The mythic heroic literature of all races is in many respects alike. The sagas not only of Greek or Persian, of Celt or Hindu, of Slav or Teuton, but also of Algonquin or Japanese, are largely made up of the same incidents set in the same framework. But each race shapes this common material in its own way, sets upon it its own stamp. And no race has done this more unmistakably than the Celtic. Stories which go back to the first century, stories taken down from the lips of living peasants, have a kinship of tone and style, a common ring which no one who has studied this literature can fail to recognise. What stamps the whole of it is the prevailing and abiding spirit of romance. To rightly urge the Celtic character of the Arthurian romances would require the minute analysis of many hundred passages, and it would only be proving a case admitted by everyone who knows all the facts. It will be more to the point to dwell briefly upon those outward features which early (i.e., pre-eleventh century) Celtic heroic literature has in common with the North French romances of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially as we thus gain a clue to much that is problematic in the formal and moral growth of the Arthurian cycle in general and of the Grail cycle in particular.
In Celtic tradition, as little as in mediæval romance, do we find a record of race-struggles such as meets us in the Nibelungenlied, in the Dietrich saga, or the Carolingian cycle.[1] In its place we have a glorification of the individual hero. The reason is not far to seek. The Celtic tribes, whether of Ireland or Britain, were surrounded by men of their own speech, of like institutions and manners. The shock of opposing nations, of rival civilisations,
- ↑ The pre-Christian Irish annals, which are for the most part euhemerised mythology, contain also a certain amount of race history; thus the struggle between the powers of light and darkness typified by the antagonism between Tuatha de Danann and Fomori, is doubled by that between the fair invading Celts and the short dark aborigines. But the latter has only left the barest trace of its existence in the national sagas. Not until we come to that secondary stage of the Fenian saga, which must have been shaped in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and which represents the Fenians as warring against the harrying Northmen, does the foreign element reappear in Irish tradition.
