ABSTRACT
The growth of northern Europe’s pagan religions was arrested in its prime when their practitioners came under the sway of Christianity. It was the Church rather than Roman culture that deprived the mythology of the Celts, the Germanic peoples, and the large pre-Celtic aboriginal population of France and the British Isles of its proper sphere of existence, sapping the vital energy of the old religion. Pre-Christian mythology, despoiled of its cult and ritual, was transformed into legend and poetry; it became secularized and seemingly uprooted and unpracticed, turning into an elusive adversary for the Church. Throughout the Middle Ages, it continued to offer the tender nourishment of the soul for which the Church’s teachings of salvation could not provide anything comparable. Using the images and figures of Celtic and pre-Celtic myths and legends, medieval man dreamed out the buried youth of his people’s prehistoric days. In the cycle of Arthur and the Grail, these myths and legends were transformed into the social romances of knightly and courtly Europe. That explains the immediate appeal these subjects hold for us, the descendants of the medieval and prehistoric peoples. Brought to life by poets time and again, the legends are of the same substance which can still be found in the depths of our soul.
