monsters. Cuchullin fares best in these trials, but Ailill, who is apparently afraid of offending the rest, gives each one privately a goblet as a token of superiority. Cuchulinn's, however, is of gold, whereas the others are of inferior metals. So when subsequently at a feast the old dispute over precedence begins anew and each presents his goblet, much bitterness is produced. The claimants are again sent forth now on a fresh series of adventures to test their worthiness, but at this point the MS. breaks off. (b) Like these episodes of the Irish sagas is the account which Layamon gives (11. 22736 ff.) of how the Round Table came to be instituted. At a great feast on Yule-day which Arthur gave, says Layamon, a sanguinary quarrel sprang up among the guests, "because each, on account of his high lineage, wished to be within (whatever that may mean). Several had lost their lives before the king succeeded in quelling it. Shortly after, when the king was in Cornwall, a smith there offered to make him a table at which 1600 and more people might sit, "all around about so that none be left out without and within, man against man". Moreover, the king could carry it about with him anywhere. In four weeks' time the work was completed and thereafter all was peace and fraternity at Arthur's feasts. This passage has nothing to correspond to it in the extant text of Wace's Brut, but, in view of the Irish parallels, must be accepted as undoubtedly derived ultimately from Celtic tradition. It has been taken 95 as a proof that Layamon drew directly from 94 The similarity was pointed out by A. C. L. Brown, "The Round Table before Wace", Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, VII, 183 ff. (1900). 95 By A. C. L. Brown, op. cit., and "Welsh Traditions in Layamon's Brut", MPh., I, 95 ff. (1903). In his review of Brown's "Round Table before Wace", in Romania, XXIX, 634 (1900), G. Paris, however, differs from Brown, inasmuch as he supposes that the Welsh traditions in question reached Layamon not directly, but through the English. This is, of course, a corollary of Paris's very questionable theory con cerning the Anglo-Norman origin of the Arthurian romances. In the Zs. f. frz. Spr. u. Litt., XXIX, 247, note 11 (1905), Brugger has attacked, in particular, Brown's assumption that Layamon derived his story of the Round Table from Wales. He points out very aptly that in no writings of Welsh authorship (Mabinogion, Giraldus the oral traditions of his neighbors, the Welsh. We have seen, however, that the English writer was, in all probability, wholly dependent on a French source (an expansion of Wace) for his so-called additions, so that the inference is unwarranted and we are left in the same state of doubt as to the Welsh or Armorican provenance of this incident as of the incidents of the Arthurian romances generally - with the usual balance of probabilities, however, in favour of the latter. (c) It has also been proposed to derive the Round Table from some Celtic feast, like the Beltane or May-day feasts of the Highlands of Scotland a spring festival which descends no doubt from pagan times. According to an account of such a feast at Callender, recorded in the nineteenth century, the boys in that neighborhood on May-day cut a table in the green sod by digging around it a trench of sufficient circumference to hold the entire Cambrensis etc.) is the Round Table mentioned. He suggests (pp. 245 ff.) that the name "Round Table" arose in Armorica and that Wace probably invented the idea that it was made round in order to forestall quarrels as to precedence. On the other hand, according to Layamon (or his source), who was modifying Wace, the purpose was to put an end to such quarrels. Like Ten Brink and Mott, Brugger believes, as against Brown, that the story about the Round Table which is told in Layamon originally was not connected with Arthur at all. This may well be so, bnt I see no reason to imagine that this connection was first made by the author of the expanded Wace (Layamon's French original) rather than in the sources (probably Armorican by origin) on which he drew. Similarly with the idea, which we find in Wace, that quarrels over precedence caused a round table to be constructed. In this same article, p. 246, note 9, Brngger speaks of a similarity between the Round Table and the table of the Last Supper in the Gospels, which, he says, is not purely accidental, for the latter, too, is "ein Überrest altheidnischen Opferbrauches". But wherever any such similarity exists, it is under the influence of the Grail romances. The Grail Table was, of course, modeled by Robert de Boron directly after the table of the Last Supper. 96 By Lewis F. Mott, "The Round Table", PMLA, XX, 231ff. (1905). Brugger, Zs. f. frz. Spr. u. Litt., XXIX, 238ff. (1906), in reviewing this article, expresses substantial approval of its results. I agree, however, with F. Lot, Étude sur le Lancelot en prose, p. 245, note 5, in rejecting it. company. Then after making a fire in the circle and cooking and eating certain prescribed things they put bits of cake into a bonnet. and blindfolded draw them out. Whoever draws a certain black bit is to be sacrificed to Baal to induce him to render productive the year which has just begun. The sacrifice is now a joke, but, originally an actual human sacrifice was, very likely, involved in the ceremony. There is a far cry, however, from this custom observed in a limited district of the Highlands to the Round Table of Arthurian romance even in its most fantastic form, that of Layamon's Brut. Besides, it is a serious weakness of the theory that the part which disputes over precedence play in accounting for the form of the table is unjustifiably treated as an afterthought. (d) Miss J. L. Weston 97 connects the Round Table with some hypothetical turning table of Celtic tradition of mythical significance. The only evidence for the Round Table as such a turning table if evidence it can be called is a single line in Béroul's Tristan, 1. 3384 (end of the twelfth century), where, in replying to a messenger of Iseult's who is inquiring about the king, a shepherd says: "Sire", fait il, "il sit au dois. From the eighth century Irish text called The Voyage of Maelduin down, we have turning castles in Celtic tradition; but no mention is made of equally marvelous turning tables in this same tradition. Béroul's words may possibly refer to the vicissitudes of life to which the company gathered about the board, like the rest of the world, are subject, or, if construed literally, they may express a passing fancy of this particular poet but, whatever the meaning of this obscure line may be, it does not justify us in jumping with Miss Weston to the conclusion that the Round Table is connected with some supposed solar ritual. Whatever we may think of the theories just presented, there 97 See her article "A hitherto unconsidered aspect of the Round Table”, in the Mélanges offerts à M. Maurice Wilmotte (Paris, 1910). is hardly room for doubt that Arthur's Round Table belongs to the paraphernalia which attached itself to him in Celtic tradition. We cannot regard the legends relating to it as a mere development out of the old stories concerning Charlemagne and his twelve peers, as has been suggested. The Irish parallels, moreover, render it probable that the conception obtained, also, among the insular Celts,98 as we know from Wace that it did among the Bretons. Perhaps, after all, in seeking for an explanation of this most famous of tables and the customs which were connected with it, we need go no further than the account which is given of Celtic feasts by the Greek philosopher and traveller, Posidonius, who lived in the first century before Christ, his observations being made probably in Southern Gaul. He tells us that at their feasts the Celts sit in a circle and that the bravest sits in the middle like the leader of a chorus. Moreover, primitive Celtic houses were often circular. It is quite possible that these actual customs may have determined the shape of the celebrated table of romance. 2. Excalibur (Caliburnus in Geoffrey's Historia, IX, 4), which is Arthur's sword in Geoffrey and commonly in the romances,100 is certainly identical with the sword Caladbolg of the Irish prose epic Tain bo Cualnge (The Cattle-Raid of Cooley),1 which is there the property of Fergus, the fugitive ruler of Ulster. It is said to have become of the size of the rainbow, whenever any 98 99 101 Zimmer, Gött. G. A., for June 10, 1890, p. 525, denies this. Quoted by A. C. L. Brown, "The Round Table before Wace", p. 195, note 3, from Carl Müller, Fragmenta Historica Graecorum, III, 260 (Paris, 1849). 100 In the relatively late Vulgate Merlin-continuation Arthur presents it to young Gawain. Cp. Sommer, Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, II, 253. 101 The identification was first made by Zimmer, Gött. G. A., for June 10, 1890, pp. 516f. For Caladbolg, cp. Miss Winifred Faraday's translation of the Irish epic: The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge, London (Grimm Library, no. 16), 1904. Loth maintains, Revue Celtique, XIII, 495, that French Calibor (= Caladbolg) is drawn from a written Welsh form. See, too, F. Lot, Romania, XXV, 1f., who contends that Geoffrey's Caliburnus does not necessarily come from the Breton. one struck with it. Fergus cuts off the tops of three hills with this sword. Moreover, like Excalibur, it was made in fairy-land. 3. Miscellaneous Celtic folk-tale motifs, such as are found, for example, in the Tristan romances.102 With regard to such motifs, it should be premised that even in instances where insular records appear to offer parallels to incidents in Arthurian romance, it may be that the same stories were current in Brittany and transmitted thence to the French writers only the complete absence of all Breton records from the Middle Ages leaves us without the means of control. We may select for notice here, particularly: (a) the motif of the Turning Castle mentioned above, which is found in La Mule sans Frein, 11. 440 ff., the Middle High German Diu Krône, 11. 12951 ff., and other romances, both metrical and prose, and is, likewise, familiar to Irish saga, Voyage of Maelduin, etc.; 103 (b) the motif of the Beheading Game: 104 A strange visitor turns up at court and offers to submit himself to decapitation at the hands of a knight, provided that at the expiration of a given period the knight will, in turn, subject himself to the same test of courage. The knight naturally accepts this as a very easy test, but to his surprise the stranger picks up his head after decapitation and at the appointed time is ready to return the blow. This incident is found in several romances earliest, perhaps, in the so-called Livre de Caradoc (Livre de Karados),105 which is an interpolation in the first continuation of Chrétien's Perceval. It is even better known, however, through the Middle English romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 108 Cp. especially Gertrude Schoepperle: Tristan and Isolt, II, 267 ff. (Frankfort and London, 1913). 108 Cp. Gideon Huet, "Le chateau tournant dans la Suite du Merlin", Romania, XL, 235 ff. (1911). Cp., too, W. E. Sypherd, Studies in Chaucer's House of Fame, pp. 114 ff. (Publications of the Chaucer Society, London, 1907), where numerous Celtic examples of Whirling Houses are given, but, also, some from other sources. On this motif both in the romances and in folk-tales, cp. G. L. Kittredge, A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight, pp. 9 ff., 147ff. (Cambridge, Mass., 1916). 104 105 Cp. Potvin's Perceval li Gallois, III, 117-221. episode in question, cp. ibid., pp. 125 ff. For the |