The main difficulty of our research lies in the fact that the Grail
legend consists of a congeries of widely differing elements--elements
which at first sight appear hopelessly incongruous, if not completely
contradictory, yet at the same time are present to an extent, and in a
form, which no honest critic can afford to ignore.
Thus it has been perfectly possible for one group of scholars, relying
upon the undeniably Christian-Legendary elements, preponderant in
certain versions, to maintain the thesis that the Grail legend is
ab initio a Christian, and ecclesiastical, legend, and to analyse
the literature on that basis alone.
Another group, with equal reason, have pointed to the strongly marked
Folk-lore features preserved in the tale, to its kinship with other
themes, mainly of Celtic provenance, and have argued that, while the
later versions of the cycle have been worked over by ecclesiastical
writers in the interests of edification, the story itself is
non-Christian, and Folk-lore in origin.
Both groups have a basis of truth for their arguments: the features
upon which they rely are, in each case, undeniably present, yet at the
same time each line of argument is faced with certain insuperable
difficulties, fatal to the claims advanced.
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