The Zeus of the later cycle, Emrys or Myrddin, appears in the Morte Darthur under both his names. The word “Emrys” becomes “Bors”, and King Bors of Gaul is made a brother of King Ban of Benwyck[[488]]—that is, Brân of the Square Enclosure, the ubiquitous underworld god. Myrddin we meet under no such disguise. The ever-popular Merlin still retains intact the attributes of the sky-god. He remains above, and apart from all the knights, higher even in some respects than King Arthur, to whom he stands in much the same position as Mâth does to Gwydion in the Mabinogi.[[489]] Like Mâth, he is an enchanter, and, like Mâth, too, who could hear everything said in the world, in however low a tone, if only the wind met it, he is practically omniscient. The account of his final disappearance, as told in the Morte Darthur, is only a re-embellishment of the original story, the nature-myth giving place to what novelists call “a feminine interest”. Everyone knows how the great magician fell into a dotage upon the “lady of the lake” whom Malory calls “Nimue”, and Tennyson “Vivien”—both names being that of “Rhiannon” in disguise. “Merlin would let her have no rest, but always he would be with her ... and she was ever passing weary of him, and fain would have been delivered of him, for she was afeard of him because he was a devil’s son, and she could not put him away by no means. And so on a time it happed that Merlin showed to her in a rock whereas was a great wonder, and wrought by enchantment, that went under a great stone. So, by her subtle working, she made Merlin to go under that stone to let her wit of the marvels there, but she wrought so there for him that he never came out for all the craft that he could do. And so she departed and left Merlin.”[[490]]
Merlin’s living grave is still to be seen at the end of the Val des Fées, in the forest of Brécilien, in Brittany. The tomb of stone is certainly but a prosaic equivalent for the tower of woven air in which the heaven-god went to his rest. Still, it is not quite so unpoetic as the leather sack in which Rhiannon, the original of Nimue, caught and imprisoned Gwawl, the earlier Merlin, like a badger in a bag.[[491]]
Elen, Myrddin’s consort, appears in Malory as five different “Elaines”. Two of them are wives of the dark god, under his names of “King Ban”[[492]] and “King Nentres”.[[493]] A third is called the daughter of King Pellinore, a character of uncertain origin.[[494]] But the two most famous are the ladies who loved Sir Launcelot—“Elaine the Fair, Elaine the lovable, Elaine the lily maid of Astolat”,[[495]] and the luckier and less scrupulous Elaine, daughter of King Pelles, and mother of Sir Launcelot’s son, Galahad.[[496]]
But it is time, now that the most important figures of British mythology have been shown under their knightly disguises, and their place in Arthurian legend indicated, to pass on to some account of the real subject-matter of Sir Thomas Malory’s romance. Externally, it is the history of an Arthur, King of Britain, whom most people of Malory’s time considered as eminently a historical character. Around this central narrative of Arthur’s reign and deeds are grouped, in the form of episodes, the personal exploits of the knights believed to have supported him by forming a kind of household guard. But, with the exception of a little magnified and distorted legendary history, the whole cycle of romance may be ultimately resolved into a few myths, not only retold, but recombined in several forms by their various tellers. The Norman adapters of the Matière de Bretagne found the British mythology already in process of transformation, some of the gods having dwindled into human warriors, and others into hardly less human druids and magicians. Under their hands the British warriors became Norman knights, who did their deeds of prowess in the tilt-yard, and found their inspiration in the fantastic chivalry popularized by the Trouveres, while the druids put off their still somewhat barbaric druidism for the more conventional magic of the Latin races. More than this, as soon as the real sequence and raison d’être of the tales had been lost sight of, their adapters used a free hand in reweaving them. Most of the romancers had their favourite characters whom they made the central figure in their stories. Sir Gawain, Sir Percival, Sir Tristrem, and Sir Owain (all of them probably once local British sun-gods) appear as the most important personages of the romances called after their names, stories of the doughty deeds of christened knights who had little left about them either of Briton or of pagan.
It is only the labours of the modern scholar that can bring back to us, at this late date, things long forgotten when Malory’s book was issued from Caxton’s press. But oblivion is not annihilation, and Professor Rhys points out to us the old myths lying embedded in their later setting with almost the same certainty with which the geologist can show us the fossils in the rock.[[497]] Thus treated, they resolve themselves into three principal motifs, prominent everywhere in Celtic mythology: the birth of the sun-god; the struggle between light and darkness; and the raiding of the underworld by friendly gods for the good of man.
The first has been already dealt with.[[498]] It is the retelling of the story of the origin of the sun-god in the Mabinogi of Mâth, son of Mâthonwy. For Gwydion we now have Arthur; instead of Arianrod, the wife of the superannuated sky-god Nwyvre, we find the wife of King Lot, the superannuated sky-god Lludd; Lleu Llaw Gyffes rises again as Sir Gawain (Gwalchmei), and Dylan as Sir Mordred (Medrawt); while the wise Merlin, the Jupiter of the new system, takes the place of his wise prototype, Mâth. Connected with this first myth is the second—the struggle between light and darkness, of which there are several versions in the Morte Darthur. The leading one is the rebellion of the evilly-disposed Sir Mordred against Arthur and Sir Gawain; while, on other stages, Balan—the dark god Brân—fights with Balin—the sun-god Belinus; and the same Balin, or Belinus, gives an almost mortal stroke to Pellam, the Pryderi of the older mythology.
The same myth has also a wider form, in which the battle is waged for possession of a maiden. Thus (to seek no other instances) Gwynhwyvar was contended for by Arthur and Medrawt, or, in an earlier form of the myth, by Arthur and Gwyn. In the Morte Darthur, Gwyn, under the corruption of his Cornish name Melwas into “Sir Meliagraunce”, still captures Guinevere, but it is no longer Arthur who rescues her. That task, or privilege, has fallen to a new champion. It is Sir Launcelot who follows Sir Meliagraunce, defeats and slays him, and rescues the fair captive.[[499]] But Sir Launcelot, it must be stated—probably to the surprise of those to whom the Arthurian story without Launcelot and Queen Guinevere must seem almost like the play of “Hamlet with Hamlet left out”,—is unknown to the original tradition. Welsh song and story are silent with regard to him, and he is not improbably a creation of some Norman romancer who calmly appropriated to his hero’s credit deeds earlier told of other “knights”.
But the romantic treatment of these two myths by the adapters of the Matière de Bretagne are of smaller interest to us at the present day than that of the third. The attraction of the Arthurian story lies less in the battles of Arthur or the loves of Guinevere than in the legend that has given it its lasting popularity—the Christian romance of the Quest of the Holy Grail. So great and various has been the inspiration of this legend to noble works both of art and literature that it seems almost a kind of sacrilege to trace it back, like all the rest of Arthur’s story, to a paganism which could not have even understood, much less created, its mystical beauty. None the less is the whole story directly evolved from primitive pagan myths concerning a miraculous cauldron of fertility and inspiration.
In the later romances, the Holy Grail is a Christian relic of marvellous potency. It had held the Paschal lamb eaten at the Last Supper;[[500]] and, after the death of Christ, Joseph of Arimathea had filled it with the Saviour’s blood.[[501]] But before it received this colouring, it had been the magic cauldron of all the Celtic mythologies—the Dagda’s “Undry” which fed all who came to it, and from which none went away unsatisfied;[[502]] Brân’s cauldron of Renovation, which brought the dead back to life;[[503]] the cauldron of Ogyrvran the Giant, from which the Muses ascended;[[504]] the cauldrons captured by Cuchulainn from the King of the Shadowy City,[[505]] and by Arthur from the chief of Hades;[[506]] as well as several other mythic vessels of less note.
In its transition from pagan to Christian form, hardly one of the features of the ancient myth has been really obscured. We may recount the chief attributes, as Taliesin tells them in his “Spoiling of Annwn”, of the cauldron captured by Arthur. It was the property of Pwyll, and of his son Pryderi, who lived in a kingdom of the other world called, among other titles, the “Revolving Castle”, the “Four-cornered Castle”, the “Castle of Revelry”, the “Kingly Castle”, the “Glass Castle”, and the “Castle of Riches”. This place was surrounded by the sea, and in other ways made difficult of access; there was no lack of wine there, and its happy inhabitants spent with music and feasting an existence which neither disease nor old age could assail. As for the cauldron, it had a rim of pearls around its edge; the fire beneath it was kept fanned by the breaths of nine maidens; it spoke, doubtless in words of prophetic wisdom; and it would not cook the food of a perjurer or coward.[[507]] Here we have considerable data on which to base a parallel between the pagan cauldron and the Christian Grail.