All three agree that Lancelot is buried in Galehault's tomb, and that Bohort becomes a hermit in his stead.
From the above comparison it seems clear that though offering less striking and interesting variants, the Dutch version and that of 1533 yet maintain, on the whole, their previous agreement as against S.; while M., which here possesses an alternative source the English M. A., yet occasionally betrays the same curious agreement with D. L. which we have noted before. The result appears to confirm the conclusion previously arrived at, that D. L. and 1533 represent a common French original, and that M.'s source, whether complete or incomplete, was a MS. belonging to the same family.
CHAPTER XII
CONCLUSION
We have now reached the final stage of our Lancelot studies, and it only remains for us to gather up the threads of the previous investigation, and to endeavour to formulate the results at which we have arrived. We have seen that the Lancelot legend was one of remarkably speedy growth. We find no mention of the hero's name before the latter half of the twelfth century, yet within ten years of that first mention he is the most famous of Arthur's knights, and the lover of the queen.[207]
We have examined the legend (a) in the form of a loosely constructed biographical romance, composed of episodes originally foreign to each other; (b) in detached episodic poems; (c) in its final form as the most important member of a great prose cycle; and we have found that in all this mass of literature the only really distinctive and individual trait on which we could lay our finger was the story of the hero being stolen as a child and brought up by the mistress of a water kingdom.[208]
Into the question of the character of the Lady of the Lake we have not entered deeply; we have seen that she touches on the one side the mysterious queen of the Other World, on the other the scarcely less enigmatic Morgain le Fay, King Arthur's sister. The subject was too wide in extent to be adequately treated in this series; it demands separate study, but the result, so far as the Lancelot legend is concerned, was to lead us to believe that the root of that legend was a lai, presumably Breton, dealing with the theft of a king's son by a water fairy; a theme which afterwards underwent considerable expansion, in the course of which the characters of the hero and of his patroness alike became greatly modified from the original conception.
The final and best known form of the story was mainly influenced by the introduction of a motif foreign to the earlier and tentative development, i.e. that of Lancelot's love for the wife of his lord. This motif, however, we saw reason to believe, did not really represent the earlier tradition of Guinevere's infidelity, but was a practically new development introduced under the dual influences of a special social condition and the high popularity of the earlier Tristan story. As to the reasons which determined the choice of Lancelot as the queen's lover, we found ourselves unable to express any decided opinion.[209]