his court and turning the attention of the literary world of the time in the direction of the stories already connected with his name, and in

1

For the specific influence of Wace on Chrétien, the most important of the romancers and the one whose works are the earliest that have survived, cp. Annette B. Hopkins, The Influence of Wace on the Arthurian Romances of Crestien de Troies (Chicago diss., 1913). Even the rather modest claims which Miss Hopkins makes on behalf of Wace are somewhat exaggerated. Brugger, moreover, in his review of her study, Zs. f. frz. Spr. u. Litt. XLIV3, 13 ff. (1916), criticizes her for attributing to Wace influences that may have been really due to the versions of Gaimar or Martin (of Rochester), to the Munich Brut or the version in laisses monorimes. The versions just named, as stated above, have all perished, except for fragments that are not pertinent to our inquiry, so that one cannot control the matter with certainty. Nevertheless, we know that Wace thongh only named once in subsequent mediaeval literature, viz. in the prologue to Guiron le Courtois was much read and we have seen that his Brut, in an expanded form, was used in two of the most important of Arthurian texts, whilst there is no indication at all that the other paraphrases of Geoffrey ever exercised the slightest influence. I cannot, therefore, regard Brugger's point as possessing any real importance.

stimulating the poets to still other inventions of the same nature. That is to say, their influence was the same as Geoffrey of Monmouth's only more powerful, for, as has been already remarked, poems in the vernacular commanded a more extensive audience than pseudo-histories in Latin.

Since the metrical romances have only this general relation to the chronicles, we have to look elsewhere for their origin, and here we are brought back again to the question of those traditions of the Celtic races which gave the starting-point for the narratives of Geoffrey and his followers. This problem of the relations of the Arthurian romances to Celtic tradition has been hotly debated and some extremists have gone so far as to deny that the French writers owed practically anything to this tradition.

2

This is, virtually, the position of Adolf Holzmann in his very able article, Artus, Pfeiffer's Germania, XII, 257 ff. (1867). In most of his contentions with respect to fundamental questions of Arthurian discussion he agrees with the Anti-Celticists of later decades. Thus, pp. 262 ff., he regards the three Welsh tales, Geraint, Owen and Peredur as derived from the French; pp. 276 ff. he argues that the Arthurian passages in William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae are late interpolations, and that the same thing is true of the passage concerning Gawain's tomb in that writer's Gesta Anglorum, III, 287, else, the author would have told of Arthur in his First Book; p. 282 he declares that the Brut Tysilio is based on Geoffrey, etc., etc. Foerster and Golther do not go to such extremes as Holtzmann, but the whole tendency of their work, as we shall see, throughout the present treatise, is, likewise, to minimize Celtic influences in the Arthurian romances. Perhaps, the best general statement of Golther's position in the matter is to be found in two articles which he contributed to the Zs. für vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, Neue Folge, III (1890), viz., pp. 211 ff., „Znr Frage nach der Entstehung der bretonischen oder Artus-Epen", and pp. 409 ff., „Beziehungen zwischen französischer und keltischer Literatur im Mittelalter“. Golther distinguishes (pp. 212 ff.) three different successive forms in which the matière de Bretagne was embodied. 1. Sagenbestandteile, i. e. the episodes which constitute the materials of the Breton epics and which, also, occur independently of these, e. g. the chastity ordeal of Iseult in the Tristan poems. 2. Sagendichtung, i. e. oral tales which might combine and elaborate earlier independent incidents. 3. Die vorhandenen altfranzösischen Epen aller Art, i. e. the Old French romances. The Celts, he thinks, (p. 213) are impor