IATION

THE GARMENT OF HUMILIATION.

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temptuously calls him Prettyhands, and bids him go to the kitchen and there have fat brose, so that at the year's end he may be fat as a pork hog. The time for action at length comes, when a maiden beseeches Arthur to send succour to a lady besieged in her castle by the Knight of the Red Lawns; but even now he must drink a bitter draught of humiliation. When he entreats Arthur that he may be sent on this service, the maiden asks indignantly if she is to be put off with a kitchen-knave, and hastens away in wrath. Sir Kay, who wishes to see how the ash-boy fares, speedily receives a stroke which compels him to believe that in his case discretion is the better part of valour; and even Lancelot, who ventures to parry lances with him, is constrained to own that their quarrel is not so great but they may fairly leave off.

This myth is repeated in the episode of the Knight with the Ill-shapen Coat, the ubiquitous garment of humiliation worn by the wanderer who owns the Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn in the German story, by the Gold Child when he appears before the king in the guise of a bearhunter, and by the soldier who is seen in the Boots of Buffalo Leather. Here, too, the maiden reviles him, and tells him that, if he will follow her, his skin shall be as well hewn as his coat. The answer of the youth is that when he is so hewn, he will ask for no plaster wherewith to heal him. In the issue, the young knight becomes lord of the castle of Pendragon and the husband of the maiden who has reviled him.

Nor is this the only mythical incident, rendered familiar to us in the legends of many lands, which has been introduced into the story of Gareth. After the battle before the Perilous Castle, the youth thinks at once to win the lady of his love; but she tells him that though she will never love another, yet he must be tested by flood and field till twelve months should have passed by, before she can be his wife. The spirit of the old myth is so far weakened, that means are

1 Grimm, Household Stories.

devised for cutting short the ordeal. But he has no sooner met again the lady of the Perilous Castle, than he becomes an actor in a series of astonishing scenes, in which the notion lying at the root of the story of the Snake-leaves1 is extravagantly exaggerated. It assumes here a coarse form in the hands of a tale-teller, to whom the story conveys not a tittle of its orginal meaning. The head of the knight, who, approaching Gareth in the dark with a drawn sword, is beheaded by him, is made to grow on his body again by means of salve which the damsel Linet applies to it. When his enemy, thus restored to life, again attacks Gareth on the following night, the latter not only smites off his head, but hews it in pieces. But Linet is not to be thus baffled, and the murderer is again made to live. A like exaggeration is seen in the power of the ring which the lady of the Perilous Castle gives to Prettyhands. The owner of the ring of Gyges becomes invisible or visible according to the way in which he handles it; in the Arabian Nights story of the Wonderful Lamp the handling of the ring brings into sight the demon who is its slave. Here the ring has this power, that that which is green it will turn to red, red to green, blue to white, and so with all other colours, while he who wears it shall lose no blood. In other words, it will both disguise and guard him effectually; and this is the idea which lies at the root of the Gyges myth, in which the ring represents the circular emblem of wealth and fertility common to the mythology of the whole human race, and pre-eminent in the Arthur story both of the Round Table and the vessel, of the Sangreal.

The fifth cycle

Having brought Gareth to the scene of his glory, the story now enters on a fifth cycle of myth, which retraces in the person of Tristram the threads of the tale -Tristram. relating the adventures of Lancelot. If there be a difference between them, it is that the Tristram story is more full of incidents common to all tales, the origin and

! See p. 5.

LANCELOT AND TRISTRAM.

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meaning of which cannot be questioned. But in their love and their madness, their bravery and their sufferings, their triumphs and their punishment, they are but shadows each of the other. So close, indeed, is the parallel, that Guenevere herself strikes the equation which makes herself and Lancelot on the one side the counterparts of Tristram and Isolte on the other. By his birth Tristram belongs to the number of those who are destined to greatness. He is the child of sorrow, born in the dark forest in which his mother seeks her lord who has been entrapped and shut up in a dungeon. Like Macduff and Sigurd, Tristram is scarcely seen by his mother who, before she dies, has only time to give him his ill-boding name; but, as with other heroes, the woes of his infancy are but clouds which are scattered before the splendour of his manhood. This story is repeated in the episode of Sir Alisander, whom king Mark of Cornwall, who is here represented in the darkest colours, orders Sir Sadok to slay. Alisander is, of course, saved by Sadok who pretends to the king that he has drowned the lad. On growing up he receives from his mother the blood-stained sark of his murderer father, and swears to take vengeance on king Mark, who on hearing that his intended victim is still alive seeks again to slay him by means of Morgan le Fay. But no woman can approach him without loving him, and Morgan le Fay enables him to overthrow all antagonists, until at length he wins the love of Alice the Fair Pilgrim. We have already had the counterpart of this tale in the story of Havelok the Dane.

Marhaus.

Tristram is pre-eminently the huntsman and the harper 'passing all other harpers that ever lived,' as are Hermes, Orpheus, Amphion, Pan, Sigurd, Volker, Tristram and and many more. He is also a fearless knight, and alone ventures to encounter Sir Marhaus, whom the king of Ireland sends to demand tribute from the king of 1 See Appendix III.

Cornwall. The combat is long and fierce; but at length Marhaus is smitten down by Tristram's sword, of which a piece is left sticking in his head. This piece is carefully stored away by the queen of Ireland, whose palace Marhaus reaches only to die. But Tristram, also, is sorely wounded by the arrows of Marhaus, which were poisoned. On this point it would be difficult to lay too great stress. Whatever may be said for African savages, it can never be maintained that the employment of poisoned weapons is a fit work for Christian chivalry, or that the fact of their being so used is credible. But what is to be said if we find this practice avowed without shame in the heroic legends of almost all lands? Poisoned arrows, as we have seen, are used by Herakles, and by him bequeathed to Philoktetes, who with one of them inflicts the deathwound of Paris. Nay they do not scruple to make use of poison in other forms. The poisoned robe of Medeia scorches to death the Corinthian Glaukê; the blood of Nessos seals the doom of Herakles; the messenger of Morgan le Fay is burnt to coals by the garment which she had been charged to lay at the feet of King Arthur. The significance of such incidents has been perhaps sufficiently pointed out already; and we need not, therefore, perplex ourselves if the use of poisoned weapons is attributed to heroes of early or medieval Christendom.

Tristram and

The relations which exist between Tristram, Isolte, and king Mark, precisely reproduce those which are found between Sigurd, Brynhild, and Gunnar in the the two Isoltes. Volsung tale. In Isolte Tristram finds the woman to whom he can give his whole heart, while Tristram is the only man who can win the love of Isolte, as Sigurd is the only hero who can wake the heart of Brynhild. But both are under the same doom. The bride is in each case, like Helen, the most beautiful of women, and she must in each case be wooed for another, and Mark of I See p. 103.

TRISTRAM AND ISOLTE.

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Cornwall in the Tristram story takes the place of Gunnar. The parallel may be traced even further. The naked sword which Sigurd places between himself and Brynhild, when he lies down to sleep by her side, is placed again by Tristram between himself and Isolte, and is used for the same purpose in the German story of the Two Brothers, the Norse legend of Big Bird Dan, and the Arabian Nights tale of Allah-ud-deen.' But if, like Sigurd, Tristram and Lancelot give their love to women who are, or must be, the wives of others, there yet remains in each case one whom each must wed, and as Gudrun is but a weaker reflexion of Brynhild, so is Elaine, the mother of Lancelot's child, a weakened image of Guenevere, and Isolte of the white hands a feeble likeness of Isolte the fair.2 So, again, the enmity between Gudrun and Brynhild is reproduced in the antipathy of the two Isoltes and the ill-concealed dislike of Guenevere for Elaine. Yet more, as Brynhild, on learning that Sigurd has wedded her in the form of Gunnar, declares that she will bring about his death, so Isolte the Fair, on hearing that Tristram has married her namesake, warns him that henceforth she is his deadly foe.

Tristram as a warrior.

As a warrior, Tristram belongs to the class of heroes who resemble Herakles or Samson. Like them, he is able single-handed to slay scores or hundreds. It matters not how many may assault him, or whether they do so secretly or openly. It makes no difference to Bellerophon whether the ambush into which he

1 These instances alone suffice to prove not only the common origin of these popular stories, but their nature, and justify the remark of Sir G. Dasent that these mythical deep-rooted germs, throwing out fresh shoots from age to age in the popular literature of the race, are far more convincing proofs of the early existence of these traditions than any mere external evidence.' See further Myth. of Ar. Nat. i. 281.

2 If Guenevere is reflected in Elaine, the daughter of King Pelles, as Gudrun wears the likeness of Brynhild, so is the story of the daughter of Pelles manifestly reproduced in the exquisite episode of the Fair Maid of Astolat, who also bears the name Elaine, the only difference being that the one would be, while the other really is, the mother of a child of Lancelot. In either case the spell which lies on the maiden is irresistible, as with Isolte the Fair it was impossible to withstand the witchery of Tristram's harping.