Personified Sea." There is no connection, save in the personage of the "toothy carlin," between the ballad and the folk-tale.[1]
It is impossible, I think, to compare Gerbert's description of the witch with that of the Highland "Carlin" without coming to the conclusion that the French poet drew from traditional, popular Celtic sources. The wild fantasy of the whole is foreign in the extreme to the French temperament, and is essentially Celtic in tone. But the incident, as well as one particular feature of it, admits of comparison: the three foster-brothers of the Highland tale correspond to the four sons of Gonemant, who be it recollected, represents in the Conte du Graal, Peredur-Perceval's uncle in the Mabinogi; in both, the hero goes forth alone to do battle with the mysterious enemy; the Son of Darkness answers to the King of the Waste City; the dead men are brought back to life in the same way; the release of the kinsman, from spells, or from danger of death, follows upon the witch's discomfiture. And yet greater value attaches to the incident as connected with the Mabinogi form of the story; in Gerbert, as in the Mabinogi, the hero's uncle is sick to death, his chief enemy is a monstrous witch (or witches), who foreknows that she must succumb at the hero's hands.[2] Something has obviously dropped
- ↑ Cf. my Branwen for remarks on the mythological aspect of the ballad. It should be noted that most of the ballads traditionally current in the Highlands are of semi-literary origin, i.e., would seem to go back to the compositions of mediæval Irish bards, who often sprinkled over the native tradition a profusion of classical and historical names. I do not think the foreign influence went farther than the "names" of some personages, and such as it is is more at work in the ballads than in the tales.
- ↑ This may seem to conflict with the statement made above (p. 145), that the Mabinogi probably took over the maimed uncle from Chrestien. But there were in all probability several forms of the story; that hinted at in Chrestien and found in Manessier had its probable counterpart in Celtic tradition as well as that found in Gerbert. It is hardly possible to determine what was the form found in the proto-Mabinogi, the possibility of its having been exactly the same as that of Gerbert is in no way affected by the fact that the Mabinogi, as we now have it, has in this respect been influenced by Chrestien. Meanwhile Birch-Hirschfeld's hypothesis that Gerbert's section of the Conte du Graal is an interpolation between Gautier and Manessier is laid open to grave doubt. It is far more likely that Gerbert's work was an independent and original attempt to provide an ending for Chrestien's unfinished poem, and that he had before him a different version of the original from that used by Gautier and Manessier.
