The Three Days' Tournament: A Study in Romance and Folk-Lore / Being an Appendix to the Author's 'Legend of Sir Lancelot'

by Jessie L. Weston

Now these are characteristics which, in their ensemble, he shares with no other Arthurian hero. True, Gawain visits the Otherworld, but he does so rather in the character of lover of the queen of that world than as rescuer of one confined within its precincts. In the Dutch Walewein alone, so far as I know, is his rôle definitely that of the deliverer. But none of the other incidents belong to his story. So, too, Tristan is the hero of a very fine version of the Dragon Slayer and False Claimant story, and it is moreover probable that the Morien version has borrowed certain details from the Tristan, but he too can claim no share in the other incidents. The close correspondence, point by point, with a folk-tale of so widespread and representative a character, is, I submit, a peculiarity of the earlier Lancelot story, which is of extraordinary interest as throwing light upon the genesis and growth of Arthurian legend.

In this connection I have by no means forgotten the energetic protests which, in certain quarters, were evoked by Mr. Nutt’s attempt to show that the story of Perceval might in this way be connected with popular tales; and I am quite prepared to be told that tales collected in the nineteenth century are not to be trusted as indications of the sources of twelfth century romance. But in the instance before us the evidence, while of precisely the same nature as in the case of Perceval, exceeds it, both in bulk and extent. The story is not one story, but a large and well-marked group of tales; the folk-lore parallels affect not one, but many incidents of the romance. How large and how widely diffused is that story-group can only be appreciated by those who will examine the lists of variants appended by M. Cosquin to the four stories I have named above and those cited by Mr. Campbell under the heading of the Sea Maiden, and then compare these stories with the numerous examples given by Mr. Hartland in his exhaustive study of the Perseus legend. The incidents are, as I have shown, six out of a possible list of seven. If, further, we remember that the group, with all its varying forms, is connected with such pre-historic heroes as Perseus and Cuchullin, we have, I think, a sufficient answer to those critics who would reject the evidence en masse on the ground of modernity.

But supposing, for the sake of argument, that we accept the possible priority of the romantic over the popular form, what, with regard to the criticism of the Arthurian literary cycle, is the logical result? This: if the folk-tale be dependent upon a romance, that romance must of necessity be the Lancelot, as no other hero offers the same combination of incident. But a version of the Lancelot story, from which all these incidents could have been borrowed, must have been older than any form of the story we now possess. As we have seen above, the correspondence is sometimes with one, sometimes with another version; and a very famous incident of the tale, the False Claimant, only exists now in two romances, each of them preserved in an isolated and unique form. Therefore, if this be not a fully proven instance of the conversion of a popular folk-tale into an Arthurian romance, it must be a case of the development of a folk-tale from a fully organised and coherent Lancelot story in a form anterior to Chrétien. The adherents of the theory which ascribes independent invention to Chrétien de Troyes, and a literary origin to the Arthurian stories, can make their choice between these two solutions of the problem—one or the other it must be.

For myself, I unreservedly accept the verdict pronounced by Mr. Campbell upon the Sea Maiden as representative of the entire story-group. ‘Is it possible that a Minglay peasant and Straparola[47] (or we may add Hue de Rotelande and the peasants of the Odenwald and Lorraine)—neither of whom can have seen a giant, or a flying horse, or a dragon, or a mermaid—could separately imagine all these impossible things, and, having imagined them simultaneously, invent the incidents of the story and arrange so many of them in the same order?

‘Is it on the other hand possible that all these barefooted, bareheaded, simple men, who cannot read, should yet learn the contents of one class of rare books and of no other? I cannot think so.

‘I have gone through the whole Sea Maiden story, and all its Gaelic versions, and marked and numbered each separate incident, and divided the whole into its parts, and then set the result beside the fruit of a similar dissection of Straparola’s Fortunio, and I find nearly the whole of the bones of the Italian story, and a great many bones which seem to belong to some original antediluvian Aryan tale. The Scotch (insular) is far wilder and more mythical than the Italian (continental).[48] The one savours of tournaments, kings’ palaces, and the manners of Italy long ago; the other of flocks and herds, fishermen and pastoral life; but the Highland imaginary beings are further from reality and nearer to creatures of the brain. The horses of Straparola are very material and walk the earth; those of old John MacPhie are closely related to Pegasus and the horses of the Veda, and fly and soar through grimy peat-reek to the clouds.’[49]

Mr. Campbell continues: ‘What is true of the Gaelic and Italian versions is equally true of all others which I know. If examined, they will be found to consist of a bare tree of branching incidents common to all, and so elaborate that no minds could possibly have invented the whole seven or eight times over[50] without some common model, and yet no one of these is the model, for the tree is defective in all, and its foliage has something peculiar to each country in which it grows. They are specimens of the same plant, but their common stock is nowhere to be found.’[51] Were Mr. Campbell living now, may we not feel sure that to these closing words he would add: Assuredly it is not to be sought in an Arthurian romance of the twelfth century?

THE ROMANCE

So much for the present as regards our folk-tale as a whole. Let us now see what light the study of it may have thrown upon the special subject of our investigation—the Three Days’ Tournament. And first of all, I think it has definitely settled the correctness of our title. East or west, north or south, wherever we have traced our story, whatever the hero’s feat—whether the rescuing the princess from a devouring dragon, or the winning her hand at a knightly tournament—the days required to complete the task are three—neither more nor less.

Mr. Hartland, to whom I referred the point, remarks that the unvarying tendency in certain families of folk-tales, notably those of Oriental origin, is to crystallise a small but indefinite number into three. Now Mr. Campbell, as we have seen, detects a likeness between the flying horses of the Sea Maiden tales, and the horses of the Veda, and Mr. Joseph Jacobs, in a note appended to another tale,[52] quotes a further remark of the same writer, to the effect that the many-coloured horses of Indian mythology may account for all the magical horses of folk-tales. So if our tale, as a whole, did not come from the east, it seems possible that this particular incident may have done so.[53]