There is never any hint that the folk feed from
the Grail; the only suggestion of such feeding is in the 'Oiste,' by
which the father of the Fisher King (or the King himself) is
nourished.
In certain texts the separation of the two is clearly brought out; in
Joseph of Arimathea, for instance, the Fish caught by Brons is to be
placed at one end of the table, the Grail at the other. In Gawain's
adventure at the Grail castle, in the prose Lancelot, as the Grail is
carried through the hall "forthwith were the tables replenished with
the choicest meats in the world," but the table before Gawain remains
void and bare.[8] I submit that while the Grail is in certain phases
a food-supplying talisman it is not one of the same character as the
cauldrons of plenty; also while the food supply of these latter has
the marked characteristic of quantity, that of the Grail is remarkable
rather for quality, its choice character is always insisted upon.
The perusal of Professor Brown's subsequent study, Notes on Celtic
Cauldrons of Plenty and The Land-Beneath-the-Waves, has confirmed me
in my view that these special objects belong to another line of
tradition altogether; that which deals with an inexhaustible submarine
source of life, examples of which will be found in the 'Sampo' of the
Finnish Kalewala, and the ever-grinding mills of popular folk-tale.
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