There remains one other famous legend to be noticed, which
has attached itself to the Arthurian group, and which, in its origin
and character, is the most distinctively Celtic of them all.
has attached itself to the Arthurian group, and which, in its origin
and character, is the most distinctively Celtic of them all.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v01
The British king is
not merely left in Avalon "to be cured of his wounds”; he is still
there, the Bretons await him, and say that he will come back and
live again. Wace's poem, as a whole, thus represents an inter-
mediate stage between the chronicles and the pure romances. It
must have contributed powerfully to the popularity of "the matter
of Britain,” by putting it into a form and a language which com-
manded a much larger constituency of readers than would be
attracted by any Latin prose narrative, however highly coloured
or agreeably written.
1 De Nugis Curialium, Dist. 11, ch. XX.
2 Gaimar had probably completed his work by 1150. His lost History of the
Britons formed a prelude to his L'Estorie des Engles, which has been preserved (ed.
Hardy and Martin, Rolls Series, 1888–9).
* Layamon states that Waoe "gave” his book to “the noble Eleanor, who was the
high king Henry's queen," Brut, 11. 42, 43.
* LI. 9994–10,007.
OL. 13,685.
## p. 265 (#285) ############################################
Layamon
265
Above all, Wace's Brut is of signal interest to English readers
as forming the basis of the solitary contribution of any consequence
made by an English writer to the vast and varied mass of Arthurian
literature before the fourteenth centuryl. Layamon, however, is
a very different poet from Wace. While not indifferent to romance,
as several significant additions to the Arthurian part of his story
will show, Layamon wrote his Brut as a frankly patriotic English --
epic. Wace's work is almost as artificial and exotic a product
as the poetical romances; it was designed as a contribution to the
polite literature of the Norman aristocracy. Layamon, dwelling
in seclusion on the banks of the Severn, where “it was good to be,"
was fired by an ambition “to tell the noble deeds of England,” and
to tell them in the English tongue. His poem is the first articulate
utterance of the native English genius reasserting itself in its own
language after the long silence which succeeded the Conquest.
Although he borrows most of his matter from Wace, Layamon,
in manner and spirit, is much nearer akin to the robust singers
of the Old English period than to the courtly French poet. The
simple force and vividness of the primitive English epic reappear
in descriptions of battle scenes and of heroic deeds. Even the
poet's diction is scrupulously pure English. And Arthur, who,
in the hands of the professional romancers, had already become
all but an alien to his fatherland, is restored to his rightful
place as the champion of Britain, and the great Christian king
who
Drew all the petty princedoms under him,
Their king and head, and made a realm, and reign'd.
Arthur, therefore, was to Layamon, primarily, the ideal British
hero-an actual king of England, whose character and prowess
deserved the veneration of his countrymen altogether apart from
the glamour with which romance had enshrouded his name. But
Layamon was a poet; and upon him, as upon the rest, the romantic
glamour works its inevitable spell Elf-land claims Arthur, both
at his birth and at his death. Elves received him into the world;
they gave him gifts, to become the best of knights and a mighty
king, to have long life and to be generous above all living men ? .
At his passing, Arthur says he will go to Argante (Morgan le fay),
the splendid elf; she will heal him of his wounds, so that he will
return again to his kingdoms. Again, Arthur's byrnie was made
for him by Wygar, the elvish smith", his spear by Griffin of the
1 Cf. ante, Chapter x, pp. 234 ff.
i Ll. 19,254 sqq. (Madden's ed. ).
Ll. 28,610 sqq.
4 L. 21,133.
## p. 266 (#286) ############################################
266 The Arthurian Legend
city of the wizard Merlin (Kaermerđin)? Caliburn, his sword,
was wrought in Avalon with magic craft? ; the Round Table, by
a strange carpenter from beyond the seas. Nowhere, however,
does Layamon's poem breathe more of the spirit of pure romance
than in the passages which describe Arthur's last battle and fall.
The encounter took place at Camelford (Camlan) "a name that
will last for ever+. ” The stream, hard by, “was flooded with blood
unmeasured. ” So thick was the throng that the warriors could
not distinguish each other, but "each slew downright, were he
swain, were he knight. " Modred and all his knights perished
and “there were slain all the brave ones, Arthur's warriors, high
and low, and all the Britons of Arthur's board. ” Of all the two
hundred thousand men who fought, none remained, at the end
of the fight, save Arthur and two of his knights. But Arthur was
sorely wounded, and, bidding the young Constantine, Cador's son,
take charge of his kingdom, he consigns himself to the care of
Argante, “the fairest of all maidens," who dwells in Avalon. Thence,
cured of his wounds, he will come again to "dwell with the Britons
with mickle joy. "
Even with the words there came from the sea a short boat, borne on the
waves, and two women therein, wondrously arrayed; and they took Arthur
anon, and bare him quickly, and softly laid him down, and fared forth away,
Then was brought to pass that which Merlin whilom said, that there should
be sorrow untold at Arthur's forth-faring. The Britons believe yet that he is
alive, and dwelleth in Avalon, with the fairest of all elves, and ever yet the
Britons look for Arthur's coming. Was never the man born, nor ever of
woman chosen, that knoweth the sooth, to say more of Arthur. But whilom
there was a seer hight Merlin; he said with words and his sayings were
800th-that an Arthur should yet come to help the Britons.
In this passage, as in many others, Layamon supplies several
details not found in Wace, and his poem throughout bears abundant
evidence that he drew upon a fund of independent traditions
gleaned from many fields. Among the most interesting of
Layamon's additions to, and amplifications of, Wace's narrative
are his accounts of Arthur's dream shortly before his last return
to Britain, and of the origin and the making of the Round Table.
The dream, of which neither Geoffrey nor Wace know anything,
foreshadows the treachery of Modred and Guinevere, and disturbs
1 L. 23,783. L. 21,135. L. 22,910. • Ll. 28,533 899.
01. Tennyson, Passing of Arthur:
“For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend blew friend not knowing whom he slew. "
6 See Ll. 28,020 sqq.
## p. 267 (#287) ############################################
Subsidiary Legends
267
Arthur with the sense of impending doom. The occasion of the
institution of the Round Table is, as in Wace, a quarrel for
precedence among Arthur's knights; but the description of the
actual making, and of the properties, of the Table is all Layamon's
own. It was while he was in Cornwall, after the quarrel among
his knights, that Arthur met the man from oversea who offered
to “make him a board, wondrous fair, at which sixteen hundred
men and more might sit ? . " Its huge size notwithstanding, and
though it took four weeks to make, the board could, by some
magic means, be carried by Arthur as he rode, and set by him
in what place soever he willed. Like Wace, Layamon evidently
knew stories about the Round Table, of which the origin has
never been traced; for “this was that same table” he says, “ of
which the Britons boast”—the Britons, who tell “ many leasings”
of king Arthur, and say of him things that never happened in the
kingdom of this world ? . " So it would appear that Layamon, had
he pleased, could have told us much more of Arthur. Even as it
stands, however, his poem is a notable contribution to Arthurian
story, and has the unique distinction of being the first celebration
of “the matter of Britain” in the English tongue.
When we pass from the metrical chronicles to the pure
romances, both verse and prose, we all but part with the traditional
British Arthur altogether. Not only are we suddenly transported
into the “no man's land” of chivalry, but we find ourselves
surrounded by strange apparitions from regions Geoffrey and his
translators never knew. In the romances, the Arthurian court
serves but as a convenient rendezvous for a
moving row
Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go
in quest of adventures which bear little, or no, relation to the
British king. Characters, of whom the chroniclers tell us nothing,
and who were themselves the heroes of quite independent legends,
now make a dramatic entry upon the Arthurian stage. Tristram and
Lancelot and Perceval play parts which divert our attention quite
away from that assigned to Arthur himself. Thus, a complete
history of Arthurian romance involves a series of enquiries into
the growth of a number of legends which have, for the most part,
only the most artificial connection with the original Arthurian
tradition. Some of these legends are as archaic, and as purely
mythical, as the primitive fables about the British Arthur, and
See 11. 22,910 sqq.
? L. 23,987.
## p. 268 (#288) ############################################
268
The Arthurian Legend
were probably current in popular lays long before the latter half
of the twelfth century. A full account of the romances in which
they were embodied and enriched during the age of chivalry
belongs to the history of French, and German, rather than to that
of English, literature. Not until the fourteenth century do we
come across a single English writer whose name is to be mentioned
in the same breath with those of Chrétien de Troyes and the
authors of the French prose romances, or of Wolfram von
Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg and Hartmann von Aue.
Here, only the briefest review can be attempted of the main
features of the subsidiary legends which were imported, by these
and other writers, into the vast Arthurian miscellany. .
Of all such legends, the most intimately connected with Arthur
himself is the story of Merlin. In Welsh tradition, Merlin, or
Myrdin, is a figure very similar to Taliesin—a wizard bard of the
sixth century, to whom a number of spurious poetical compositions
came, in course of time, to be ascribed. His first association with
Arthur is due to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who identifies him with
the Ambrosius of Nennius and makes of him both a magician and
a prophet; to his magic arts, as we have seen, the birth of Arthur
was largely due. His character is further developed in a Latin
hexameter poem, Vita Merlini, composed, probably, about the
year 1148 and attributed by several competent authorities to
Geoffrey. This poem, however, presents us with a conception of
the mage which is not easy to reconcile with the account given of
him in Geoffrey's History, and suggests many points of analogy
with certain early Welsh poems in which Merlin figures, and with
which Geoffrey could hardly have been acquainted? . Merlin makes
his first appearance in French romantic poetry in a poem of which
only a fragment has been preserved, supposed to be by Robert de
Borron, and dating from the end of the twelfth century. Upon
this poem was based the French prose romance of Merlin, part of
which is assigned to Robert de Borron, and which exists in two
forms-the first known as the “ordinary” Merlin, and the other
as the Suite de Merlin. For Robert de Borron, the enchanter's
arts are but so many manifestations of the powers of darkness ;
Merlin himself becomes the devil's offspring and most active agent.
From the Suite de Merlin, of which Malory's first four books are
an abridged version, was derived one of the minor offshoots of
1 These resemblances are pointed out in what is the fullest account of the Merlin
saga in English, Outlines of the History of the Legend of Merlin, by W. E. Mead
(Part 1v of II. B. Wheatley's edition of the prose Merlin in the E. E. T. 8. series).
## p. 269 (#289) ############################################
Gawain
269
Arthurian romance, the striking story of Balin and Balan. The
earliest romance of Merlin in English is the metrical Arthour and
Merlin, translated from a French original at the beginning of the
fourteenth century. This work, however, is not so well known as
the great prose Merlin, a translation from the French made about -
the middle of the fifteenth century.
No knight of the primitive Arthurian fellowship enjoyed a
higher renown than Arthur's nephew, Gawain. Under the name
of Gwalchmei, Gawain figures prominently in the Welsh Triads
and in the Mabinogion; while, as Walgainus, he is one of Arthur's
most faithful and doughty lieutenants in the wars recounted by
Geoffrey. So great was the traditional fame of Gawain that
William of Malmesbury thought it worth while to record the
discovery of his grave in Pembrokeshire; and there is some
evidence that his name was well known even in Italy by the
beginning of the twelfth century? He was, probably, the centre
of a cycle of adventures quite independent of, and quite as old as,
the original Arthur saga. He is certainly the hero of more
episodic romances than any other British knight? , and, in the
general body of Arthurian romance, none is so ubiquitous. In
Chrétien de Troyes's Conte del Graal, and in Wolfram von Eschen-
bach's Parzival, Gawain is almost as important a personage as
Perceval himself. In the German poem Diu Krône, by Heinrich
von dem Türlin, he, and not Perceval, is the actual achiever of
the Grail quest. It is curious, however, to note that no other knight
undergoes so marked a transformation of character as he in his
progress through the romances. In the Mabinogion, and the
earlier stages of the legend generally, Gawain appears as the
paragon of knightly courtesy. In some of the later romances,
particularly in the more elaborate versions of the Grail legend,
as in Malory and Tennyson,
A reckless and irreverent knight is he3.
Before Malory's time, however, Gawain is uniformly presented in
English literature in a flattering light, and no Arthurian hero was
more popular with English writers. The finest of all Middle
English metrical romances, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight,
i Zimmer, Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1890, No. 20, p. 831.
Gaston Paris gives summaries of a number of these in Histoire Littéraire de la
France, vol. XXX.
3 Tennyson, The Holy Grail, 852.
• See the Sir Gawayne romances, ed. Madden, Bannatyne Club (London, 1839).
## p. 270 (#290) ############################################
270
The Arthurian Legend
dealing with incidents derived, apparently, from a primitive form
of the Gawain legend, portrays him in his original character as a
model of chivalry and of all the knightly graces.
In the full-orbed Arthurian cycle the most dramatic feature of
the story which centres around the fortunes of Arthur himself is
the love of Lancelot for Guinevere. The story of Lancelot is a
comparatively late, and, to all appearance, a non-Celtic, graft upon
the original Arthurian stock. Whether, as some surmise, its
motive was originally suggested by the Tristram legend or not,
it remains as an obvious embodiment of the French ideal of
amour courtois, and is thus the most significant example of the
direct influence of the conceptions of chivalry upon the develop-
ment of Arthurian story. Lancelot first appears as the lover of
Guinevere in Chrétien's Chevalier de la Charrette, a poem written
at the instance of Marie of Champagne, who took a lively interest
in the elaboration of the theory and practice of "courtly love. "
Hence it came about that, as Chaucer tells us, women held “in
ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake? " The book to
which Chaucer, like Dante in the famous passage about Paolo and
Francesca, refers is, doubtless, the great prose romance of Lancelot,
traditionally associated with the name of Walter Map. The
Lancelot is a vast compilation, of which there are three clear
divisions—the first usually called the Lancelot proper, the second
the Quest of the Holy Grail and the third the Morte Arthur
In the MSS, these romances are persistently attributed to Walter
Map; one version of the Quest is described as having been written
by him “for the love of his lord, king Henry, who caused it to be
translated from Latin into French. " A passage in Hue de
Rotelande's poem, Ipomedon, following the description of a
tournament which bears some resemblance to incidents recorded
in Lancelot, has been taken to furnish additional evidence of
Map's authorship. The main difficulty about assigning these
romances to Map is that of reconciling the composition of works
of such size with his known activity as a courtier and a public
man. Nor, apart from one or two fairy-stories included in it,
does what may be called his common-place book, De Nugis
Curialium, afford any indication of the life-long interest which
1 Nonne Prestes Tale, 392.
See Ward, Catalogue of Romances in the British Museum (Vol. I, pp. 345 sqq. ),
for an account of some of the MSS.
3 See ante, Chapter X, p. 190. For a full discussion of the problems suggested by
this passage, see Ward, Catalogue of Romances in B. M. (Vol. I, p. 734) and Miss
J. L. Weston's The Three Days' Tournament (Nutt, 1902).
## p. 271 (#291) ############################################
The Holy Grail
271
Arthurian romance must have had for one capable of so imposing
a contribution to its literature as the great prose Lancelot.
The ascription to Walter Map of the prose Quest of the Holy
Grail links his name with the most intricate branch of Arthurian
romance. The Grail saga, in its various ramifications and exten-
sions, is the most difficult to interpret, and to account for his-
torically, of all the constituent elements of the “matter of Britain. ”
None, at any rate, affords a better illustration of the way in which
that matter came to be “subdued to what they worked in ” by a
particular group of romantic hands. Just as the ideals of courtly
chivalry shape and colour the story of Lancelot, so do the ascetic
proclivities of a monastic cult assert themselves in the gradual
unfolding of the legend of the Holy Grail. The original hero of
the Grail quest appears to have been Gawain ; but he is soon
displaced by the central figure of the existing versions of the
story, Perceval. Perceval, in his turn, is superseded by one who
“exemplifies, in a yet more uncompromising, yet more inhuman,
spirit, the ideal of militant asceticism," Lancelot's son, Galahad.
The earlier versions of the legend, however, know nothing of
Galahad, nor is there any reason for assuming that the primitive
forms of the story had any religious motive. In the Grail literature
which has come down to us, two distinct strata of legend, which
are, apparently, independent of each other in their origin, are to
be clearly traced. They are distinguished as the “Quest” proper,
and the “Early History" of the Holy Grail'. The best-known ver-
sions of the “Quest" are the Conte del Graal, of which the earlier
portions are by Chrétien de Troyes, the Parzival of Wolfram von
Eschenbach and the Welsh Mabinogi of Peredur. Of the “Early
History" the chief versions are the Joseph of Arimathea and
Merlin of Robert de Borron, and the Quête del St Graal attributed
to Map? . In the “Quest” forms of the legend the interest turns
mainly upon the personality of the hero, Perceval, and upon his
adventures in search of certain talismans, which include a sword,
a bleeding lance and a “grail” (either a magic vessel, as in
Chrétien, or a stone, as in Wolfram). The “Early History" versions
1 A. Nutt, The Legends of the Holy Grail (Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance
and Folklore, 1902), p. 72.
* This is the classification made by Alfred Nutt, our chief English authority on
the Grail legends.
3 Other versions of the Grail legend are those known as the Grand St Graal, the
Didot Perceval and Perceval le Gallois. The latter, a thirteenth century prose
romance, has been excellently translated by Sebastian Evans onder the name of
The High History of the Holy Grail.
## p. 272 (#292) ############################################
272 The Arthurian Legend
dwell, chiefly, upon the nature and origin of these talismans. The
search for the talismans is, in the “Quest” stories, connected with
the healing of an injured kinsman, and with the avenging of the
wrong done to him. In the fifteenth century English metrical
romance of Sir Percyvelle, the vengeance of a son upon his father's
slayers is the sole argument of the story.
The Grail cycle, in its fully developed form, would thus seem
to comprise stories of mythical and pagan origin, together with
later accretions due entirely to the invention of romancers with a
deliberately ecclesiastical bias. The palpably mythical character of
the earlier “Quest” versions points to their being of more archaic
origin than the “Early History" documents, and they are almost
certainly to be traced to Celtic sources. "The texture, the colour-
ing, the essential conception of the older Grail Quest stories can
be paralleled from early Celtic mythic romance, and from no other
contemporary European literature! . ” These tales, however, proved
susceptible of being used, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, for religious purposes ; thus, the Grail came to be
identified with the cup of the Last Supper, which Pilate gave to
Joseph of Arimathea, and in which Joseph treasured the blood
that flowed from Christ's wounds on the Cross. The cup was
brought by Joseph to Britain, and its story is thus connected with
an old legend which attributed to Joseph the conversion of Britain
to Christianity. The traditions concerning this evangelisation of
Britain appear to have been specially preserved in documents kept
at the abbey of Glastonbury; and Glastonbury, associated as it
was even with Avalon itself, came, as we know, to have a significant
connection with Arthurian lore by the end of the twelfth century.
The glorification of Britain manifestly intended by this particular
use of the Grail legend suggests, once again, the interest taken by
the Angevin court in the diplomatic possibilities of adroit literary
manipulation of the Arthurian traditions. And if, indeed, Henry II
can be proved to have had anything to do with it at all, an argument
of some plausibility is established in support of the MS record
that the courtier, Walter Map, did, “for the love of his lord, king
Henry,” translate from Latin into French The Quest of the Holy
Grail.
There remains one other famous legend to be noticed, which
has attached itself to the Arthurian group, and which, in its origin
and character, is the most distinctively Celtic of them all. The
story of Tristram and Iseult is the most purely poetical, and,
1 Natt, Legends of the Holy Grail, p. 59.
## p. 273 (#293) ############################################
Tristram and Iseult
273
probably, the oldest, of the subsidiary Arthurian tales. Above all, its
scene, its character and its motif mark it out as the one undoubted
and unchallenged property of "the Celtic fringe. " Ireland and
Wales, Cornwall and Britanny, all claim a share in it. Tristram
appears, under the name of Drystan son of Tallwch, as a purely
mythical hero in a very old Welsh triad, which represents him as
the nephew, and swineherd, of Mark— March ab Meirchion-
protecting his master's swine against Arthur's attempt to get at
them'. Mark, in the earliest poetical versions of the tale, is king of
Cornwall. Iseult, the primal heroine, is a daughter of Ireland,
while the other Iseult, she of the White Hands, is a princess of
Britanny. The entire story breathes the very atmosphere, and
reflects the dim, mysterious half-lights, of the western islands
beaten by the gray, inhospitable sea—the sea, which, in the finest
rendering of the legend in English poetry, keeps up a haunting
choral accompaniment to Iseult's anguish-stricken cries at Tintagel,
when
all their past came wailing in the wind,
And all their future thundered in the sea 2.
Coloured by scarcely any trace of Christian sentiment, and only
faintly touched, as compared with the story of Lancelot, by the
artificial conventions of chivalry, the legend of Tristram bears
every mark of a remote pagan, and Celtic, origin. Neither in
classical, nor in Teutonic, saga, is there anything really comparable
with the elemental and over-mastering passion which makes the
story of Tristram and Iseult, in tragic interest and pathos, second
to none of the great love-tales of the world.
The Tristram legend was preserved, in all probability, in many
detached lays before it came to be embodied in any extant poem.
The earliest known poetical versions of the story are those of the
Anglo-Normans, Béroul (c. 1150) and Thomas (c. 1170), of which
we possess only fragments, and which were the foundations,
respectively, of the German poems of Eilhart von Oberge and
of Gottfried von Strassburg. A lost Tristan poem is also ascribed
to Chrétien de Troyes, and is supposed by some to have been used
by the writer, or writers', of the long prose Tristan, upon which
Malory largely drew. As it passed through the hands of these
1 See Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, p. 13, where it is said of March, or Mark, that
he was “ according to legends, both Brythonio and Irish, an unmistakable prince of
darkness. ”
• Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse,
The names, almost certainly fictitious, of Luces de Gast and of Hélie de Borron
are associated with the authorship of the prose Tristan,
E. L. I. CH. XII.
18
## p. 274 (#294) ############################################
274
The Arthurian Legend
writers, the Tristram story, like the rest, was subjected to the
inevitable process of chivalric decoration; but it has managed to
preserve better than the others its bold primitive characteristics.
Its original existence in the form of scattered popular lays is, to
some extent, attested by one of the poems of Marie of France
Le Chèvrefeuille (The Honeysuckle)-recording a pretty stratagem
of Tristan during his exile from king Mark's court, whereby he
succeeded in obtaining a stolen interview with Iseult. Nor was it
the Tristram legend alone that was thus preserved in popular lays
from a period anterior to that of the great romantic efflorescence
of Arthurian story. Many isolated poems dealing with characters
and incidents subsequently drawn into the Arthurian medley must
have been based upon traditions popularised by the rude art of
some obscure minstrels, or story-tellers, "Breton" or other. One
of the best known examples of such poems is Marie of France's lay
of Lanval, a Celtic fairy-tale quite unconnected, originally, with
the Arthurian court. Even more ambitious works, such as the
Chevalier au Lion, or Yvain, and the Erec, of Chrétien, were almost
certainly founded upon poems, or popular tales, of which the
primitive versions have been irretrievably lost. For the Welsh
prose romances of The Lady of the Fountain and of Geraint-
the heroes of which, Owein and Geraint, correspond respectively to
Chrétien's Yvain and Erec—while resembling the French poems in
their main incidents, cannot be satisfactorily accounted for except
on the supposition that the stories embodied in them originally
existed in a much older and simpler form than that in which they
are presented by Chrétien.
In this necessarily cursory review of an extensive and compli-
cated subject, a good deal has been claimed for Celtic sources and
Celtic influence; and it may not be out of place to conclude with
an attempt to summarise, very briefly, the actual debt of English
literature to the early literature of the Celtic peoples. Upon few
subjects has there been, in our time, so much vague and random
writing as upon so-called Celtic “traits” and “notes” in English
imaginative literature. Renan and Matthew Arnold, in two famous
essays, which, in their time, rendered a real service to letters by
calling attention to the buried literary treasures of Wales and
Ireland, set a fashion of speculating and theorising about “the
Celt” as perilous as it is fascinating. For, after all, no critical
method is more capable of abuse than the process of aesthetic
literary analysis which seeks to distinguish the Celtic from the
## p. 275 (#295) ############################################
-
Celtic Literature
275
other ingredients in the genius of the greater English writers, and
which sounds Shakespeare, or Byron, or Keats for the Celtic "note. ”
While there is no difficulty about admitting that the authentic
literature of the Celts reveals a “sentiment,” a “natural magic,” a
“turn for style," and even a “Pindarism” and a “Titanism,”1 which
are all its own, it is a very different matter to assign a Celtic
source to the supposed equivalents of these things in later English
poetry. An example of the peculiar dangers besetting such
speculations is furnished by Matthew Arnold's own observations
about Macpherson and the Celtic “melancholy. ” The Ossianic
poems, whatever their original Gaelic sources may have been,
reflect far more of the dour melancholy peculiar to the middle
eighteenth century than of anything really characteristic of the
primitive Celtic temperament. Matthew Arnold is, indeed, able to
parallel the laments over the desolation of the halls of Balclutha,
and so on, with extracts from the old Welsh poet, Llywarch Hên.
But even Llywarch's anguish as he contemplates the vanished
glories of the hall of Kyndylan is by no means peculiar to the
Celt. The same melancholy vein is found in the early poetry of
other races; it appears in the Old English poems of The Seafarer
and The Wanderer, and even in the ancient poetry of the east, for
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,
And Bahrám, that great Hunter-the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head but cannot break his Sleep.
The direct influence of Celtic literature upon that of England
amounts, on any strict computation, to very little. And this is only
natural when we remember that the two languages, in which the
chief monuments of that literature are preserved—Welsh and Irish
-present difficulties which only a very few intrepid English
linguists have had the courage and the patience to surmount.
Thus it happens, for example, that the greatest of all the medieval
Welsh poets-Davyd ap Gwilym, a contemporary of Chaucer—is
only known to English readers by fragmentary notices, and
indifferent translations, supplied by George Borrow. A few tanta-
lising, and freely translated, scraps—for they are nothing more
from the Welsh bards are due to Gray; while Thomas Love Peacock
has treated, in his own peculiar vein of sardonic humour, themes
borrowed from ancient Welsh poetry and tradition. Above all,
there remains the singularly graceful translation of the Welsh
1 These are some of Matthew Arnold's “notes” of the Celtic genius in The Study
of Celtic Literature.
18-2
## p. 276 (#296) ############################################
276
The Arthurian Legend
Mabinogion by Lady Charlotte Guest. The literature of Ireland
has, at a quite recent date, been much better served by translators
than that of Wales, and several admirable English versions of
Irish poems and prose tales are making their influence felt upon
the literature of the day. So far, however, as the older Celtic
literature is concerned, it is not so much its form that has told to
any appreciable extent upon English writers as its themes and its
spirit. The main channel of this undoubted Celtic influence was
that afforded by the Arthurian and its kindred legends. The
popularity of the “matter of Britain” came about at a time when
there was, comparatively, much more intimate literary commerce
between the European nations than there is now. The Normans
succeeded in bringing Britain and France at least into much closer
contact than has ever existed between them since; and it was
France that controlled the literary destinies of Europe during the
great romantic period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It
would be rash to endeavour to apportion between the south of
France and the northern “Celtic fringe” their respective contri-
butions to all that is denoted by the ideals of chivalry. But, in
the mist which still overhangs the subject, we do seem to discern
with fair distinctness that it was the conjunction of these ap-
parently diverse racial tendencies, directed by the diplomatic
genius of the Normans, that gave us our vast and picturesque body
of Arthurian romance. Through all the various strains of Arthurian
story we hear
the horns of Elfand faintly blowing;
and it is quite possible that, to the Celtic wonderland, with its
fables of “the little people,” we owe much of the fairy-lore which
has, through Shakespeare and other poets of lower degree, enriched
the literature of England Chaucer, at any rate, seemed to have
very little doubt about it, for he links all that he knew, or cared
to know, about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of
the fairy world :
In th' olde dayes of the king Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
So let us believe, with the poets, and leave the British Arthur in
his unquestioned place as the supreme king of fairy-land.
## p. 277 (#297) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
METRICAL ROMANCES, 1200-1600
Men speke of romances of prys,
Of Horn child and of Ypotys,
Of Bevis and sir Gy,
Of sir Libeux and Pleyn-damour;
But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour
Of royal chivalry.
SIR TÆOPAS.
It is hard to understand the process of change that made so
much difference between Old and Middle English story-telling.
At first, one is inclined to account for it by the Norman con-
quest, and, no doubt, that is one of the factors; the degradation
of the English and their language naturally led to a more popular
and vulgar sort of narrative literature. Beowulf was composed
for persons of quality, Havelok for the common people. Old
English narrative poetry was, in its day, the best obtainable ;
English metrical romances were known by the authors, vendors
and consumers of them to be inferior to the best, i. e. to the French;
and, consequently, there is a rustic, uncourtly air about them. Their
demeanour is often lumbering, and they are sometimes conscious
of it. The English look to the French for instruction in good
manners and in the kinds of literature that belong properly to a
court. In the old times before the Conquest they had the older
courtliness which was their own, and which is represented in the
Old English epic remains, Beowulf, Waldhere and other poems.
But it will not do to regard the Conquest as a full and complete
explanation of the difference, because the same kind of change is
found in other Teutonic countries where there was no political
conquest. In Denmark and Sweden and Germany and the Nether-
lands there are to be found riming romances of the same sort as
the English, written about the same time. In Germany, it is true,
the romantic school of the early thirteenth century is much more
refined than anything in England before the days of Chaucer and
Gower; but, besides the narrative work of the great German poets
## p. 278 (#298) ############################################
278
Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
of that time there are many riming tales that may very well be
compared with English popular romances; while in Denmark and
Sweden there is a still closer likeness to England. There the
riming narrative work is not a bit more regular or courtly than
in England; there is the same kind of easy, shambling verse, the
same sort of bad spelling, the same want of a literary standard.
But in those countries there was no Norman conquest; so that it
will not do to make the political condition of the English account-
able for the manners of their popular literature. The Norman
conquest helped, no doubt, in the depression of English literature,
but like things happened in other countries without a foreign
conqueror. Just as all the Teutonic languages (except that of
Iceland) pass from the Old to the Middle stage, so in litera-
ture there is a parallel movement in Germany, England and
Denmark from an earlier to a later medieval type. In all the
Teutonic countries, though not at the same time in all, there was
a change of taste and fashion which abandoned old epic themes
and native forms of verse for new subjects and for riming
measures. This meant a great disturbance and confusion of literary
principles and traditions ; hence, much of the new literature was
experimental and undisciplined. It took long for the nations to
find a literary standard. The Germans attained it about 1200;
the English in the time of Chaucer; the Danes and Swedes not
until long after the close of the Middle Ages. The progress
from Old to Middle English narrative verse is not to be under-
stood from a consideration of England alone; it is part of a
general change in European fashions, a new mixture of Teutonic
and Roman elements, not to speak of Celtic and oriental strains
in the blending.
In the history of English narrative poetry there is a great gap
of two centuries between The Battle of Maldon and Layamon's
Brut, with very little to fill it or even to show what sort of things
have been lost, what varieties of story-telling amused the English
in the reign of Harold Godwinsson or of Henry I. In France,
on the other hand, these centuries are rich in story books still
extant; and, as the English metrical romances depend very largely
upon the French, the history of them may to some extent be ex-
plained from French history; though often more by way of contrast
than of resemblance.
In France, the twelfth century witnessed a very remarkable
change of taste in stories which spread over all Europe and
affected the English, the Germans and other peoples in different
## p. 279 (#299) ############################################
279
French Influences
ways. The old national epics, the chansons de geste, were dis-
placed by a new romantic school, which triumphed over the old
like a young Olympian dynasty over Saturn and his peers, or like
the new comedy of the restoration over the last Elizabethans.
The chansons de geste were meant for the hall, for Homeric
recitation after supper; the new romances were intended to be
read in my lady's bower; they were for summer leisure and day-
light, as in the pretty scene described by Chrétien de Troyes in
his Chevalier au Lion, and translated into English :
Thurgh the hal sir Ywain gase
Intil ane orcherd, playn pase;
His maiden with him ledes he:
He fand a knyght, under a tre,
Opon a clath of gold he lay;
Byfor him sat a ful fayr may;
A lady sat with tham in fere.
The mayden red, at thai myght here,
A real romance in that place,
But I ne wote of wham it was;
Sho was but fiftene yeres alde.
The knyght was lorde of al that halde,
And that mayden was his ayre;
She was both gracious gode and fayrel.
These French romances were dedicated to noble ladies, and repre-
sented everything that was most refined and elegant in the life
of the twelfth century. Furthermore, like other later romantic
schools, like Scott and Victor Hugo, authors travelled wide for
their subjects. The old French poet's well-known division of stories
according to the three “matters ”—the “matter of France,” the
“matter of Britain” and the matter of Rome the great”2–
very imperfectly sums up the riches and the variety of French
romantic themes, even when it is understood that the “matter
of Rome” includes the whole of antiquity, the tales of Thebes and
Troy, the wars of Alexander. It is true that (as in later romantic
schools) the variety of scene and costume does not always prevent
monotony. The romantic hero may be a knight of king Arthur's
court, or may take his name from Protesilaus or Palaemon or
Archytas; the scene in one story may be Logres or Lyonesse, in
another Greece or Calabria ; it does not really make much differ-
ence. So Mrs Radcliffe's heroes, or Victor Hugo's, are of the same
sort, whether their scene be in the Pyrenees or in Italy. But,
1 Ywain and Gawain, 11. 3081 sqq.
• Ne sont que trois matières à nul home attendant,
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant.
Jean Bodel, Chanson de Saisnes.
## p. 280 (#300) ############################################
280 Metrical Romances, 1200-1500
nevertheless, the freedom of wandering over the world in search of
plots and characters was exhilarating and inspiriting in the twelfth
century in France; there was great industry in fiction, a stirring
literary competition. The following ages very largely lived on the
products of it, to satisfy their own wants in the way of romance.
The leaders of this school, Benoit de Ste More and Chrétien
de Troyes, with their followers, were courtly persons, authors of
fashionable novels, bent on putting into their work the spirit and
all the graces of gentle conversation as it was then understood,
more particularly the refinements of amatory sentiment, such as
was allegorised in the next century in The Romaunt of the Rose.
This sort of thing could not be equally appreciated or appropriated
in all countries. Some people understood it, others could not.
The great houses of Germany were very quick to learn from
French masters and to rival them in their own line. Hartmann
von Aue translated Chrétien freely—the romance of Enid, the
tale of Yvain. Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival may
borrow the substance, but the rendering, the spirit, is his own,
removed far from any danger of comparison with the French
school, because it has a different kind of nobility. In England
things were otherwise, and it was not till the age of Chaucer and
Gower that there was any English narrative work of the finer sort,
with the right courtly good manners and a proper interest in
sentimental themes. The English of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries were generally unable to make much of the “finer shades"
in their French authors. They can dispose of romantic plots and
adventures, they are never tired of stories; but they have difficulty
in following the eloquent monologues of passionate damsels ; the
elegant French phrasing annoyed them just as one of the later
French successors of Chrétien, the heroic romance of Le Grand
Cyrus, affected Major Bellenden. Even the more ambitious of the
English romances generally fall far short of the French and cannot
keep up with their elaborate play of rhetoric and emotion. There
is only one English version of a romance by Chrétien, Ywain
and Gawain. This is comparatively late; it belongs to the
time of Chaucer; it is not rude; on the contrary, it is one of the
most accomplished of all the riming tales outside the work of
Chaucer and Gower. But it cuts short the long speeches of the
original. Chrétien's Yvain (Le Chevalier au Lion) has 6818 lines;
the English version, 4032. Hartmann, on the other hand, spins his
story out to 8166 lines, being thoroughly possessed with admira-
tion of the French ways of thinking. The English romances of
## p. 281 (#301) ############################################
Translators' Difficulties
281
Ipomedon (there are two in rime, besides a prose version) show
well the difficulties and discrepancies, as will be explained later.
William of Palerne is an example of a different sort, showing
how hard it was for the English, even as late as the middle of the
fourteenth century, to understand and translate the work of the
French romantic school. The English poet takes up the French
Guillaume de Palerme, a sophisticated, sentimental story written
in the fluent, unemphatic, clear style which perhaps only Gower
could rightly reproduce in English. This is turned into alliterative
verse, with rather strange results, the rhetoric of the English
school being utterly different from the French : quaint in diction,
inclined to be violent and extravagant, very effective in satirical
passages (as Piers Plowman was to show) or in battle scenes
(as in the Morte Arthure), but not well adapted for polite and
conventional literature. The alliterative poets were justified when
they took their own way and did not try to compete with the
French. Their greatest work in romance is Sir Gawayne and the
Grene Knight, written by a man who understood his business and
produced new effects, original, imaginative, without trying to copy
the manner of the French artists.
At the same time, while the great, the overruling, French
influence is to be found in the ambitious literary work of Chrétien
de Troyes and his peers, it must not be forgotten that there was
also a simpler but still graceful kind of French romance, with
which the English translators had more success. This is best
represented in the work of Marie de France; and, in English, by
the shorter romances which profess to be taken from Breton lays,
such as Launfal, Orfeo and the Lai le Freine. Here, the scale is
smaller, and there is no superabundance of monologue and senti-
mental digression. The clear lines of the original could be followed
by the English without too much difficulty; for the English, though
long inferior to the French in subtlety, were not bunglers, except
when they ventured on unfamiliar ground without the proper
education.
Briefly and roughly, the history of the English romances might
be put in this way. About the year 1200 French literature came
to dominate the whole of Christendom, especially in the matter of
stories ; not only sending abroad the French tales of Charlemagne
and Roland, but importing plots, scenery and so forth, from many
lands, Wales and Britanny, Greece and the further east, and giving
new French forms to them, which were admired and, as far as
possible, borrowed by foreign nations, according to their several
## p. 282 (#302) ############################################
282 Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
tastes and abilities. The English took a large share in this trade.
Generally speaking, their taste was easily satisfied. What they
wanted was adventures; slaughter of Saracens, fights with dragons
and giants, rightful heirs getting their own again, innocent
princesses championed against their felon adversaries. Such
commodities were purveyed by popular authors, who adapted
from the French what suited them and left out the things in
which the French authors were most interested, viz. the orna-
mental passages. The English romance writers worked for
common minstrels and their audiences, and were not particular
about their style. They used, as a rule, either short couplets or
some variety of that simple stanza which is better known to most
readers from Sir Thopas than from Horn Childe or Sir Libeaus.
Sir Thopas illustrates and summarises, in parody, all the ways of
the popular romance for a long time before Chaucer and for long
after his death. Of course there are many differences in particular
cases, and Sir Thopas, with all his virtue, does not so far outshine
the others as to make them indistinguishable. Beves is not exactly
the same kind of thing as Sir Guy, and the story of Sir Libeaus
has merits of its own not to be confounded with those of the other
heroes. Nevertheless, they are all of one kind, and their style
is popular and hackneyed. The authors were well enough pleased
to have it so; they did not attempt to rival their eminent French
masters.
But there were exceptions. One finds ambition at work in
English poets even in days when French literature might have
appeared so strong and so exalted as to dishearten any mere
English competitor. The English Sir Tristrem is a specimen of
literary vanity; the English author is determined to improve upon
his original, and turns the simple verse of his French book into
rather elaborate lyrical stanzas. And, again, it was sometimes
possible for an Englishman to write gracefully enough without
conceit or emphasis ; as in Ywain and Gawain, already quoted.
And the alliterative romances are in a class by themselves.
Chaucer and Gower disturb the progress of the popular romance,
yet not so much as one might expect. Chaucer and Gower, each
in his own way, had challenged the French on their own ground;
they had written English verse which might be approved by
French standards; they had given to English verse the peculiar
French qualities of ease and grace and urbanity. A reader to
whom the fifteenth century was unknown would, naturally, look for
some such consequences as followed in the reign of Charles II from
## p. 283 (#303) ############################################
Matter and Form
283
the work of Dryden and his contemporaries—a disabling of the
older schools, and a complete revolution in taste. But, for what-
ever reason, this was not what actually followed the age of Chaucer.
The fifteenth century, except for the fact that the anarchy of
dialects is reduced to some order, is as far from any literary good
government as the age before Chaucer. It is rather worse, indeed,
on account of the weaker brethren in the Chaucerian school who
only add to the confusion. And the popular romances go on very
much as before, down to the sixteenth century, and even further.
The lay of the last minstrel is described by Sir Walter Scott, in
prose, in a note to Sir Tristrem :
Some traces of this custom remained in Scotland till of late years.
A satire on the Marquis of Argyle, published about the time of his death,
is said to be composed to the tune of Graysteel, a noted romance reprinted
at Aberdeen so late as the beginning of the last century. Within the memory
of man, an old person used to perambulate the streets of Edinburgh, singing,
in a monotonous cadence, the tale of Rosewal and Lilian, which is, in all the
forms, a metrical romance of chivalry.
It is possible to classify the romances according to their sources
and their subjects, though, as has been already remarked, the
difference of scenery does not always make much difference in
the character of the stories. The English varieties depend so
closely on the French that one must go to French literary history
for guidance. The whole subject has been so clearly summarised
and explained in the French Medieval Literature of Gaston Paris'
that it is scarcely necessary here to repeat even the general facts.
But, of course, although the subjects are the same, the English
point of view is different; especially in the following respects.
The “matter of France” includes the subjects of the old French
epics. These, being national, could not bear exportation so well
as some of the other "matters. ” It is only in France that the Song
of Roland can be thoroughly understood and valued. Yet Roland
and Charlemagne were honoured beyond the Alps and beyond the
sea. The Karlamagnus Saga is a large book written in Norway
in the thirteenth century, bringing together in a prose version all
the chief stories of the cycle. One section, Olif and Landres, was
found "in the English tongue in Scotland” by a Norwegian envoy
who went there in 1284 after the death of king Alexander III.
Roland was almost as popular in Italy as in France. He appears
also in English, though not to very great advantage. The favourite
· La Littérature française au moyen âge (with bibliography); also Esquisse his.
torique de la litt. fr. au inoyen âge; English transiation of this latter, Dent, 1903.
## p. 284 (#304) ############################################
284 Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
story from the French epics was that of Oliver and Fierabras, where
the motive is not so much French patriotism as the opposition
between Christian and infidel.
In the “matter of Britain” the English had a better right to
share. They accepted at once the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth
and made king Arthur into an English national hero, the British
counterpart of Charlemagne. The alliterative Morte Arthure,
derived from Geoffrey, is a kind of political epic, with allusions
to contemporary history and the wars of Edward III, as George
Neilson has sufficiently proved'. This touch of allegory, which one
need not be afraid to compare with the purpose of the Aeneid
or of The Faerie Queene, makes it unlike most other medieval
romances; the pretence of solidity and historical truth in Geoffrey
is not suitable for mere romantic purposes. Quite different is the
Arthur who merely sits waiting for adventures, being "somewhat
child-geared,” as the poet of Sir Gawayne says. In most of the
stories, Arthur is very unlike the great imperial monarch and
conqueror as presented by Geoffrey and his followers. He has
nothing particular to do, except to be present at the beginning
and end of the story; the hero is Sir Perceval, Sir Ywain, Sir
Gawain, or the Fair Knight Unknown (Sir Libeaus); unfortu-
nately not Sir Erec (Geraint), in any extant English poem before
Tennyson. In this second order, the proper Arthurian romances
as distinguished from the versions or adaptations of Geoffrey,
England had something to claim even before the English rimers
began their work; for some of the French poems certainly, and
probably many now lost, were written in England. This is a
debatable and difficult part of literary history; but, at any rate,
it is plain that the more elaborate French Arthurian romances
were not the only authorities for the English tales. Chrétien's
Yvain is translated into English ; but the French romance of
The Fair Unknown is probably not the original of the English
story of Sir Libeaus which, like the old Italian version, would
seem to have had a simpler and earlier form to work upon. Like-
wise, the English Sir Perceval must, surely, come from something
older and less complicated than Chrétien's Conte del Graal. It is
at least a fair conjecture that these two romances belong to an
earlier type, such as may have been hawked about in England by
French or French-speaking minstrels; and, without any conjecture
at all, they are different in their plots (not merely in their style)
from the French work of Renaud de Beaujeu in the one case, and
* Huchown of the Awle Ryale, Glasgow, 1902, pp. 59–66.
## p. 285 (#305) ############################################
Sources and Subjects
285
Chrétien de Troyes in the other. Sir Gawayne and the Grene
Knight, again, cannot be referred to any known French book
for its original; and, in this and other ways, the English
rendering of the “matter of Britain” goes beyond the French, or,
to be more precise, is found to differ from the existing French
documents.
The "matter of Rome the great," that is, classical antiquity, is
well represented in English. There are several poems in rime
and alliterative verse on Alexander and on Troy, some of them
being fragmentary. The tale of Thebes, though often referred
to, does not appear fully told till Lydgate took it up, nor the
romantic version of the Aeneid (Roman d'Enéas) before Caxton's
prose.
The classification under the three “matters” of France, Britain
and Rome is not exhaustive; there are many romances which fall
outside these limits.
not merely left in Avalon "to be cured of his wounds”; he is still
there, the Bretons await him, and say that he will come back and
live again. Wace's poem, as a whole, thus represents an inter-
mediate stage between the chronicles and the pure romances. It
must have contributed powerfully to the popularity of "the matter
of Britain,” by putting it into a form and a language which com-
manded a much larger constituency of readers than would be
attracted by any Latin prose narrative, however highly coloured
or agreeably written.
1 De Nugis Curialium, Dist. 11, ch. XX.
2 Gaimar had probably completed his work by 1150. His lost History of the
Britons formed a prelude to his L'Estorie des Engles, which has been preserved (ed.
Hardy and Martin, Rolls Series, 1888–9).
* Layamon states that Waoe "gave” his book to “the noble Eleanor, who was the
high king Henry's queen," Brut, 11. 42, 43.
* LI. 9994–10,007.
OL. 13,685.
## p. 265 (#285) ############################################
Layamon
265
Above all, Wace's Brut is of signal interest to English readers
as forming the basis of the solitary contribution of any consequence
made by an English writer to the vast and varied mass of Arthurian
literature before the fourteenth centuryl. Layamon, however, is
a very different poet from Wace. While not indifferent to romance,
as several significant additions to the Arthurian part of his story
will show, Layamon wrote his Brut as a frankly patriotic English --
epic. Wace's work is almost as artificial and exotic a product
as the poetical romances; it was designed as a contribution to the
polite literature of the Norman aristocracy. Layamon, dwelling
in seclusion on the banks of the Severn, where “it was good to be,"
was fired by an ambition “to tell the noble deeds of England,” and
to tell them in the English tongue. His poem is the first articulate
utterance of the native English genius reasserting itself in its own
language after the long silence which succeeded the Conquest.
Although he borrows most of his matter from Wace, Layamon,
in manner and spirit, is much nearer akin to the robust singers
of the Old English period than to the courtly French poet. The
simple force and vividness of the primitive English epic reappear
in descriptions of battle scenes and of heroic deeds. Even the
poet's diction is scrupulously pure English. And Arthur, who,
in the hands of the professional romancers, had already become
all but an alien to his fatherland, is restored to his rightful
place as the champion of Britain, and the great Christian king
who
Drew all the petty princedoms under him,
Their king and head, and made a realm, and reign'd.
Arthur, therefore, was to Layamon, primarily, the ideal British
hero-an actual king of England, whose character and prowess
deserved the veneration of his countrymen altogether apart from
the glamour with which romance had enshrouded his name. But
Layamon was a poet; and upon him, as upon the rest, the romantic
glamour works its inevitable spell Elf-land claims Arthur, both
at his birth and at his death. Elves received him into the world;
they gave him gifts, to become the best of knights and a mighty
king, to have long life and to be generous above all living men ? .
At his passing, Arthur says he will go to Argante (Morgan le fay),
the splendid elf; she will heal him of his wounds, so that he will
return again to his kingdoms. Again, Arthur's byrnie was made
for him by Wygar, the elvish smith", his spear by Griffin of the
1 Cf. ante, Chapter x, pp. 234 ff.
i Ll. 19,254 sqq. (Madden's ed. ).
Ll. 28,610 sqq.
4 L. 21,133.
## p. 266 (#286) ############################################
266 The Arthurian Legend
city of the wizard Merlin (Kaermerđin)? Caliburn, his sword,
was wrought in Avalon with magic craft? ; the Round Table, by
a strange carpenter from beyond the seas. Nowhere, however,
does Layamon's poem breathe more of the spirit of pure romance
than in the passages which describe Arthur's last battle and fall.
The encounter took place at Camelford (Camlan) "a name that
will last for ever+. ” The stream, hard by, “was flooded with blood
unmeasured. ” So thick was the throng that the warriors could
not distinguish each other, but "each slew downright, were he
swain, were he knight. " Modred and all his knights perished
and “there were slain all the brave ones, Arthur's warriors, high
and low, and all the Britons of Arthur's board. ” Of all the two
hundred thousand men who fought, none remained, at the end
of the fight, save Arthur and two of his knights. But Arthur was
sorely wounded, and, bidding the young Constantine, Cador's son,
take charge of his kingdom, he consigns himself to the care of
Argante, “the fairest of all maidens," who dwells in Avalon. Thence,
cured of his wounds, he will come again to "dwell with the Britons
with mickle joy. "
Even with the words there came from the sea a short boat, borne on the
waves, and two women therein, wondrously arrayed; and they took Arthur
anon, and bare him quickly, and softly laid him down, and fared forth away,
Then was brought to pass that which Merlin whilom said, that there should
be sorrow untold at Arthur's forth-faring. The Britons believe yet that he is
alive, and dwelleth in Avalon, with the fairest of all elves, and ever yet the
Britons look for Arthur's coming. Was never the man born, nor ever of
woman chosen, that knoweth the sooth, to say more of Arthur. But whilom
there was a seer hight Merlin; he said with words and his sayings were
800th-that an Arthur should yet come to help the Britons.
In this passage, as in many others, Layamon supplies several
details not found in Wace, and his poem throughout bears abundant
evidence that he drew upon a fund of independent traditions
gleaned from many fields. Among the most interesting of
Layamon's additions to, and amplifications of, Wace's narrative
are his accounts of Arthur's dream shortly before his last return
to Britain, and of the origin and the making of the Round Table.
The dream, of which neither Geoffrey nor Wace know anything,
foreshadows the treachery of Modred and Guinevere, and disturbs
1 L. 23,783. L. 21,135. L. 22,910. • Ll. 28,533 899.
01. Tennyson, Passing of Arthur:
“For friend and foe were shadows in the mist,
And friend blew friend not knowing whom he slew. "
6 See Ll. 28,020 sqq.
## p. 267 (#287) ############################################
Subsidiary Legends
267
Arthur with the sense of impending doom. The occasion of the
institution of the Round Table is, as in Wace, a quarrel for
precedence among Arthur's knights; but the description of the
actual making, and of the properties, of the Table is all Layamon's
own. It was while he was in Cornwall, after the quarrel among
his knights, that Arthur met the man from oversea who offered
to “make him a board, wondrous fair, at which sixteen hundred
men and more might sit ? . " Its huge size notwithstanding, and
though it took four weeks to make, the board could, by some
magic means, be carried by Arthur as he rode, and set by him
in what place soever he willed. Like Wace, Layamon evidently
knew stories about the Round Table, of which the origin has
never been traced; for “this was that same table” he says, “ of
which the Britons boast”—the Britons, who tell “ many leasings”
of king Arthur, and say of him things that never happened in the
kingdom of this world ? . " So it would appear that Layamon, had
he pleased, could have told us much more of Arthur. Even as it
stands, however, his poem is a notable contribution to Arthurian
story, and has the unique distinction of being the first celebration
of “the matter of Britain” in the English tongue.
When we pass from the metrical chronicles to the pure
romances, both verse and prose, we all but part with the traditional
British Arthur altogether. Not only are we suddenly transported
into the “no man's land” of chivalry, but we find ourselves
surrounded by strange apparitions from regions Geoffrey and his
translators never knew. In the romances, the Arthurian court
serves but as a convenient rendezvous for a
moving row
Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go
in quest of adventures which bear little, or no, relation to the
British king. Characters, of whom the chroniclers tell us nothing,
and who were themselves the heroes of quite independent legends,
now make a dramatic entry upon the Arthurian stage. Tristram and
Lancelot and Perceval play parts which divert our attention quite
away from that assigned to Arthur himself. Thus, a complete
history of Arthurian romance involves a series of enquiries into
the growth of a number of legends which have, for the most part,
only the most artificial connection with the original Arthurian
tradition. Some of these legends are as archaic, and as purely
mythical, as the primitive fables about the British Arthur, and
See 11. 22,910 sqq.
? L. 23,987.
## p. 268 (#288) ############################################
268
The Arthurian Legend
were probably current in popular lays long before the latter half
of the twelfth century. A full account of the romances in which
they were embodied and enriched during the age of chivalry
belongs to the history of French, and German, rather than to that
of English, literature. Not until the fourteenth century do we
come across a single English writer whose name is to be mentioned
in the same breath with those of Chrétien de Troyes and the
authors of the French prose romances, or of Wolfram von
Eschenbach, Gottfried von Strassburg and Hartmann von Aue.
Here, only the briefest review can be attempted of the main
features of the subsidiary legends which were imported, by these
and other writers, into the vast Arthurian miscellany. .
Of all such legends, the most intimately connected with Arthur
himself is the story of Merlin. In Welsh tradition, Merlin, or
Myrdin, is a figure very similar to Taliesin—a wizard bard of the
sixth century, to whom a number of spurious poetical compositions
came, in course of time, to be ascribed. His first association with
Arthur is due to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who identifies him with
the Ambrosius of Nennius and makes of him both a magician and
a prophet; to his magic arts, as we have seen, the birth of Arthur
was largely due. His character is further developed in a Latin
hexameter poem, Vita Merlini, composed, probably, about the
year 1148 and attributed by several competent authorities to
Geoffrey. This poem, however, presents us with a conception of
the mage which is not easy to reconcile with the account given of
him in Geoffrey's History, and suggests many points of analogy
with certain early Welsh poems in which Merlin figures, and with
which Geoffrey could hardly have been acquainted? . Merlin makes
his first appearance in French romantic poetry in a poem of which
only a fragment has been preserved, supposed to be by Robert de
Borron, and dating from the end of the twelfth century. Upon
this poem was based the French prose romance of Merlin, part of
which is assigned to Robert de Borron, and which exists in two
forms-the first known as the “ordinary” Merlin, and the other
as the Suite de Merlin. For Robert de Borron, the enchanter's
arts are but so many manifestations of the powers of darkness ;
Merlin himself becomes the devil's offspring and most active agent.
From the Suite de Merlin, of which Malory's first four books are
an abridged version, was derived one of the minor offshoots of
1 These resemblances are pointed out in what is the fullest account of the Merlin
saga in English, Outlines of the History of the Legend of Merlin, by W. E. Mead
(Part 1v of II. B. Wheatley's edition of the prose Merlin in the E. E. T. 8. series).
## p. 269 (#289) ############################################
Gawain
269
Arthurian romance, the striking story of Balin and Balan. The
earliest romance of Merlin in English is the metrical Arthour and
Merlin, translated from a French original at the beginning of the
fourteenth century. This work, however, is not so well known as
the great prose Merlin, a translation from the French made about -
the middle of the fifteenth century.
No knight of the primitive Arthurian fellowship enjoyed a
higher renown than Arthur's nephew, Gawain. Under the name
of Gwalchmei, Gawain figures prominently in the Welsh Triads
and in the Mabinogion; while, as Walgainus, he is one of Arthur's
most faithful and doughty lieutenants in the wars recounted by
Geoffrey. So great was the traditional fame of Gawain that
William of Malmesbury thought it worth while to record the
discovery of his grave in Pembrokeshire; and there is some
evidence that his name was well known even in Italy by the
beginning of the twelfth century? He was, probably, the centre
of a cycle of adventures quite independent of, and quite as old as,
the original Arthur saga. He is certainly the hero of more
episodic romances than any other British knight? , and, in the
general body of Arthurian romance, none is so ubiquitous. In
Chrétien de Troyes's Conte del Graal, and in Wolfram von Eschen-
bach's Parzival, Gawain is almost as important a personage as
Perceval himself. In the German poem Diu Krône, by Heinrich
von dem Türlin, he, and not Perceval, is the actual achiever of
the Grail quest. It is curious, however, to note that no other knight
undergoes so marked a transformation of character as he in his
progress through the romances. In the Mabinogion, and the
earlier stages of the legend generally, Gawain appears as the
paragon of knightly courtesy. In some of the later romances,
particularly in the more elaborate versions of the Grail legend,
as in Malory and Tennyson,
A reckless and irreverent knight is he3.
Before Malory's time, however, Gawain is uniformly presented in
English literature in a flattering light, and no Arthurian hero was
more popular with English writers. The finest of all Middle
English metrical romances, Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight,
i Zimmer, Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 1890, No. 20, p. 831.
Gaston Paris gives summaries of a number of these in Histoire Littéraire de la
France, vol. XXX.
3 Tennyson, The Holy Grail, 852.
• See the Sir Gawayne romances, ed. Madden, Bannatyne Club (London, 1839).
## p. 270 (#290) ############################################
270
The Arthurian Legend
dealing with incidents derived, apparently, from a primitive form
of the Gawain legend, portrays him in his original character as a
model of chivalry and of all the knightly graces.
In the full-orbed Arthurian cycle the most dramatic feature of
the story which centres around the fortunes of Arthur himself is
the love of Lancelot for Guinevere. The story of Lancelot is a
comparatively late, and, to all appearance, a non-Celtic, graft upon
the original Arthurian stock. Whether, as some surmise, its
motive was originally suggested by the Tristram legend or not,
it remains as an obvious embodiment of the French ideal of
amour courtois, and is thus the most significant example of the
direct influence of the conceptions of chivalry upon the develop-
ment of Arthurian story. Lancelot first appears as the lover of
Guinevere in Chrétien's Chevalier de la Charrette, a poem written
at the instance of Marie of Champagne, who took a lively interest
in the elaboration of the theory and practice of "courtly love. "
Hence it came about that, as Chaucer tells us, women held “in
ful gret reverence the boke of Lancelot de Lake? " The book to
which Chaucer, like Dante in the famous passage about Paolo and
Francesca, refers is, doubtless, the great prose romance of Lancelot,
traditionally associated with the name of Walter Map. The
Lancelot is a vast compilation, of which there are three clear
divisions—the first usually called the Lancelot proper, the second
the Quest of the Holy Grail and the third the Morte Arthur
In the MSS, these romances are persistently attributed to Walter
Map; one version of the Quest is described as having been written
by him “for the love of his lord, king Henry, who caused it to be
translated from Latin into French. " A passage in Hue de
Rotelande's poem, Ipomedon, following the description of a
tournament which bears some resemblance to incidents recorded
in Lancelot, has been taken to furnish additional evidence of
Map's authorship. The main difficulty about assigning these
romances to Map is that of reconciling the composition of works
of such size with his known activity as a courtier and a public
man. Nor, apart from one or two fairy-stories included in it,
does what may be called his common-place book, De Nugis
Curialium, afford any indication of the life-long interest which
1 Nonne Prestes Tale, 392.
See Ward, Catalogue of Romances in the British Museum (Vol. I, pp. 345 sqq. ),
for an account of some of the MSS.
3 See ante, Chapter X, p. 190. For a full discussion of the problems suggested by
this passage, see Ward, Catalogue of Romances in B. M. (Vol. I, p. 734) and Miss
J. L. Weston's The Three Days' Tournament (Nutt, 1902).
## p. 271 (#291) ############################################
The Holy Grail
271
Arthurian romance must have had for one capable of so imposing
a contribution to its literature as the great prose Lancelot.
The ascription to Walter Map of the prose Quest of the Holy
Grail links his name with the most intricate branch of Arthurian
romance. The Grail saga, in its various ramifications and exten-
sions, is the most difficult to interpret, and to account for his-
torically, of all the constituent elements of the “matter of Britain. ”
None, at any rate, affords a better illustration of the way in which
that matter came to be “subdued to what they worked in ” by a
particular group of romantic hands. Just as the ideals of courtly
chivalry shape and colour the story of Lancelot, so do the ascetic
proclivities of a monastic cult assert themselves in the gradual
unfolding of the legend of the Holy Grail. The original hero of
the Grail quest appears to have been Gawain ; but he is soon
displaced by the central figure of the existing versions of the
story, Perceval. Perceval, in his turn, is superseded by one who
“exemplifies, in a yet more uncompromising, yet more inhuman,
spirit, the ideal of militant asceticism," Lancelot's son, Galahad.
The earlier versions of the legend, however, know nothing of
Galahad, nor is there any reason for assuming that the primitive
forms of the story had any religious motive. In the Grail literature
which has come down to us, two distinct strata of legend, which
are, apparently, independent of each other in their origin, are to
be clearly traced. They are distinguished as the “Quest” proper,
and the “Early History" of the Holy Grail'. The best-known ver-
sions of the “Quest" are the Conte del Graal, of which the earlier
portions are by Chrétien de Troyes, the Parzival of Wolfram von
Eschenbach and the Welsh Mabinogi of Peredur. Of the “Early
History" the chief versions are the Joseph of Arimathea and
Merlin of Robert de Borron, and the Quête del St Graal attributed
to Map? . In the “Quest” forms of the legend the interest turns
mainly upon the personality of the hero, Perceval, and upon his
adventures in search of certain talismans, which include a sword,
a bleeding lance and a “grail” (either a magic vessel, as in
Chrétien, or a stone, as in Wolfram). The “Early History" versions
1 A. Nutt, The Legends of the Holy Grail (Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance
and Folklore, 1902), p. 72.
* This is the classification made by Alfred Nutt, our chief English authority on
the Grail legends.
3 Other versions of the Grail legend are those known as the Grand St Graal, the
Didot Perceval and Perceval le Gallois. The latter, a thirteenth century prose
romance, has been excellently translated by Sebastian Evans onder the name of
The High History of the Holy Grail.
## p. 272 (#292) ############################################
272 The Arthurian Legend
dwell, chiefly, upon the nature and origin of these talismans. The
search for the talismans is, in the “Quest” stories, connected with
the healing of an injured kinsman, and with the avenging of the
wrong done to him. In the fifteenth century English metrical
romance of Sir Percyvelle, the vengeance of a son upon his father's
slayers is the sole argument of the story.
The Grail cycle, in its fully developed form, would thus seem
to comprise stories of mythical and pagan origin, together with
later accretions due entirely to the invention of romancers with a
deliberately ecclesiastical bias. The palpably mythical character of
the earlier “Quest” versions points to their being of more archaic
origin than the “Early History" documents, and they are almost
certainly to be traced to Celtic sources. "The texture, the colour-
ing, the essential conception of the older Grail Quest stories can
be paralleled from early Celtic mythic romance, and from no other
contemporary European literature! . ” These tales, however, proved
susceptible of being used, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, for religious purposes ; thus, the Grail came to be
identified with the cup of the Last Supper, which Pilate gave to
Joseph of Arimathea, and in which Joseph treasured the blood
that flowed from Christ's wounds on the Cross. The cup was
brought by Joseph to Britain, and its story is thus connected with
an old legend which attributed to Joseph the conversion of Britain
to Christianity. The traditions concerning this evangelisation of
Britain appear to have been specially preserved in documents kept
at the abbey of Glastonbury; and Glastonbury, associated as it
was even with Avalon itself, came, as we know, to have a significant
connection with Arthurian lore by the end of the twelfth century.
The glorification of Britain manifestly intended by this particular
use of the Grail legend suggests, once again, the interest taken by
the Angevin court in the diplomatic possibilities of adroit literary
manipulation of the Arthurian traditions. And if, indeed, Henry II
can be proved to have had anything to do with it at all, an argument
of some plausibility is established in support of the MS record
that the courtier, Walter Map, did, “for the love of his lord, king
Henry,” translate from Latin into French The Quest of the Holy
Grail.
There remains one other famous legend to be noticed, which
has attached itself to the Arthurian group, and which, in its origin
and character, is the most distinctively Celtic of them all. The
story of Tristram and Iseult is the most purely poetical, and,
1 Natt, Legends of the Holy Grail, p. 59.
## p. 273 (#293) ############################################
Tristram and Iseult
273
probably, the oldest, of the subsidiary Arthurian tales. Above all, its
scene, its character and its motif mark it out as the one undoubted
and unchallenged property of "the Celtic fringe. " Ireland and
Wales, Cornwall and Britanny, all claim a share in it. Tristram
appears, under the name of Drystan son of Tallwch, as a purely
mythical hero in a very old Welsh triad, which represents him as
the nephew, and swineherd, of Mark— March ab Meirchion-
protecting his master's swine against Arthur's attempt to get at
them'. Mark, in the earliest poetical versions of the tale, is king of
Cornwall. Iseult, the primal heroine, is a daughter of Ireland,
while the other Iseult, she of the White Hands, is a princess of
Britanny. The entire story breathes the very atmosphere, and
reflects the dim, mysterious half-lights, of the western islands
beaten by the gray, inhospitable sea—the sea, which, in the finest
rendering of the legend in English poetry, keeps up a haunting
choral accompaniment to Iseult's anguish-stricken cries at Tintagel,
when
all their past came wailing in the wind,
And all their future thundered in the sea 2.
Coloured by scarcely any trace of Christian sentiment, and only
faintly touched, as compared with the story of Lancelot, by the
artificial conventions of chivalry, the legend of Tristram bears
every mark of a remote pagan, and Celtic, origin. Neither in
classical, nor in Teutonic, saga, is there anything really comparable
with the elemental and over-mastering passion which makes the
story of Tristram and Iseult, in tragic interest and pathos, second
to none of the great love-tales of the world.
The Tristram legend was preserved, in all probability, in many
detached lays before it came to be embodied in any extant poem.
The earliest known poetical versions of the story are those of the
Anglo-Normans, Béroul (c. 1150) and Thomas (c. 1170), of which
we possess only fragments, and which were the foundations,
respectively, of the German poems of Eilhart von Oberge and
of Gottfried von Strassburg. A lost Tristan poem is also ascribed
to Chrétien de Troyes, and is supposed by some to have been used
by the writer, or writers', of the long prose Tristan, upon which
Malory largely drew. As it passed through the hands of these
1 See Rhys, The Arthurian Legend, p. 13, where it is said of March, or Mark, that
he was “ according to legends, both Brythonio and Irish, an unmistakable prince of
darkness. ”
• Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse,
The names, almost certainly fictitious, of Luces de Gast and of Hélie de Borron
are associated with the authorship of the prose Tristan,
E. L. I. CH. XII.
18
## p. 274 (#294) ############################################
274
The Arthurian Legend
writers, the Tristram story, like the rest, was subjected to the
inevitable process of chivalric decoration; but it has managed to
preserve better than the others its bold primitive characteristics.
Its original existence in the form of scattered popular lays is, to
some extent, attested by one of the poems of Marie of France
Le Chèvrefeuille (The Honeysuckle)-recording a pretty stratagem
of Tristan during his exile from king Mark's court, whereby he
succeeded in obtaining a stolen interview with Iseult. Nor was it
the Tristram legend alone that was thus preserved in popular lays
from a period anterior to that of the great romantic efflorescence
of Arthurian story. Many isolated poems dealing with characters
and incidents subsequently drawn into the Arthurian medley must
have been based upon traditions popularised by the rude art of
some obscure minstrels, or story-tellers, "Breton" or other. One
of the best known examples of such poems is Marie of France's lay
of Lanval, a Celtic fairy-tale quite unconnected, originally, with
the Arthurian court. Even more ambitious works, such as the
Chevalier au Lion, or Yvain, and the Erec, of Chrétien, were almost
certainly founded upon poems, or popular tales, of which the
primitive versions have been irretrievably lost. For the Welsh
prose romances of The Lady of the Fountain and of Geraint-
the heroes of which, Owein and Geraint, correspond respectively to
Chrétien's Yvain and Erec—while resembling the French poems in
their main incidents, cannot be satisfactorily accounted for except
on the supposition that the stories embodied in them originally
existed in a much older and simpler form than that in which they
are presented by Chrétien.
In this necessarily cursory review of an extensive and compli-
cated subject, a good deal has been claimed for Celtic sources and
Celtic influence; and it may not be out of place to conclude with
an attempt to summarise, very briefly, the actual debt of English
literature to the early literature of the Celtic peoples. Upon few
subjects has there been, in our time, so much vague and random
writing as upon so-called Celtic “traits” and “notes” in English
imaginative literature. Renan and Matthew Arnold, in two famous
essays, which, in their time, rendered a real service to letters by
calling attention to the buried literary treasures of Wales and
Ireland, set a fashion of speculating and theorising about “the
Celt” as perilous as it is fascinating. For, after all, no critical
method is more capable of abuse than the process of aesthetic
literary analysis which seeks to distinguish the Celtic from the
## p. 275 (#295) ############################################
-
Celtic Literature
275
other ingredients in the genius of the greater English writers, and
which sounds Shakespeare, or Byron, or Keats for the Celtic "note. ”
While there is no difficulty about admitting that the authentic
literature of the Celts reveals a “sentiment,” a “natural magic,” a
“turn for style," and even a “Pindarism” and a “Titanism,”1 which
are all its own, it is a very different matter to assign a Celtic
source to the supposed equivalents of these things in later English
poetry. An example of the peculiar dangers besetting such
speculations is furnished by Matthew Arnold's own observations
about Macpherson and the Celtic “melancholy. ” The Ossianic
poems, whatever their original Gaelic sources may have been,
reflect far more of the dour melancholy peculiar to the middle
eighteenth century than of anything really characteristic of the
primitive Celtic temperament. Matthew Arnold is, indeed, able to
parallel the laments over the desolation of the halls of Balclutha,
and so on, with extracts from the old Welsh poet, Llywarch Hên.
But even Llywarch's anguish as he contemplates the vanished
glories of the hall of Kyndylan is by no means peculiar to the
Celt. The same melancholy vein is found in the early poetry of
other races; it appears in the Old English poems of The Seafarer
and The Wanderer, and even in the ancient poetry of the east, for
They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep,
And Bahrám, that great Hunter-the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head but cannot break his Sleep.
The direct influence of Celtic literature upon that of England
amounts, on any strict computation, to very little. And this is only
natural when we remember that the two languages, in which the
chief monuments of that literature are preserved—Welsh and Irish
-present difficulties which only a very few intrepid English
linguists have had the courage and the patience to surmount.
Thus it happens, for example, that the greatest of all the medieval
Welsh poets-Davyd ap Gwilym, a contemporary of Chaucer—is
only known to English readers by fragmentary notices, and
indifferent translations, supplied by George Borrow. A few tanta-
lising, and freely translated, scraps—for they are nothing more
from the Welsh bards are due to Gray; while Thomas Love Peacock
has treated, in his own peculiar vein of sardonic humour, themes
borrowed from ancient Welsh poetry and tradition. Above all,
there remains the singularly graceful translation of the Welsh
1 These are some of Matthew Arnold's “notes” of the Celtic genius in The Study
of Celtic Literature.
18-2
## p. 276 (#296) ############################################
276
The Arthurian Legend
Mabinogion by Lady Charlotte Guest. The literature of Ireland
has, at a quite recent date, been much better served by translators
than that of Wales, and several admirable English versions of
Irish poems and prose tales are making their influence felt upon
the literature of the day. So far, however, as the older Celtic
literature is concerned, it is not so much its form that has told to
any appreciable extent upon English writers as its themes and its
spirit. The main channel of this undoubted Celtic influence was
that afforded by the Arthurian and its kindred legends. The
popularity of the “matter of Britain” came about at a time when
there was, comparatively, much more intimate literary commerce
between the European nations than there is now. The Normans
succeeded in bringing Britain and France at least into much closer
contact than has ever existed between them since; and it was
France that controlled the literary destinies of Europe during the
great romantic period of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It
would be rash to endeavour to apportion between the south of
France and the northern “Celtic fringe” their respective contri-
butions to all that is denoted by the ideals of chivalry. But, in
the mist which still overhangs the subject, we do seem to discern
with fair distinctness that it was the conjunction of these ap-
parently diverse racial tendencies, directed by the diplomatic
genius of the Normans, that gave us our vast and picturesque body
of Arthurian romance. Through all the various strains of Arthurian
story we hear
the horns of Elfand faintly blowing;
and it is quite possible that, to the Celtic wonderland, with its
fables of “the little people,” we owe much of the fairy-lore which
has, through Shakespeare and other poets of lower degree, enriched
the literature of England Chaucer, at any rate, seemed to have
very little doubt about it, for he links all that he knew, or cared
to know, about the Arthurian stories with his recollections of
the fairy world :
In th' olde dayes of the king Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye;
The elf-queen, with hir joly companye
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.
So let us believe, with the poets, and leave the British Arthur in
his unquestioned place as the supreme king of fairy-land.
## p. 277 (#297) ############################################
CHAPTER XIII
METRICAL ROMANCES, 1200-1600
Men speke of romances of prys,
Of Horn child and of Ypotys,
Of Bevis and sir Gy,
Of sir Libeux and Pleyn-damour;
But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour
Of royal chivalry.
SIR TÆOPAS.
It is hard to understand the process of change that made so
much difference between Old and Middle English story-telling.
At first, one is inclined to account for it by the Norman con-
quest, and, no doubt, that is one of the factors; the degradation
of the English and their language naturally led to a more popular
and vulgar sort of narrative literature. Beowulf was composed
for persons of quality, Havelok for the common people. Old
English narrative poetry was, in its day, the best obtainable ;
English metrical romances were known by the authors, vendors
and consumers of them to be inferior to the best, i. e. to the French;
and, consequently, there is a rustic, uncourtly air about them. Their
demeanour is often lumbering, and they are sometimes conscious
of it. The English look to the French for instruction in good
manners and in the kinds of literature that belong properly to a
court. In the old times before the Conquest they had the older
courtliness which was their own, and which is represented in the
Old English epic remains, Beowulf, Waldhere and other poems.
But it will not do to regard the Conquest as a full and complete
explanation of the difference, because the same kind of change is
found in other Teutonic countries where there was no political
conquest. In Denmark and Sweden and Germany and the Nether-
lands there are to be found riming romances of the same sort as
the English, written about the same time. In Germany, it is true,
the romantic school of the early thirteenth century is much more
refined than anything in England before the days of Chaucer and
Gower; but, besides the narrative work of the great German poets
## p. 278 (#298) ############################################
278
Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
of that time there are many riming tales that may very well be
compared with English popular romances; while in Denmark and
Sweden there is a still closer likeness to England. There the
riming narrative work is not a bit more regular or courtly than
in England; there is the same kind of easy, shambling verse, the
same sort of bad spelling, the same want of a literary standard.
But in those countries there was no Norman conquest; so that it
will not do to make the political condition of the English account-
able for the manners of their popular literature. The Norman
conquest helped, no doubt, in the depression of English literature,
but like things happened in other countries without a foreign
conqueror. Just as all the Teutonic languages (except that of
Iceland) pass from the Old to the Middle stage, so in litera-
ture there is a parallel movement in Germany, England and
Denmark from an earlier to a later medieval type. In all the
Teutonic countries, though not at the same time in all, there was
a change of taste and fashion which abandoned old epic themes
and native forms of verse for new subjects and for riming
measures. This meant a great disturbance and confusion of literary
principles and traditions ; hence, much of the new literature was
experimental and undisciplined. It took long for the nations to
find a literary standard. The Germans attained it about 1200;
the English in the time of Chaucer; the Danes and Swedes not
until long after the close of the Middle Ages. The progress
from Old to Middle English narrative verse is not to be under-
stood from a consideration of England alone; it is part of a
general change in European fashions, a new mixture of Teutonic
and Roman elements, not to speak of Celtic and oriental strains
in the blending.
In the history of English narrative poetry there is a great gap
of two centuries between The Battle of Maldon and Layamon's
Brut, with very little to fill it or even to show what sort of things
have been lost, what varieties of story-telling amused the English
in the reign of Harold Godwinsson or of Henry I. In France,
on the other hand, these centuries are rich in story books still
extant; and, as the English metrical romances depend very largely
upon the French, the history of them may to some extent be ex-
plained from French history; though often more by way of contrast
than of resemblance.
In France, the twelfth century witnessed a very remarkable
change of taste in stories which spread over all Europe and
affected the English, the Germans and other peoples in different
## p. 279 (#299) ############################################
279
French Influences
ways. The old national epics, the chansons de geste, were dis-
placed by a new romantic school, which triumphed over the old
like a young Olympian dynasty over Saturn and his peers, or like
the new comedy of the restoration over the last Elizabethans.
The chansons de geste were meant for the hall, for Homeric
recitation after supper; the new romances were intended to be
read in my lady's bower; they were for summer leisure and day-
light, as in the pretty scene described by Chrétien de Troyes in
his Chevalier au Lion, and translated into English :
Thurgh the hal sir Ywain gase
Intil ane orcherd, playn pase;
His maiden with him ledes he:
He fand a knyght, under a tre,
Opon a clath of gold he lay;
Byfor him sat a ful fayr may;
A lady sat with tham in fere.
The mayden red, at thai myght here,
A real romance in that place,
But I ne wote of wham it was;
Sho was but fiftene yeres alde.
The knyght was lorde of al that halde,
And that mayden was his ayre;
She was both gracious gode and fayrel.
These French romances were dedicated to noble ladies, and repre-
sented everything that was most refined and elegant in the life
of the twelfth century. Furthermore, like other later romantic
schools, like Scott and Victor Hugo, authors travelled wide for
their subjects. The old French poet's well-known division of stories
according to the three “matters ”—the “matter of France,” the
“matter of Britain” and the matter of Rome the great”2–
very imperfectly sums up the riches and the variety of French
romantic themes, even when it is understood that the “matter
of Rome” includes the whole of antiquity, the tales of Thebes and
Troy, the wars of Alexander. It is true that (as in later romantic
schools) the variety of scene and costume does not always prevent
monotony. The romantic hero may be a knight of king Arthur's
court, or may take his name from Protesilaus or Palaemon or
Archytas; the scene in one story may be Logres or Lyonesse, in
another Greece or Calabria ; it does not really make much differ-
ence. So Mrs Radcliffe's heroes, or Victor Hugo's, are of the same
sort, whether their scene be in the Pyrenees or in Italy. But,
1 Ywain and Gawain, 11. 3081 sqq.
• Ne sont que trois matières à nul home attendant,
De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant.
Jean Bodel, Chanson de Saisnes.
## p. 280 (#300) ############################################
280 Metrical Romances, 1200-1500
nevertheless, the freedom of wandering over the world in search of
plots and characters was exhilarating and inspiriting in the twelfth
century in France; there was great industry in fiction, a stirring
literary competition. The following ages very largely lived on the
products of it, to satisfy their own wants in the way of romance.
The leaders of this school, Benoit de Ste More and Chrétien
de Troyes, with their followers, were courtly persons, authors of
fashionable novels, bent on putting into their work the spirit and
all the graces of gentle conversation as it was then understood,
more particularly the refinements of amatory sentiment, such as
was allegorised in the next century in The Romaunt of the Rose.
This sort of thing could not be equally appreciated or appropriated
in all countries. Some people understood it, others could not.
The great houses of Germany were very quick to learn from
French masters and to rival them in their own line. Hartmann
von Aue translated Chrétien freely—the romance of Enid, the
tale of Yvain. Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival may
borrow the substance, but the rendering, the spirit, is his own,
removed far from any danger of comparison with the French
school, because it has a different kind of nobility. In England
things were otherwise, and it was not till the age of Chaucer and
Gower that there was any English narrative work of the finer sort,
with the right courtly good manners and a proper interest in
sentimental themes. The English of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries were generally unable to make much of the “finer shades"
in their French authors. They can dispose of romantic plots and
adventures, they are never tired of stories; but they have difficulty
in following the eloquent monologues of passionate damsels ; the
elegant French phrasing annoyed them just as one of the later
French successors of Chrétien, the heroic romance of Le Grand
Cyrus, affected Major Bellenden. Even the more ambitious of the
English romances generally fall far short of the French and cannot
keep up with their elaborate play of rhetoric and emotion. There
is only one English version of a romance by Chrétien, Ywain
and Gawain. This is comparatively late; it belongs to the
time of Chaucer; it is not rude; on the contrary, it is one of the
most accomplished of all the riming tales outside the work of
Chaucer and Gower. But it cuts short the long speeches of the
original. Chrétien's Yvain (Le Chevalier au Lion) has 6818 lines;
the English version, 4032. Hartmann, on the other hand, spins his
story out to 8166 lines, being thoroughly possessed with admira-
tion of the French ways of thinking. The English romances of
## p. 281 (#301) ############################################
Translators' Difficulties
281
Ipomedon (there are two in rime, besides a prose version) show
well the difficulties and discrepancies, as will be explained later.
William of Palerne is an example of a different sort, showing
how hard it was for the English, even as late as the middle of the
fourteenth century, to understand and translate the work of the
French romantic school. The English poet takes up the French
Guillaume de Palerme, a sophisticated, sentimental story written
in the fluent, unemphatic, clear style which perhaps only Gower
could rightly reproduce in English. This is turned into alliterative
verse, with rather strange results, the rhetoric of the English
school being utterly different from the French : quaint in diction,
inclined to be violent and extravagant, very effective in satirical
passages (as Piers Plowman was to show) or in battle scenes
(as in the Morte Arthure), but not well adapted for polite and
conventional literature. The alliterative poets were justified when
they took their own way and did not try to compete with the
French. Their greatest work in romance is Sir Gawayne and the
Grene Knight, written by a man who understood his business and
produced new effects, original, imaginative, without trying to copy
the manner of the French artists.
At the same time, while the great, the overruling, French
influence is to be found in the ambitious literary work of Chrétien
de Troyes and his peers, it must not be forgotten that there was
also a simpler but still graceful kind of French romance, with
which the English translators had more success. This is best
represented in the work of Marie de France; and, in English, by
the shorter romances which profess to be taken from Breton lays,
such as Launfal, Orfeo and the Lai le Freine. Here, the scale is
smaller, and there is no superabundance of monologue and senti-
mental digression. The clear lines of the original could be followed
by the English without too much difficulty; for the English, though
long inferior to the French in subtlety, were not bunglers, except
when they ventured on unfamiliar ground without the proper
education.
Briefly and roughly, the history of the English romances might
be put in this way. About the year 1200 French literature came
to dominate the whole of Christendom, especially in the matter of
stories ; not only sending abroad the French tales of Charlemagne
and Roland, but importing plots, scenery and so forth, from many
lands, Wales and Britanny, Greece and the further east, and giving
new French forms to them, which were admired and, as far as
possible, borrowed by foreign nations, according to their several
## p. 282 (#302) ############################################
282 Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
tastes and abilities. The English took a large share in this trade.
Generally speaking, their taste was easily satisfied. What they
wanted was adventures; slaughter of Saracens, fights with dragons
and giants, rightful heirs getting their own again, innocent
princesses championed against their felon adversaries. Such
commodities were purveyed by popular authors, who adapted
from the French what suited them and left out the things in
which the French authors were most interested, viz. the orna-
mental passages. The English romance writers worked for
common minstrels and their audiences, and were not particular
about their style. They used, as a rule, either short couplets or
some variety of that simple stanza which is better known to most
readers from Sir Thopas than from Horn Childe or Sir Libeaus.
Sir Thopas illustrates and summarises, in parody, all the ways of
the popular romance for a long time before Chaucer and for long
after his death. Of course there are many differences in particular
cases, and Sir Thopas, with all his virtue, does not so far outshine
the others as to make them indistinguishable. Beves is not exactly
the same kind of thing as Sir Guy, and the story of Sir Libeaus
has merits of its own not to be confounded with those of the other
heroes. Nevertheless, they are all of one kind, and their style
is popular and hackneyed. The authors were well enough pleased
to have it so; they did not attempt to rival their eminent French
masters.
But there were exceptions. One finds ambition at work in
English poets even in days when French literature might have
appeared so strong and so exalted as to dishearten any mere
English competitor. The English Sir Tristrem is a specimen of
literary vanity; the English author is determined to improve upon
his original, and turns the simple verse of his French book into
rather elaborate lyrical stanzas. And, again, it was sometimes
possible for an Englishman to write gracefully enough without
conceit or emphasis ; as in Ywain and Gawain, already quoted.
And the alliterative romances are in a class by themselves.
Chaucer and Gower disturb the progress of the popular romance,
yet not so much as one might expect. Chaucer and Gower, each
in his own way, had challenged the French on their own ground;
they had written English verse which might be approved by
French standards; they had given to English verse the peculiar
French qualities of ease and grace and urbanity. A reader to
whom the fifteenth century was unknown would, naturally, look for
some such consequences as followed in the reign of Charles II from
## p. 283 (#303) ############################################
Matter and Form
283
the work of Dryden and his contemporaries—a disabling of the
older schools, and a complete revolution in taste. But, for what-
ever reason, this was not what actually followed the age of Chaucer.
The fifteenth century, except for the fact that the anarchy of
dialects is reduced to some order, is as far from any literary good
government as the age before Chaucer. It is rather worse, indeed,
on account of the weaker brethren in the Chaucerian school who
only add to the confusion. And the popular romances go on very
much as before, down to the sixteenth century, and even further.
The lay of the last minstrel is described by Sir Walter Scott, in
prose, in a note to Sir Tristrem :
Some traces of this custom remained in Scotland till of late years.
A satire on the Marquis of Argyle, published about the time of his death,
is said to be composed to the tune of Graysteel, a noted romance reprinted
at Aberdeen so late as the beginning of the last century. Within the memory
of man, an old person used to perambulate the streets of Edinburgh, singing,
in a monotonous cadence, the tale of Rosewal and Lilian, which is, in all the
forms, a metrical romance of chivalry.
It is possible to classify the romances according to their sources
and their subjects, though, as has been already remarked, the
difference of scenery does not always make much difference in
the character of the stories. The English varieties depend so
closely on the French that one must go to French literary history
for guidance. The whole subject has been so clearly summarised
and explained in the French Medieval Literature of Gaston Paris'
that it is scarcely necessary here to repeat even the general facts.
But, of course, although the subjects are the same, the English
point of view is different; especially in the following respects.
The “matter of France” includes the subjects of the old French
epics. These, being national, could not bear exportation so well
as some of the other "matters. ” It is only in France that the Song
of Roland can be thoroughly understood and valued. Yet Roland
and Charlemagne were honoured beyond the Alps and beyond the
sea. The Karlamagnus Saga is a large book written in Norway
in the thirteenth century, bringing together in a prose version all
the chief stories of the cycle. One section, Olif and Landres, was
found "in the English tongue in Scotland” by a Norwegian envoy
who went there in 1284 after the death of king Alexander III.
Roland was almost as popular in Italy as in France. He appears
also in English, though not to very great advantage. The favourite
· La Littérature française au moyen âge (with bibliography); also Esquisse his.
torique de la litt. fr. au inoyen âge; English transiation of this latter, Dent, 1903.
## p. 284 (#304) ############################################
284 Metrical Romances, 1200—1500
story from the French epics was that of Oliver and Fierabras, where
the motive is not so much French patriotism as the opposition
between Christian and infidel.
In the “matter of Britain” the English had a better right to
share. They accepted at once the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth
and made king Arthur into an English national hero, the British
counterpart of Charlemagne. The alliterative Morte Arthure,
derived from Geoffrey, is a kind of political epic, with allusions
to contemporary history and the wars of Edward III, as George
Neilson has sufficiently proved'. This touch of allegory, which one
need not be afraid to compare with the purpose of the Aeneid
or of The Faerie Queene, makes it unlike most other medieval
romances; the pretence of solidity and historical truth in Geoffrey
is not suitable for mere romantic purposes. Quite different is the
Arthur who merely sits waiting for adventures, being "somewhat
child-geared,” as the poet of Sir Gawayne says. In most of the
stories, Arthur is very unlike the great imperial monarch and
conqueror as presented by Geoffrey and his followers. He has
nothing particular to do, except to be present at the beginning
and end of the story; the hero is Sir Perceval, Sir Ywain, Sir
Gawain, or the Fair Knight Unknown (Sir Libeaus); unfortu-
nately not Sir Erec (Geraint), in any extant English poem before
Tennyson. In this second order, the proper Arthurian romances
as distinguished from the versions or adaptations of Geoffrey,
England had something to claim even before the English rimers
began their work; for some of the French poems certainly, and
probably many now lost, were written in England. This is a
debatable and difficult part of literary history; but, at any rate,
it is plain that the more elaborate French Arthurian romances
were not the only authorities for the English tales. Chrétien's
Yvain is translated into English ; but the French romance of
The Fair Unknown is probably not the original of the English
story of Sir Libeaus which, like the old Italian version, would
seem to have had a simpler and earlier form to work upon. Like-
wise, the English Sir Perceval must, surely, come from something
older and less complicated than Chrétien's Conte del Graal. It is
at least a fair conjecture that these two romances belong to an
earlier type, such as may have been hawked about in England by
French or French-speaking minstrels; and, without any conjecture
at all, they are different in their plots (not merely in their style)
from the French work of Renaud de Beaujeu in the one case, and
* Huchown of the Awle Ryale, Glasgow, 1902, pp. 59–66.
## p. 285 (#305) ############################################
Sources and Subjects
285
Chrétien de Troyes in the other. Sir Gawayne and the Grene
Knight, again, cannot be referred to any known French book
for its original; and, in this and other ways, the English
rendering of the “matter of Britain” goes beyond the French, or,
to be more precise, is found to differ from the existing French
documents.
The "matter of Rome the great," that is, classical antiquity, is
well represented in English. There are several poems in rime
and alliterative verse on Alexander and on Troy, some of them
being fragmentary. The tale of Thebes, though often referred
to, does not appear fully told till Lydgate took it up, nor the
romantic version of the Aeneid (Roman d'Enéas) before Caxton's
prose.
The classification under the three “matters” of France, Britain
and Rome is not exhaustive; there are many romances which fall
outside these limits.
