manners which are missing in the French poem. When Geraint is contending against the Knight of the Sparrow Hawk, the latter is incited to do valiantly by the exhortations of his dwarf, and Geraint is in like manner spurred on by the reproaches of the dispossessed earl. Herr Othmer remarks that this episode, wanting in Crestien, is contrary to the usages of French chivalry. Be this as it may, the combatants in the Welsh tale bear themselves as do rival warriors in the oldest Irish sagas. “If it be I that shall begin to yield this day, thou art to excite, reproach, and speak evil to me, so that the ire of my rage and anger may grow more upon me,” says Cuchullain to his charioteer, Laeg, in the Tain bo Cuailgné. And the Highland peasant of to-day, when he tells of the marvellous feats of Conall Gulban, places Duanach at his side to spur and egg him on.[1] Is it not more likely that the Welsh story-teller was following an early lay, describing a combat of Geraint’s, than that he introduced this Celtic trait into his translation from the French?
This is not the only instance in which ignorance of Celtic history and literature has led Herr Othmer astray. In proof that Geraint is derived from Crestien’s poem, he justly cites the fact that the Welshman took his heroine’s name, Enid, from the French poet; but when he explains this on the ground that “older Celtic tradition had no heroines”, he is wholly in the wrong. On the contrary, nowhere is the influence of the “heroine” more preponderating than in the Irish heroic sagas, nor do the epic traditions of any race offer heroines of more individual energy and character than Medhbh, and Deirdre, and Blathnaid, to cite the first names that come to hand.[2]
- ↑ Campbell, No. lxxvi.
- ↑ Indeed “Das Ewig-weibliche” in the early sagas moves Professor Zimmer, writing from the chaste shores of the Baltic, to a four-page-long lamentation over “den ausgeprägten sinnlichen Zug” in Irish literature (op. cit., 281 et seq.) Lest any should feel tempted to learn old Irish in consequence, I hasten to add that they would find the Irish sagas, pace Professor Zimmer, of by no means such an exciting character as, let us say, Lemprière.
