At that court the fairy, whether she be Morgain, the Lady of the Lake, or the Mistress of Graalent, Lanval, or Gawain, is at home, to be distinguished by nothing, save her superior beauty and wisdom, from the mortals who surround her. (It is scarcely necessary to remark that the fairies of the mediæval French romance writers are not the pigmies of the Teutonic sagas and of Shakespeare.) The rôle of these maidens is, generally speaking, a clearly defined one: they are immortals in search of a mortal love,[3] and in this character the parallels carry us far back to the earliest stages of Celtic tradition as preserved in ancient Irish romance. [3] To this rule _Nimue_, = the Lady of the Lake, appears to be the only exception. A special feature of these Breton _lais_, to be noted in this connection, is that they often combine two features which are more generally found apart, and which, as represented by their most famous mediæval forms, are wont to be considered by us as belonging to two different families of tradition, _i.e._, the _Tannhäuser_ legend (the carrying off of a knight by the queen of the other world), and the _Lohengrin_ legend (the rupture of a union between a mortal and an immortal, and the penalties incurred by the former by the transgression of a prohibition imposed by the latter). Two of the stories given in this volume, _Guingamor_ and _Lanval_, in common with others which will be found noted in Dr. Schofield's studies, combine both _motifs_. Now that such tales as these, in themselves independent popular folk-tales, sometimes became incorporated with, at other times by the loan of incident and feature strongly influenced, the Arthurian story, cannot I think be denied. Fairies such as the mistresses of _Guingamor_ and _Lanval_ were, as I have said above, residents or visitors at Arthur's court. Arthur himself is, like those knights, carried to Avalon; even as _Guingamor_ in the extremity of mortal weakness. That like Guingamor he was thought of as recovering, and reigning with undiminished vigour over his fairy kingdom, is clear from numerous references in mediæval romance. The authors of _La Bataille de Loquifer_ and _Ogier le Danois_ knew him as King of Avalon; in _Huon de Bordeaux_ he has been promised the reversion of Oberon's kingdom; in _Lohengrin_ he reigns with Parzival, in a mysterious other-world realm; he is as completely lord of Fairyland as any knight beloved of fairy queen. The boyhood of _Tyolet_ is the boyhood of Perceval; the mysterious stag guarded by lions wanders in and out of the mazes of Arthurian romance.