Studies in the Arthurian Legend
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<?. CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY The original of tliis bool< is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924087972927 ^^t cHr^^utian Begenb banian HENRY FROWDE Oxford University Press Warehouse Amen Corner, E.C. STUDIES IN THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND BY JOHN RHtS, M.A. FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE PROFESSOR OF CELTIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD Ne sont que trois matieres a nul home entendant, De France at de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant. AT THE CLARENDON PRESS M DCCC XCI [A/l rights reserved^ f ii -^'' ^v.; . :— O;cfot^ PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS BY HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY PREFACE. My chief object in the following pages is to make Welsh literature help to shed light on the Arthurian Legend ; and that term is here construed loosely, so as to include other legends more or less closely associated with Arthur. Most of the following chapters arose out of my Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom, which were delivered in the year 1886. In consequence of that origin they take for granted the same views, in the main, as to Aryan mythology. It is hoped, however, that the reader who disapproves of those views, will not regard me as now perpetrating a fresh offence, though I have been obliged to continue the use of some of the terms of the Solar Myth Theor}^. They are so convenient ; and whatever may eventually happen to that theory, nothing has yet been found exactly to take its place. Nevertheless, we are possibly on the eve of a revolution in respect of mythological questions, as Mr. Frazer's Golden Bough seems to indicate. VI PREFACE. The publication has been much delayed owing to the pressure of other work, but the delay has not been profitless, as I have had the advantage of reading for my last chapter two remarkable articles by Prof. Zimmer in this year's Gottingische gelehrte Anzeigen. Had they appeared sooner, several things in this volume would have been handled otherwise than they have been. Finality is not, in any case, to be dreamed of in a field of research where so much remains to be learned. I shall feel, therefore, only too gratified if this book should be found to contain any contribution, however trifling, to the fund of knowledge already acquired concerning Arthur and his Knights, the Table Round and the Holy Grail. J. RHYS. Oxford : Dec. 31, 1890. CONTENTS. PAGE CHAPTER I. Arthur, Historical and Mythical i CHAPTER n. Arthur and Airem 25 CHAPTER HI. GWENHWYVAR AND HER CaPTORS 49 CHAPTER IV. Peredur and Owein 71 CHAPTER V. Peredur and the Empress 98 CHAPTER VI. Peredur and Lancelot 127 CHAPTER VII. Lancelot and Elayne 145 CHAPTER VIII. Galahad and Gwalchaved 166 CHAPTER IX. CiSchulainn and Heracles 184 VlU CONTENTS. CHAPTER X. PAGE CUCHULAINN AND HeRACLES (continued) 211 CHAPTER XL Urien and his Congeners 238 CHAPTER Xn. PWYIL AND PeLLES 273 CHAPTER Xni. The Origin of the Holy Grail 300 CHAPTER XIV. Glastonbury and Gower 328 CHAPTER XV. The Isles of the Dead .... 348 CHAPTER XVI. Great Britain and . Little Britain . 370 ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS 391 INDEX • . 397 ; CHAPTER I. Arthur, Historical and Mythical. The system as a whole, of which Arthur forms the central figure, is later as we know it than any represented by the other cycles of Welsh sagas, such as those, for example, in which Gwydion appears, or Pwytt, or Pryderi. The comparative lateness of the Arthurian cycle, as con- trasted with them, may readily be seen from the fact that they are contained in the Mabinogion, which is the case with no story concerning Arthur. This requires to be explained ; for, since the publication of Lady Char- lotte Guest's edition of the Mabinogion, the idea seems to prevail that any Welsh tale of respectable anti- quity may be called a mabinogi, plural mabinogion but there is no warrant for so extending the use of the word; and of the eleven stories contained in Lady Charlotte Guest's collection, only four are entitled to be called mabinogion. More strictly speaking, they are not mabinogion so much perhaps as the 'four branches of the mabinogi'^.' We allude to those entitled Pwytt Prince of Dyved, Branwen daughter of ILyr, Manaw- ydan son of ILyr, and Math son of Mathonwy. What then is the meaning of the word mabinogi, and why was it applied to some of the Welsh tales and not to others ? The word mabinogi is derived from mabinog, and that ' The Text of the Mabinogion and other Welsh Talesfrom the Red Book of Hergest, ed. by Rh^s and Evans (Oxford, 1887). B a ARTHURIAN LEGEND. [Ch. I. was a term belonging to the bardic system, meaning a sort of a literary apprentice or young man who was receiving instruction from a qualified bard ; and the lowest description of mabinog was one who had not acquired the art of making verse ^ The inference to be drawn is that mahinogi meant the collection of things which formed the mabinog's literary training and stock in trade, so to say^. He was probably allowed to re- late the tales forming ' the four branches of the Mahin- ogi ' at a fixed price established by law or custom. If he wanted to rise in the hierarchy of letters, he must acquire the poetic art ; but he was usually a young man, not a child in the nursery; and it is utterly wrong to suppose the Mabinogion to be nursery tales, as any one will admit who will take the trouble to read them. The original machinery, so to say, of Welsh tales was magic and the supernatural, in which respect the four Mabinogion do not differ from the old stories of the Irish. This was also probably the case with the stories about Arthur, as they came from the mouths of Brythonic Celts ; but the Normans, having made their conquests in South Wales, became familiar with them, and handled them freely so as to adapt some of them to their own tastes. The result was that in some cases the second-hand versions would seem to have been brought back to the Welsh, and to have in some instances modi- ' See the lolo MSS. pp. 626-7; the original, pp. 21 1-2, has the older spelling mebinog and mebinogion. ' This would be the technical meaning of the word mabinogi, the reference being to the youthfulness of the narrators of the stories so called ; but it might be to the youthfulness of the hero of the story, as when one of the Apocryphal is gospels called Mabinogt lesu Grist, or the Infantia Jesu Christi. Stephens, in his Literature of the Kymry, p. 417, gives the so-called History of Taliessin the title Mabinogi. Lastly, the words here in question are accented Mabinog, Mabinogi, and Mabin6gion, all being pronounced with the g of the English words get and give. Ch. I.] ARTHUR, HISTORICAL AND MYTHICAL. 3 fied the originals or even replaced them. Take, for example, the allusions in the story of Peredur to the fortress of Yshidinongyl. Now Ysbidinongyl is clearly the Welsh reproduction of some form of the name of a knight called Epynogrys by Malory, and by some of the Grail romancers Espinogre; nor is it less certain that the French forms themselves were derived from the Welsh YspySaden Pencawr'^, or Yspydaden Gawr—that is to say, Yspydaden the Giant. Thus Ysbidinongyl proves that the story was derived in the first instance from a Brythonic source, at the same time that it also proves it to have been brought into the Peredur, not from Welsh, but from French^- The five Arthurian stories still extant in Welsh, without counting Geoffrey's quasi-history and the Welsh versions of the Quest of the Holy Grail, fall into two groups : the first consists of the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, and the Dream of Rhona- bwy, neither of which seems to have been taken up by the Normans ; so both have remained Welsh stories with plenty of the supernatural and hardly any- thing of knight-errantry. The other group embraces the stories of Owein and Lunet, of Peredur son of Evrawc, and of Gereint and Enid, most of the mate- rials of which are also to be found in some form or other in the French and English versions of the Ar- thurian romances, or the stories relating to the Holy Grail ; and the three Welsh stories bear unmistakable marks of the influence of the non-Welsh versions. Nay, it is quite possible that in the form in which we have them, some portions of some of them may be ' See the author's Hibbert Lectures (for 1886) on Celtic Heathendom, p. 487 : we shall refer to them as Hit. Lee. ' See the R. B. Mab. pp. 240, 242; Guest, i. 366, 369; Malory's Morte Darthur (ed. by Sommer and publ. by Nutt, in 1889), vii. 26, x. 55, 65, 82, xviii. 10, xix. 11 ; also Nutt's Holy Grail, p. 20. B 2 I- 4 ARTHURIAN LEGEND. [Ca. of merely free translations or adaptations by the Welsh versions popular among their neighbours. For the re- action on the native stories does not appear to have been much hindered by the fact, which the proper names place beyond reasonable doubt, that the materials were purely Brythonic. It follows, that if one wished to make a comprehensive collection of the sagas about Arthur, one would have to take all the romances into account, since things even of mythological interest have in the been lost in Welsh, and are now only to be found ^ Anglo-Norman versions and those based on them : in- stances will offer themselves as we go on.