CHAPTER X: ARTHURIAN ROMANCE IN BRITTANY
Fierce and prolonged has been the debate as to the original birthplace of Arthurian legend, authorities of the first rank, the ‘Senior Wranglers’ of the study, as Nutt has called them, hotly advancing the several claims of Wales, England, Scotland, and Brittany. In this place it would be neither fitting nor necessary to traverse the whole ground of argument, and we must content ourselves with the examination of Brittany’s claim to the invention of Arthurian story—and this we will do briefly, passing on to some of the tales which relate the deeds of the King or his knights on Breton soil.
Confining ourselves, then, to the proof of the existence of a body of Arthurian legend in Brittany, we are, perhaps, a little alarmed at the outset to find that our manuscript sources are scanty. “It had to be acknowledged,” says Professor Saintsbury, “that Brittany could supply no ancient texts whatever, and hardly any ancient traditions.”[54] But are either of these conditions essential to a belief in the Breton origin of Arthurian romance?
The two great hypotheses regarding Arthurian origins have been dubbed the ‘Continental’ and the ‘Insular’ theories. The first has as its leading protagonist Professor Wendelin Förster of Bonn, who believes that the immigrant Britons brought the Arthur legend with them to Brittany and that the Normans of Normandy received it from their descendants and gave it wider territorial scope. The second school, headed by the brilliant M. Gaston Paris, believes that it originated in Wales.
If we consider the first theory, then, we can readily see that ancient texts are not essential to its acceptance. In any case the entire body of Arthurian texts prior to the twelfth century is so small as to be almost negligible. The statement that “hardly any ancient traditions” of the Arthurian legend exist in Brittany is an extraordinary one. In view of the circumstances that in extended passages of Arthurian story the scene is laid in Brittany (as in the Merlin and Vivien incident and the episode of Yseult of the White Hand in the story of Tristrem), that Geoffrey of Monmouth speaks of “the Breton book” from which he took his matter, and that Marie de France states that her tales are drawn from old Breton sources, not to admit the possible existence of a body of Arthurian tradition in Brittany appears capricious. Thomas’s Sir Tristrem is professedly based on the poem of the Breton Bréri, and there is no reason why Brittany, drawing sap and fibre as it did from Britain, should not have produced Arthurian stories of its own.
On the whole, however, that seems to represent the sum of its pretensions as a main source of Arthurian romance. The Arthurian story seems to be indigenous to British soil, and if we trace the origin of certain episodes to Brittany we may safely connect these with the early British immigrants to the peninsula. This is not to say, however, that Brittany did not influence Norman appreciation of the Arthurian saga. But that it did so more than did Wales is unlikely, in view of documentary evidence. Both Wales and Brittany, then, supplied matter which the Norman and French poets shaped into verse, and if Brittany was not the birthplace of the legend it was, in truth, one of its cradle-domains.