Norman conquest of England and settlement in Southern Wales. He assumed that the French verse and prose romances of the late twelfth century had been preceded by shorter Anglo-Normanic narrative poems, akin somewhat to the lais of Marie de France.[1]
The thesis which, in opposition to M. Gaston Paris, Prof. Zimmer set himself to prove is no new one; it is that the French minstrels drew their knowledge of Arthur and his warriors not from Wales and Cornwall, but from Brittany. But what is new is the convincing way in which it is worked out, and the consequences drawn from it. Firstly, the formative period of the romance, which was to be elaborated later by the French poets, is defined as that during which the Bretons were in close political and social contact with the Normans (ninth-eleventh centuries), resulting in a bilingual zone, to the wandering minstrels of which the stories in their present form may often be traced. Secondly, the French Arthurian romance is due to the slow elaboration of tales and lyrics brought with them to Armorica by the British emigrants of the sixth-seventh centuries, which gradually put off their original quasi-historic character, and were profoundly modified by later vicissitudes in the national life of the Bretons. Thirdly, after the Norman Conquest this specific Breton form of the Arthur hero-tales was brought to England and Wales by the Breton allies of the Conqueror, and influenced the more historic form of these tales which had been preserved by the Welsh. Fourthly, the features in which the Breton form differs from the Welsh ones must be ascribed to the widening of the Breton horizon which followed the emigration to the Continent and to the contact with Gallo-Frankish civilisation; such features must be used with great caution, if at all, as evidence for Celtic belief and fancy.
I do not think that this brief summary either mis-
- ↑ The last chapter of Prof. Rhys's Arthurian Studies deals with the views of Prof. Zimmer and of M. Gaston Paris.
