Nor would the existence of such a version be, as Professor Foerster asserts, incompatible with the continental origin of the character;[64] to assert as much is really to stultify his own arguments. Does not the whole system of Professor Foerster rest upon the hypothesis that the character of Arthur, indisputably of insular origin, underwent development upon continental ground? The fact that what he roundly denies of Arthur he asserts emphatically as natural for Lancelot throws a flood of light upon the ex parte character of this distinguished scholar’s methods!
If we take into consideration the character of the elements composing the early Lancelot story, a character which, be it remembered, is not a question of suggestion but a matter of proof, we shall become clearly aware that the material for development existed on both sides of the Channel. I believe myself that Lancelot was of continental origin, but I recognise clearly that if the source and development of his story were such as I suppose them to have been, that continental origin was a matter of accident, not of necessity; and if some other scholar should bring forward arguments to prove that the story had its rise on insular rather than on continental ground, I shall be quite prepared to reconsider the question.
So far as the evidence I have now collected is concerned, it looks as if the development of the early Lancelot story might thus be sketched:—
a. Lai (presumably Breton), relating theft of king’s son by water-fairy, amplified by
b. Bringing up of youth in Otherworld kingdom, peopled by women only (source, general Celtic tradition, possibly Gawain legend).
c. His entry into the world (Perceval legend).
d. Introduction of adventures of Sea Maiden story, a being the point of contact, and suggesting the development, which may have been as follows:—
da. Winning of magic steeds and armour.
db. { Rescue of princess from monster, and False Claimant story; or
dc. { Rescue of princess from Otherworld. As we have seen (p. 25), it would be quite possible for these to be combined.
dd. Appearance at Three Days’ Tournament.
It would seem not improbable that it was the independent existence of incident dc in the popular tale that led to its coalescing with the Arthurian legend. As I have elsewhere pointed out,[65] the character of the Guinevere abduction story is in itself so primitive that it may well have formed part of the earliest stratum of Arthurian tradition. The variants are of such a nature as to indicate that they arose at a period when the real meaning of the story was still understood, and carefully retained. The tale must therefore be far older than any extant literary version.
If we admit the suggested hypothesis—that the hero of the Lancelot lai became through the ‘mermaid’ incident identified with the hero of the Sea Maiden story—the character of that story, and the immense popularity to which its wide diffusion testifies, would give us a solid working hypothesis to account for the choice of Lancelot as Guinevere’s lover. The similarity of the stories led to his identification with her rescuer, and that step once taken the recognition of him as her lover was—given the social conditions of the time and the popularity of the Tristan story—a foregone conclusion.[66]
But this evolution, so far as we can tell, took place on both sides of the Channel. Thus, while I have found no single insular version which gives the Tournament episode, I have equally found no continental variant which contains the mermaid. Yet it is the latter (mermaid) which appears to form the point of contact between the folk-tale and the lai, while it is the persistent recurrence of the former (the Tournament) which has given us the key to disentangle the complicated evolution of the story.
Here is a point on which I should wish to make my position perfectly clear. I do not think that Lancelot was ab origine the hero of a variant of this popular and widely-spread folk-tale. The persistent element in the Lancelot story is, as I have elsewhere shown, his connection with the beneficent Lady of the Lake. Now the maiden of the folk-tale is a sea, not a lake, maiden, and is, further, consistently represented as of a malicious, rather than a kindly, character. True, she aids the fisher in the first instance, but she belongs to that order of beings whose gifts, apparently desirable, are saddled with conditions which turn to the undoing, rather than to the profit of the receiver. Also, her presence in the story is restricted to a small and well-marked group of variants, which apparently preserve a primitive type of the story, and are never combined with the Tournament, which recurs so frequently in the Lancelot romances.
Again this folk-tale, quâ folk-tale, does not belong to the same group as that which offers parallels to the Perceval story; yet the Lancelot story was certainly affected, and that at an early stage of development, by the Perceval. Folk-lore students are well aware of the facility with which one story-type can become contaminated by another originally distinct from it; and while I see in the common ‘folk-tale’ origin of the two legends a satisfactory explanation of the undeniable influence traceable through all the earlier stages of the Lancelot evolution, I would yet distinguish sharply between the two heroes. Perceval is a British (insular) Celt; Lancelot a continental (Breton) Celt, the development of whose story is posterior to that of the insular hero. For all these reasons I think it most probable that Lancelot was the hero of an independent, and originally short, tale, which by an accidental similarity of incident became connected with one of the most popular of known folk-tales, from which it freely borrowed adventures, and which, through the medium of one of these adventures, became later incorporated with the Arthurian tradition and developed upon romantic lines.