“——whose decks are dense with stately forms,
Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream—by these
Three queens with crowns of gold, and from them rose
A cry that shivered to the tingling stars——”
has a very old germ;—Something not unlike this watery bier, to carry a dead hero into the Silences, belongs to the opening of that ancient poem of Beowulf—which all students of early English know and prize—but which did not grow on English soil, and therefore does not belong to our present quest.[16] The brand Excalibur, too, which is thrown into the sea by King Arthur’s friend, and which is caught by an arm clothed in white samite, rising from the mere, and three times brandished, has its prototype in the “old mighty sword” which is put into the hands of Beowulf before he can slay the great sea-dragon of the Scandinavian fable.
Now, these Arthurian stories, put into book by Geoffrey—a Latin book, for all the monks wrote in Latin, though they may have sung songs in English, as good father Aldhelm did—were presently caught up by a romance-writer, named Wace, who was living at Caen, in Normandy, and whose knightly cousins (some say father and titled baron) had come over with William the Conqueror,—the name being long known in Nottinghamshire. This Wace put these Arthur stories into Norman verse—adding somewhat and giving a French air, which made his book sought after and read in royal courts; and fragments of it were chanted by minstrels in castle halls.
Then, this Arthur mine of legends was explored again by another priest and Welshman, who came to have some place at Oxford, where the beginnings of the great university were then a-brew. This writer, Walter Map[17] by name—or Mapes, as he is sometimes called—lived just about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the crusades were in full blast, and when dreams about the Holy Sepulchre hovered round half the house roofs of England. People saw in visions the poor famished pilgrims, fainting with long marches toward the far-away Jerusalem, and shot down by cruel Saracen arrows, within sight of the Holy of Holies. So Walter Map, the priest (they say he was one while chaplain to Henry II.), writing under light of that fierce enthusiasm, puts a religious element into the Arthur stories; and it is from him—in all probability—comes that Legend of the Holy Graal—the cup which caught the sacred blood, and which saintly knights were to seek after, the pure Sir Galahad being the winning seeker.
Nor did the Arthur legends stop here: but another priestly man, Layamon[18]—he, too, living on the borders of Wales, in the foraging ground of Arthur’s knights, not far from the present town of Kidderminster (which we know carpet-wise)—set himself to turning the Legends, with many additions, into short, clanging, alliterative Saxon verses, with occasional rhyme—the first English (or Teutonic) wording of the story; Map’s version being in Latin and French. He copies very much from Wace (Le Brut d’Angleterre), but his book is longer by a half. It has its importance, too—this Layamon version—in the history of the language. Of the why and the how, and of its linguistic relations to the Anglo-Saxon, or the modern tongue, I shall leave discussion in the hands of those more instructed in the history of Early English. We know this Layamon in our present writing, only as a simple-minded, good, plodding, West-of-England priest, who asked God’s blessing on his work, and who put that quaint alliterative jingle in it, which in years after was spent in larger measure over the poem of Piers Plowman, and which, still later, comes to even daintier usage when the great master—Spenser
“——fills with flowers fair Flora’s painted lap.”