When the Normans settled in Neustria, their lively fancy caught up all that was imaginative among those around them. It is from their arrival that the first dawn of French literature dates, and it seems to have been they who first listened to the Breton lays, and brought them forward in the French tongue. At the central court of France, the Norman trouvère met the Provençal troubadour, and their repertory of tales was exchanged, the one giving his native Norse myths, tinctured with Keltic heroic tales, the other the Greco-Roman and Arabic stories that had travelled to him. And there, both sets of stories were steeped in that mysterious atmosphere of chivalry, which could dream of no court that was not based on the model of feudal France, no warrior without a horse and an esquire, a cone-shaped helmet, and kite-shaped shield.
That true knights were all equal, was a maxim held, though hardly carried out, in the eleventh century, and the floating notion of a table, where all were on an equality, was ready to fix itself on the golden age of chivalry. And when the Normans themselves became the owners of Britain, and brought with them a fair sprinkling of Bretons, no wonder they decided that the heroes, who, at least, were not Saxon, should be their own property. Siegfried and Brynhild had fallen into oblivion, and the British chiefs did veritably flourish on their native soil. Geoffrey of Monmouth pretended to hunt up their history in Wales and Brittany; Marie of France more faithfully reproduced her native lays in Norman-French; and as fresh tales were discovered or invented, metrical romances spread them far and wide, and began all to place their scene at the court of Arthur. Most noted among these, was the story of the San-grail, the cup of healing and lance of wounding, that may have been a shadow of a mighty truth, but which became myth in many countries, until, in the hands of the Cymry, they assumed to be the veritable original Cup of Blessing of the Last Supper, and the lance of the soldier at the Cross.
A relic-adoring age willingly believed, that to find these treasures was the great task of the knights it had invented. Thenceforth, English imagination beheld the glorious past as a feudal court, where all the good Knights of the Round Table, now an order of chivalry, had bound themselves to seek the holy relics, that could only be revealed to the perfectly pure and worthy. Mallory’s beautiful book preserves the main line of the allegory, though it is full of episodes, and it is the veritable prose epic of the Round Table.
France and Lombardy likewise believed in the Round Table, but not with the same national faith. As was natural, their poems centered about the great Frank emperor, and what they wrote or told of the British knights rather dealt in the less creditable adventures of individuals, than in the ennobling religious drift of the main story.
However, it is these Round Table names that are the most widely known and used of all the Keltic nomenclature, with a reputation almost entirely romantic, and very seldom saintly. Among the Arthurian names there is not one that is Teutonic; all are either genuine Cymric, or else such modifications of Latin nomina as citizenship was sure to leave to the Britons.
Section II.—Arthur.
No Keltic name approaches in renown to that of the central figure of the Round Table; yet, in the very dazzle of his brightness, his person has been so much lost, that, as the author of Welsh Sketches observes, “Whereas Peter Schlemihl lost his shadow, Arthur has lost his substance.”
To begin with his name. He may have been a Romanized Briton named from Arctus, “Arthur’s slow wain rolling his course round the pole,” and Arcturus, the bear’s-tail, far behind him in Boötes; and Arth, perhaps from them, does indeed mean a bear in British.
Ard, the consonant softening into th in composition, means high or noble, in all the Keltic tongues but Welsh, and had been a name from time immemorial in Ireland, as Scott knew when he made the Bertram family tree bear fruit of Arths in fabulous ages. Art, a Milesian, is said to have lived B.C. 233; Art MacCormac appears in the Ossianic legends, “Art Oge MacMorne kept Dundorme;” according to Hanmer’s catalogue of Finn MacCoul’s comrades, Art and Arth recur for ever in Erse Highland pedigree; and in the end of the fourteenth century, Art MacMorough was the great hero of Ireland, who slew Roger Mortimer, and sorely puzzled Richard II., reigned in Leinster for forty years, and cost the English treasury twelve million marcs; so that when he died,
“Since Brien’s death in Erin