semi-oriental mysteries, for which they were
later so frightfully misused, certainly come into play) with food which
is at once of the body and of the soul. Thus the Keltic Peredur, bent
upon massacring the Gloucester witches to avenge his uncle, was turned
into a saintly knight, seeking throughout a more and more perfect life
for the kingdom of the Grail: the Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes, the
Parzifal of Wolfram von Eschenbach, whom later romance writers (wishing
to connect everything more closely with Arthur's court) replaced by the
Sir Galahad of the "Morte d'Arthur," while the guest of the Grail became
a sort of general mission of several knights, a sort of spiritual
crusade to whose successful champions Percival, Bors, and Galahad, the
Middle Ages did not hesitate to add the arch-adulterer Launcelot.

Thus did the Arthurian tales answer the requirements of the languid,
dreamy, courtly, lady-serving and religiously mystic sons and grandsons
of those earlier Crusaders whose aspirations had been expressed by the
rough and solemn heroes of Carolingian tales. The Carolingian tales were
thrown aside, or were kept by the noble mediaeval poets only on condition
of their original meaning being completely defaced by wholesale
admixture of the manners and adventures belonging to the Arthurian
cycles. The paladins were forced to disport themselves in the same
fairyland as the Knights of the Round Table; and many mediaeval poems the
heroes of which, like Ogier of Denmark and Huon of Bordeaux, already
existed in the Carolingian tales, are in reality, with their romantic
loves, their useless adventures, their Morgana's castles and Oberon's
horns, offshoots of the Keltic stories, which were as rich in every kind
of supernatural (being, in fact, pagan myths turned into fairy tales) as
the genuine Carolingian subjects, whose origin was entirely historical,
were completely devoid of such things. Arthur and his ladies and
knights: Guenevere, Elaine, Enid, Yseult, Launcelot, Geraint, Kay,
Gawain, Tristram, and Percival-Galahad, were the real heroes and
heroines of the courtly nobles and the courtly poets of this second
phase of mediaeval life. The Teuton Charlemagne, Roland and Oliver were
as completely forgotten of the poets who met in that memorable combat of
the Wartburg, as were the Teuton Sigurd and Dietrich. And if the
Carolingian cycle survived, however much altered, I think it must have
been thanks to the burghers and artizan