which Wülcker seeks to account for the early knowledge of the Evangelium Nicodemi in England, that Joseph enjoyed particular favour among the British Christians, and that it was from them the tidings of him spread among their Saxon conquerors.
The legendary popularity of Joseph in these islands, though not in any special capacity of Apostle of Britain, is thus attested. Let us admit for argument's sake that the conversion legend did first take shape in the twelfth century, is it not more likely to have done so here, where the apocryphal writings about him were widely spread, than in France, where they were practially unknown? And why if Borron, or any other French poet, wanted to connect the Holy Vessel legend which he had imagined with Arthur, should he go out of his way to invent the personages of Brons and Alain? The story as found in the Queste would surely have been a far more natural one for him. And why the insistence upon Avalon? We have plain proof that Borron did not understand the word, as he explains it by a ridiculous pun (supra, p. 78).[1]
These difficulties are met in a large measure if we look upon
- ↑ I may here notice a theory to which my attention has only just been called. It is found cited in a work of great research, Die Fronica, by Professor Karl Pearson, Strassburg, 1887. The author quotes an opinion of Mr. Jenner, of the British Museum, that the head in the platter of the Mabinogi may be derived from a Veronica portrait. Professor Pearson expresses doubt, because such a procession of the Veronica portrait and the Passion Instruments as the scene in the Mabinogi would, ex hypothesi, imply is not known to him before the fourteenth century, whereas the Mabinogi must be attributed, at latest, to the middle of the thirteenth century. Mr. H. L. D. Ward informs me that the suggestion was his. Noting the connection of the Veronica and Grail legends, testified to by Borron, it occurred to him that the whole scene at the Wounded King's might be derived from the former legends. The Wounded King, healed by the Grail, would thus be a counterpart of the leprous Vespasian healed by the Veronica portrait, which some wandering "jongleur" turned boldly into an actual head. But it must be noted that in Borron, our authority for the connection of the two legends, there is no Wounded King at all; in the Conte du Graal the Maimed King is not healed by any special talisman, but by the death of his enemy, the visible sign of which is that enemy's head, whilst in the "procession" (which Mr. Ward thinks to have been intended as a vision), the Grail is certainly a vessel, and has no connection whatever with any head or portrait. The theory thus requires that the version which gives the oldest form of the hypothetical remodelled Veronica legend omitted the very feature which was its sole raison d'être.
