ARTHUR THE PEERLESS KNIGHT.

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sets hand to the sword Gram, 'pulls it from the stock, even as if it lay loose before him.' The Arthur version may be a direct copy from the Sigmund myth; it is far less likely, and is indeed to the last degree unlikely, that the latter was directly suggested by the myth of Theseus, who draws from beneath the mighty stone the sword and sandals of his father. The weapon reappears necessarily in the myths of all lands. It is the Morglay of Bevis of Hampton, the Durandal which flashes like the sun in the hands of Roland. When Arthur draws it from its sheath it gleams on the eyes of his enemies like the blaze of thirty torches; when Achilles holds it up, the splendour leaps to heaven like the lightning.

According to the later ideal, Arthur is the king or knight of spotless purity. With this notion the earlier traditions stand out in striking contrast. The inci- The loves of dents relating to the daughter of Earl Sanam and King Arthur. the wife of the king of Orkney are cardinal points in the story. As in the Theban tradition, the ruin of the hero or of his kingdom must be brought about by his own son or descendants; and Mordred and the wife of the king of Orkney stand to Arthur in the relation of Polyneikes and Iokastê to Edipus. The queen of Orkney is Arthur's sister, the daughter of Igerne, although he knows it not, as Edipus knows not that in wedding Iokastê he is wedding his mother. But in the Arthur story it must be remembered that he dallies with the queen of Orkney, though she comes to his court with her four sons, as he dallies with the daughter of Earl Sanam, for the mere attraction of her beauty. In neither case has he any misgivings of conscience. If his relations with the mother of Mordred cause him sadness, this sadness is not awakened until he has dreams which forbode the ruin to be one day wrought. But if Arthur really belong to the same heroic company with Herakles and Sigurd, with Phoebus, or Indra, or Agni, this sensuous characteristic is precisely what we

should look for. All these must be lovers of the maidens. So it is with Paris; and so, too, Minos is the lover of Diktynna and of Prokris. So again the Vedic poet, addressing the sun as the horse, says: After thee is the chariot; after thee, Arvan, the man; after thee, the cows; after thee, the host of the girls,' who all seek to be wedded to him, and who, as we have seen, are all wedded at one and the same moment to Krishna. Nor may we pass over the incident which closes the first portion of the Arthur myth, and which tells us that Arthur, on hearing that his destroyer should be born on Mayday, orders that all the children born on that day shall be brought to him. With these Mordred is placed in a ship, which is wrecked, and, as we may suppose, Mordred is the only one saved.'

Arthur's sword.

But the sword which Arthur draws out of the stone is not the weapon by which his greatest deeds are wrought. It is snapped in conflict with the knight Pellinore. Precisely the same is the fortune of the sword Gram which Odin thrusts into the roof-tree of the Volsungs. The sword of Arthur, whether it be Excalibur, or, as some versions have it, Mirandoise, is bestowed on him by the Lady of the Lake; just as the shards of the sword Gram, welded together by Regin the smith, are brought by the Fair Hjordis to Sigurd her son, who now stands in place of his father Sigmund. But the Lady of the Lake and the mother of Sigurd are simply counterparts of Thetis, the nymph of the sea, who brings from the smith Hephaistos the armour which is to serve for her child Achilleus, in place of that which Hektor had taken from the body of Patroklos. The parallel is complete, and its significance cannot be mistaken.

The scabbard of this sword is even more marvellous

1 With this we may compare the myth which represents Kamsa as ordering the slaughter of the new-born children, amongst whom he hopes that Krishna will meet his death: see p. 147. The only difference is that Kamsa represents the darkness, while Arthur is the light; but the night destroys the day, and the day destroys the night, and what is said of the one holds good of the other.

THE MAGIC SCABBARD.

of Arthur's

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than the weapon itself: nay, the sage Merlin tells Arthur that it is worth ten of the sword, for so long as he bears the sheath about him, the sorest blow shall not The scabbard cause him to lose a drop of blood; and thus sword. Arthur is placed in the ranks of that large class of heroes who may be wounded only in one way, whether as being vulnerable only in one part of their body, like Achilles or Siegfried, or only by some particular weapon or instrument, as Balder by the mistletoe, or Ragnar Lodbrog by the viper. In all these stories a way is necessarily provided by which the catastrophe may be brought about. Arthur, invulnerable with the scabbard, as is Aurendil with the grey cloak,' must somehow or other be deprived of it; and here this is done by means of Arthur's sister, Morgan le Fay, to whom he entrusts it for safety, but who, loving Sir Accolon more than her husband Sir Uriens, gives it to him, making by enchantment a forged scabbard for her brother. In a fight which follows the king is well-nigh overcome; but though he regains the sheath, yet Morgan contrives once more to get it into her hands. Excalibur she cannot take from the grasp of Arthur as he sleeps; but she hurls the scabbard into the lake, and the death of the king at some time or other is insured.

Nor is it here only in the Arthur cycle that this magic sword is seen. The whole story is repeated in the episode of the good Sir Galahad. When the day for filling up the Perilous Seat has come, a squire tells the king that he has seen a great stone floating down the river, and a sword fixed in it. Here again we have the inscription, by which the weapon is made to say that no man shall take it hence but he by whose side it ought to hang; and that he shall be the best knight in the world. At Arthur's bidding Lancelot, Gawaine, and Percivale strive to draw it forth; but it will yield only to the touch of the pure Sir Galahad, who, in full assurance of winning it, has come with a scabbard only.

1 See p. 308.

Arthur and the Fatal Children.

The reluctance which Uther's nobles show to receive Arthur as their lord, on the ground that he is but a baseborn boy, brings before us another familiar feature in this whole class of legends. Without exception the Fatal Children, as Grimm calls them, have to spend their early years in banishment or disguise or humiliation; and when they come to claim their rightful inheritance, they are despised or jeered at by men of meaner birth, who can never be their match in strength and wit. The wise Odysseus is mocked for his beggarly garb as he stands on the day of doom in his own hall; and this passing shame before the great victory is reflected in countless popular stories which tell us of a degradation culminating in the Gaelic lay of the Great Fool. This story is repeated in the episode of Sir Tor, who is brought in by a cowherd. The herdsman, supposing him to be his own son, complains of his folly; but the wise Merlin, who happens to be present, declares that he is the son of King Pellinore. The same imputation of weakness is seen again in the demands made to Arthur for homage to his alleged sovereigns-demands which are in each case refused, and which lead to the discomfiture whether of King Ryons or of the Roman Cæsar.

The story of

The recurrence of precisely the same ideas in the story of the poor knight Balin,' throws light on the method in which a crowd of originally independent stories Balin. have been sorted and pieced together in order to produce the Arthur story of Jeffrey of Monmouth, and still more of Malory. In truth, the myth told of Arthur is now told all over again of Balin, and Arthur becomes altogether subordinate to the new protagonist. Here, as before, the first incident is that of the drawing of a sword; but in this case the weapon is attached not to an anvil or a stone, but to the side of a maiden who cannot be freed from

1 Popular Romances of the Middle Ages, p. 7.

GUENEVERE AND HELEN.

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it save by a true knight guileless of treason. No knights of the court of King Ryons have been able to rid her of the burden; and Arthur himself is now not more successful. Hence, when Balin, the poor-clad knight, who has just been let out of prison, begs that he may be suffered to try, the maiden tells him that it is in vain for him to do so, when his betters have failed before him. To his hand, however, the weapon yields as easily as those which were drawn forth at the touch of Arthur or of Galahad.

With the death of Balin and his brother Balan the story returns to the myth of Arthur and his wedding with Guenevere, whose character approaches more

Arthur and

nearly to that of the Helen of the Greek lyric Guenevere. and tragic poets, than to the Helen of our Iliad and Odyssey. As Helen is with Æschylus the ruin of ships, men, and cities, so is Arthur here warned by Merlin that Guenevere is not wholesome for him; and at a later time. the knights who are besought to come forward as champions in her behalf demur to the request, on the ground that she is a destroyer of good knights. Their reluctance is fully justified. The real Guenevere of the Arthur story is sensual in her love and merciless in her vengeance; nor is Lancelot the austerely devoted knight which sometimes he declares himself to be. By equivocation or direct falsehood Lancelot contrives to avoid or rebut the charge brought against him by Sir Meliagrance; but when, in the encounter that follows, that knight goes down beneath the stroke of Sir Lancelot and yields him to his mercy, the latter is sorely vexed, because he wished to destroy the evidence of his guilt; and when he looks to Guenevere, she makes a sign which expressed the will of the Roman ladies in the amphitheatre, that the vanquished gladiator should die. It may, of course, be said that the incident which furnished grounds for the accusation of Meliagrance has been interpolated into the myth; but the process is perilous which rejects from a legend every portion that clashes