Page:Studies on the legend of the Holy Grail.djvu/112

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THE ARRIVAL EPISODE IN QUESTE AND GRAND ST. GRAAL.

to the original author of the Queste, who, having broken with Perceval as chief hero, also broke with the distinctive Quest incident as far as the chief hero is concerned. But a strange blunder is committed; the second draft, anxious to make Galahad's grandfather both Fisher and Lame King, actually speaks of Pelles as Galahad's uncle, in direct contradiction to its own indication. The third draft corrects this mistake, and tries by different explanatory interpolations to confirm the relationship of Galahad to the Lame King, and the identity of his castle with the Grail Castle. The author of the Grand St. Graal now appears on the scene, appropriates the story about King Lambar, father to the Lame King, Percival's uncle, makes him an ancestor of Galahad, and gives a name to his son, Pelleant (which name creeps back into the second draft of the Queste as that of Perceval's father), and thus derives Galahad on the mother's side from Brons, although it escapes him that he thus gives the lie to the prophecy which he puts in the angel's mouth, that it is the last of Josephe's seed who is to be lamed by the lance, and that he has not given his Lambor fictitious ancestors enough to equalize the genealogies.

We are thus led back to the relationship of uncle and nephew as the earliest subsisting between the Grail King and the achiever of the Quest, and we find in those versions which supplant Perceval by Galahad a story told of the former's great uncle, King Lambar, by no means unlike that told of his uncle in the A versions, and that there, as here, the cause of the woe brought upon the hero's family is one of the magic talismans which the hero is in quest of and by means of which he is to achieve his quest. We further notice that in so far as the Early History influences the Quest forms, it is the later versions in which its influence is apparent, and it is the Joseph, not the Brons form, which exercises this influence. Not until we come to the Grand St. Graal, an obvious and bold attempt to embody previous versions in one harmonious whole, does the Brons form make itself felt.


Work of the Promised Knight.

In Chrestien we can only guess at what the results of the successful achievement of the Quest would have been by the