Myths and Dreams by Edward Clodd

Author:Edward Clodd [Clodd, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781411465053
Publisher: BarnesNoble
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

So Charlemagne reposes beneath the Untersberg, waiting for the appointed time to rise and do battle with anti-Christ; Tell slumbers ready-panoplied to save Switzerland when danger threatens; the hero-deity of the Algonquins, when he left the earth, promised to return, but has not, wherefore he is called Glooskap, or the Liar; St. John sleeps at Ephesus till the last days are at hand; and the Church militant awaits the return of her Lord at the Second Advent.

The comparative mythologists say that Arthur is a myth, pure and simple, a variant of Sigurd and Perseus; the winning of his famous sword but a repetition of the story of the Teutonic and Greek heroes; the gift of Guinevere as fatal to him as Helen to Menelaus; his knights but reproductions of the Achaian hosts—much of which may be true; but the romance corresponded to some probable event; it fitted in with the national traditions. There were struggles between the Kelts and subsequent invaders—Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes. There were brave chieftains who led forlorn hopes or fought to the death in their fastnesses. There were, in the numerous tribal divisions, petty kings and queens ruling over mimic courts, with retinues of knights bent on chivalrous, unselfish service. These were the nuclei of stories which were the early annals of the tribe, the glad theme of bards and minstrels, and from which a long line of poets to the latest singer of the Idylls of the King have drawn the materials of their epics. The fascination which such a cycle of tales had for the people, especially in days when the ballad was history and poetry and all literature rolled into one, was so strong, that the Church wisely imported an element which gave loftier meaning to the knightly life, and infused religious ardour into the camp and court. To the stories of Tristram and Gawayne, already woven into the old romance, she added the half-Christian, half-pagan, legend of the knights who left the feast at the Round Table to travel across land and sea that they might free the enslaved, remove the spell from the enchanted, and deliver fair women from the monsters of tyranny and lust, setting forth on what in her eyes was a nobler quest—to seek and look upon the San Graal, or Holy Vessel used by Jesus at the Last Supper, and into which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood and water that streamed from the side of the crucified Jesus. This mystic cup, in which we have probably a sacrificial relic of the old British religion imported into the Christian incident with which it blended so well, floated, according to Arthurian legend, suddenly into the presence of the King and his Round Table knights at Camelot as they sat at supper, and was as suddenly borne away, to be henceforth the coveted object of knightly endeavour. Only the baptized could hope to behold it; to the unchaste it was veiled: hence only they among the knights who were pure in heart and life vowed to go in quest of the San Graal, and return not until they had seen it.

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