[97] So much has been clearly proved in the case of Peredur, for instance, in a French essay on the composition of that romance recently published from Paris by Dr Mary Williams, formerly Fellow of the University of Wales.
[98] This, of course, is an obvious variant of the story told in the Life of Gildas, already mentioned, of Guinevere’s abduction by Melwas.
[99] Nonne Prestes Tale, l. 392.
[101] Matthew Arnold, Tristram and Iseult.
[102] Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse.
[103] M. Bédier, in his edition of Thomas’s Tristan, maintains that the original of all the various versions of the story was a single poem composed in England. This is a disputed point among scholars, but it is generally agreed that the story is of British origin.
[104] See Tennyson, The Passing of Arthur.
[105] A. Nutt, The Legends of the Holy Grail (Popular Studies in Mythology and Folklore), p. 72.
[106] For a learned and suggestive study of the various versions of the Grail legend, see Miss J. L. Weston’s The Legend of Sir Perceval (2 vols.) in the Grimm Library (Nutt). Miss Weston there distinguishes three stages in the growth of the legend as “the Folklore, the Literary and the Mystical.” In the Mystical, an element which she holds to be “entirely foreign to the original tale,” viz., the Grail quest, “modified and finally transformed it.” The folk-tale “assumed an ecclesiastical and mystical character. The hero became a champion of Christianity and Holy Church, and as such displayed the qualities most approved by the religious views of the time: he became not merely chaste, but an ascetic celibate, and any connection with women was dropped altogether” (Vol. I. p. 117).