Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/140

Sir Perceval of Galles. A Study of the Sources of the Legend. By Reginald Harvey Griffith. Chicago: University Press, 191 1. 8vo, pp. viii+131.

The main object of this Study is literary,—a critical examination of the relations between the English poem and the Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes,—but the ground traversed by the writer, and the results arrived at, belong essentially to the domain of folklore. The late Mr. Alfred Nutt, in his Studies in the Legend of the Holy Grail, had already pointed out the analogy existing between certain versions of the Perceval story, in which figures a hideous hag, possessed of a magic balsam by means of which she can revive the slain, and certain popular Celtic folk-tales. Mr. Griffith has carried the investigation further, and in chapter iii., entitled "The Red Knight-Witch-Uncle Story," he demonstrates clearly that a number of incidents, which a less searching criticism had ascribed to the inventive genius of Chrétien de Troyes, are, as a matter of fact, parts of a folk-tale which has enjoyed, and apparently still enjoys, considerable popularity in Scandinavia and the British Isles. The tale deals with the adventures of a youth, brought up in solitude, who comes to the court of a king at the moment when the monarch is smarting under an insult inflicted by an enemy of long standing. The youth avenges the king, and at the same time succours relatives of his own, oppressed by the witch mother of the king's foe. Mr. Griffith gives a large number of variants of this tale, drawn principally from Celtic sources. The result appears to establish decisively the folklore character of a section of the Perceval story, the provenance of which had hitherto been inadequately recognized. Modern criticism seems to be bringing out more and more clearly the fact that in this story we have, not so much a folk-tale, as a folk-tale complex, the component elements of which are presented in varying combinations. That such a complex could be the offspring of a work of purely literary invention, all folklore students would allow to be highly improbable. When the putative parent shows itself to be demonstrably lacking in important and necessary features, which are nevertheless preserved in what are claimed to be its direct descendants, the parentage will be held, by those conversant with the laws of story-transmission, to be frankly impossible. On the merits