THE ROUND TABLE. VI. 135 it is snapped in twain in the conflict with Pellinore; but it is of CHAP. course brought back to him in the form of Excalibur, by a maiden who answers to Thetis or to Hjordis.1 Arthur, riding with Merlin along a lake, becomes "ware of an arm clothed in white samite that held a fair sword in the hand." This is the fatal weapon, whose scabbard answers precisely to the panoply of Achilleus, for while he wears it Arthur cannot shed blood, even though he be wounded. Like all the other sons of Helios, Arthur has his enemies, and King Rience demands as a sign of homage the beard of Arthur, which gleams with the splendour of the golden locks or rays of Phoibos Akersekomes. The demand is refused, but in the medieval romance there is room for others who reflect the glory of Arthur, while his own splendour is for the time obscured. At Camelot they see a maiden with a sword attached to her body, which Arthur himself cannot draw. In the knight Balin, who draws it, and who "because he was poorly arrayed put him not far in the press," we see not merely the humble Arthur who gives his sword to Sir Kay, but Odysseus, who in his beggar's dress shrinks from the brilliant throng which crowds his ancestral hall.* Table and On the significance of the Round Table we must speak elsewhere. The Round It is enough for the present to note that it comes to Arthur with the the San bride whose dowry is to be to him as fatal as the treasures of the Greal. Argive Helen to Menelaos. In the warning of Merlin that Guinevere "is not wholesome for him " we see that earlier conception of Helen in which the Attic tragedians differ so pointedly from the poets of the Iliad and the Odyssey. As Helen is to be the ruin of cities, of men, and of ships, so is Guinevere to bring misery on herself and on all around her, as of Brynhild it is said, "Luckless thou camest to thy mother's lap, born for the sorrow of all folk." Dangers thicken round Arthur, and he is assailed by enemies as dangerous as Kirkê and Kalypso to Odysseus. The Fay Morgan seeks to steal Excalibur, and succeeds in getting the scabbard, which she throws into a lake, and Arthur now may both bleed and die." At the hands of another maiden he narrowly escapes the doom which Medeia and Dêianeira "The Manks hero, Olave of Norway, had a sword with a Celtic name, Macabuin."-Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands, i. lxxii. It reappears as the sword Tirfing in the fairy tale. Keightley, Fairy Mythology, 73. In some versions, as in "Arthur and Merlin," Excalibur is the sword fastened in the stone, the sword obtained from the fairy being Mirandoisa. 2 The invisible knight who at this stage of the narrative smites Sir Herleus wears the helmet of Hades, and his action is that of the Erinys who wanders in the air. Morgan has the power of transformation possessed by all the fish and water-gods, Proteus, Onnes, Thetis, &c. I. BOOK brought upon Glaukê and on Heraklês. The Lady of the Lake warns him not to put on this vesture until he has first seen the bringer wear it. This accordingly he makes the maiden do, "and forthwith she fell down, and was brent to coals."1 Arthur's The story now ceases practically to be the romance of Arthur, until it once more exhibits him in all the majesty of Christian longsuffering and holiness; but, as we might expect, those portions of the romance which less immediately relate to Arthur are founded on old Teutonic or Hellenic myths. In the three sisters which meet Sir Marhaus, Sir Gawain, and Sir Ewain by the fountain, we can scarcely fail to recognise the three weird sisters, whose office, as belonging to the past, the present, and the future, seems to be betokened by their age and the garb which distinguishes them from each other. The eldest has a garland of gold about her hair, which is white with the snows of threescore winters; the second, thirty years of age, with more brilliant ornaments, marks the middle stage in which the main action of life lies; while in the younger sister of fifteen summers, crowned with luxuriant flowers, we have the Norn whose business is only with the time to come. In the good knight Tristram we have another of those fatal children whose mother's eyes may not be long gladdened with the sight of their babes. Like Asklepios and Dionysos, like Macduff and Sigurd, Tristram is the son of sorrow; nor did he fail to justify the popular conviction that all such children are born to do great things. In the madness which comes upon Lancelot when Guinevere rebukes him for the love of Elaine we see the frenzy of Heraklês and other heroes, a frenzy which is naturally healed by the San Greal. In the story of the Perilous Seat we have simply another form of a myth already twice given in this romance. "Then the king went forth and all the knights unto the river, and there they found a stone floating, as if it had been of red marble, and therein stuck a fair and a rich sword, and in the pommel thereof were precious stones wrought with subtle letters of gold, which said, 'Never shall man take me hence but he by whom I ought to hang; and he shall be the best knight of the world'"-bravery and goodness being thus made the prize instead of an earthly kingdom as in the case of Arthur. The king tells Lancelot that this sword ought to La Morte d'Arthure, ed. Coneybeare, book iii. ch. v. Ibid., book iv. ch. iii. In the Arthur cycle there are two forms of the Tristram story, the one occurring in the body of the Arthur legend, the other given separately. For 8 THE HOLY GRAIL. VI. 137 be his, but it is the prize which, like the princess for whom the un- CHAP. successful suitors venture their bodies, brings ruin on those who fail to seize it. The hero who is to take it is revealed, when an old man coming in lifts up the cover that is on the Siege Perilous, and discloses the words, "This is the siege of Sir Galahad the good knight." The story of this peerless hero is introduced with an incident which is manifestly suggested by the narrative of Pentecost. As the Knights of the Round Table sat at supper in Camelot, "they heard cracking and crying of thunder, that they thought the place should all-to rive. And in the midst of the blast entered a sunbeam more clear by seven times than ever they saw day, and all they were alighted by the grace of the Holy Ghost. Then began every knight to behold other; and each saw other by their seeming fairer than ever they saw afore. Then there entered into the hall the holy Grail covered with white samite, and there was none that might see it nor who bear it. And then was all the hall full filled with great odours, and every knight had such meat and drink as he best loved in the world." The wonderful vessel is suddenly borne away, and the knights depart on a search which answers precisely to the quest of the Golden Fleece or the treasures of Helen the fair. The myth of the sword, already thrice given, is presented to us once more on board the ship Faith, on which there was "a fair bed, and at the foot was a sword, fair and rich; and it was drawn out of the scabbard half a foot or more." "Wot ye well," says a maiden to Sir Galahad, "that the drawing of this sword is warned unto all men save unto you." This ship is the same vessel which carries Helios round the stream of Ocean during the hours of darkness. In other words, it becomes the ship of the dead, the bark which carries the souls to the land of light which lies beyond the grave. This ship carries to the Spiritual Place the body of Sir Percival's sister, who dies to save the lady of the castle by giving her a dish full of her own blood-a myth which reflects the story of Iphigeneia who dies that Helen, the lady of the castle of Menelaos, may be rescued, and of Polyxena, whose blood is shed that Achilleus may repose in the unseen land. From the quest of the Grail Lancelot comes back ennobled and exalted. Arthur longs for the return of the good knight Galahad, of Percival, and Bors; but the face of the purest of all men he may never see again. When at length the eyes of Galahad rest on the mystic vessel, he utters the Nunc Dimittis, and Joseph of Arimathæa says to him, "Thou hast resembled me in two things; one is, that thou hast seen the San Greal, and the other is that thou art a clean maiden as I am." Then follows the farewell of Galahad to his comrades, as he charges BOOK I. Lancelot and Guinevere. Sir Bors to salute his father Sir Lancelot and bid him remember this unstable world. "And therewith he kneeled down before the table and made his prayers, and then suddenly his soul departed unto Jesus Christ. And a great multitude of angels bare his soul up to heaven that his two fellows might behold it; also they saw come down from heaven a hand, but they saw not the body, and then it came right to the vessel and took it and the spear,' and so bare it up into heaven. Sithence was there never a man so hardy as to say that he had seen the San Greal." The sequel which tells the story of the final fortunes of Lancelot and Guinevere presents perhaps the most wonderful instance of the degree to which a myth may be modified, and in this case the modifying influence is strictly and purely Christian. It is true that he estranges the love of Guinevere from her lord Arthur, and that even the sanctifying influence of the holy Grail, which makes him proof against the heart-rending sorrow of Elaine, cannot avail to repress his unconquerable affection for the brightest and the fairest of women. But although the romance throughout speaks of it as his great sin, the love is one which asks only for her heart as its recompence, and enables him to say even at the last, that Guinevere is worthy of the love of Arthur. But the same Christian influence which makes Arthur slow to believe any evil of his dear friend Lancelot, could not allow Guinevere to end her days in peace with Arthur, as Helen returns to live and die in the house of Menelaos. Like Paris, whom Menelaos admitted to an equally trustful friendship, Lancelot had done a great wrong; and even when Arthur has closed his brief but splendid career, Guinevere tells Lancelot that all love on earth is over between them. Their lips may not meet even in the last kiss which should seal the death-warrant of their old affection. Arthur is gone. When he will come back again, no man may tell; but Guinevere is more faithful now to the word which she had pledged to him than she had been while his glorious form rose pre-eminent among the bravest knights of Christendom. Yet in spite of all that Christian influence has done to modify and ennoble the story, the myth required that Guinevere should be separated from Lancelot, as Helen is torn away from Paris; and the narrative presents us from time to time with touches which vividly recall the old Greek and Teutonic myths. Thus Sir Urre of Hungary has wounds which only Lancelot can heal, as Oinônê alone can heal Paris; and the last battle with Modred is begun when a knight draws his sword on an adder that has stung him in the foot, like the snake which bit 1 See book ii. chap. ii. sect. 12. THE SLEEP OF ARTHUR IN AVILION. 139 VI. Eurydikê. So again, Excalibur is, by the hands of the reluctant Sir CHAP. Bedivere, thrown into the lake from which it had been drawn, as the light of Helios is quenched in the waters from which he sprung in the morning; and the barge, which had borne away the fair maid of Astolat and the sister of Sir Percival, brings the three queens (seemingly the weird sisters who have already been seen in another form) to carry off the wounded Arthur. of Arthur. But even at the last the story exhibits the influence of the old The death myth. Neither Arthur himself thinks, nor do any others think, that he is really dying. His own words are, "I will unto the vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound." There, in the shadowy valley in which Endymion sinks to sleep, the thought of the renewed life in store for Baldur or Dionyos, Memnôn or Sarpêdôn, or Adonis, showed itself in the epitaph "Hic jacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.” and Diar Of the story of Arthur and Guinevere, Mr. Campbell says that, Guinevere "when stripped to the bones," it "is almost identical with the love maid. story of the history of the Feinne," the tradition embodied in the poems which bear the name of Ossian, with not less justice perhaps than the Iliad and Odyssey bear the name of Homer, and the Finnish epic Kalewala that of Wäinämöinen.1 To Grainne, the wife of Fionn, Diarmaid stands in the relation of Lancelot to Guinevere, or of Paris to Helen. Guinevere loves Lancelot at first sight: Diarmaid, when first he meets Grainne, "shows a spot on his forehead, which no woman can see without loving him." But if Lancelot follows Guinevere willingly, Grainne compels Diarmaid to run away with her. In the sequel the conduct of Fionn precisely matches that of Arthur, and Diarmaid is as fearless a knight as Lancelot— the conclusion being that "here are the same traditions worked up into wholly different stories, and differently put upon the stage, according to the manners of the age in which romances are written, but the people go on telling their own story in their own way." " For the supposed historical residuum in the story of Arthur, see Appendix V. to the Introduction to Comparative Mythology. Into the question of the authenticity of Macpherson's Ossian it is altogether unnecessary to enter. The matter has been admirably and conclusively treated by Mr. Campbell in the fourth volume of his Tales of the West Highlands, and no one probably would for an instant suppose that Macpherson invented the tradition-in other words, the framework of the myth: and |