gave free play to the mystic imaginings of those writers who used romance as a vehicle for edification. The one tangible thing about it in stories of the one class, its food producing-power, has left its trace upon every one of the romances. But we shall also find in our survey of Celtic literature that this attribute, as well as that of healing or restoring to life, is found indifferently in stories of both the classes, to the fusion of which we refer the Grail legends in their present form. Another link between the two formulas is formed by the sword. It is almost invariably found associated with the healing vessel of balsam in task stories connected with the feud quest of the Mabinogi and the Conte du Graal; it is also a frequent feature in the legend of the unsuccessful visit to the Bespelled Castle.[1] Finally, the most important reason for running into one the stories derived from these two formulas, and the one which could hardly fail to lead to the fusion, is to be found in the identity of the myth which underlies both conceptions. The castle to which the avenger must penetrate to win the talismans, and that to which the hero comes with the intent of freeing its lord, are both symbols of the otherworld.
Bearing in mind this double origin of the Grail, and reviewing once more the entire cycle, we note that, whilst it is that presentment of the magic vessel due to the second formula which is most prominent in the romances, the feud quest has furnished more and more varied sequences of incident, and is the staple of the oldest literary Celtic form (the Proto-Mabinogi) and of those North French forms which are most closely akin to it. Here the magic vessel is at best one of three equally potent treasures; as a matter of fact its rôle in this section of the romances is, as we have seen,
- ↑ Nearly all the objections to the view suggested in the text may be put aside as due to insufficient recognition of the extent to which the two formulas have been mingled, but there is one which seems to me of real moment. The wasting of the land which I have looked upon as belonging to the unspelling formula, is traced by the Queste to the blow struck by King Lambar against King Urlain, a story which, as we have seen, is very similar to that which forms the groundwork of one at least of the models followed by the Conte du Graal in its version of the feud quest. It does not seem likely that the Queste story is a mere echo of that found in the Conte du Graal, nor that the fusion existed so far back as in a model common to both. But the second alternative is possible.
