The prose _Lancelot_ is a vast compilation embracing what is really a series of romances, including a version of the Grail story, and is attributed, on good MS. authority, to the courtier Walter Map. If he be indeed its author, he is entitled to as high a pedestal in the Arthurian House of Fame as either Geoffrey or Chrétien. The difficulty of accepting his authorship of the work is not so much that he was a very active public man, as that the one book of which he is the indubitable author, the _De Nugis Curialium_,--a sort of commonplace book in which contemporary history finds a place side by side with fairy tales, and much other odd lore,--does not afford the slightest trace of interest in Arthurian story. Map’s name was used to give a literary passport to the notorious Goliardic poems gathered from many cryptic sources in the thirteenth century, and it may very well be that the ascription to him of so wholly laudable a work as the _Lancelot_ was dictated by some too modest scribe’s desire for high credentials. The other great love-story of Arthurian romance, that of Tristram and Iseult, is the most poetical and the most poignant in tragic interest of all the tales that came to be included in “the matter of Britain.” The story of Lancelot, with all its charm and pathos, betrays only too obviously its origin in the artificial conventions of “courtly love.” The story of Tristram, on the other hand, is one of sheer, over-mastering, natural passion,--the first really great story of passionate romantic love in modern literature. It is also, in its scene, its characters, its colouring, a distinctively Celtic tale. Tristram[100] is known to early Welsh tradition under the name of Drystan, the son of Tallwch, as a purely mythical hero; so also is Mark, or March ab Meirchion, who, in the first literary versions of the story, appears as King of Cornwall. The “proud, first Iseult, Cornwall’s queen,” “She who, as they voyaged, quaff’d With Tristram that spiced magic draught,” came from Ireland; while the other Iseult, “the patient flower, Who possess’d his darker hour, Iseult of the Snow-White hand,”[101] had her home in Brittany. The entire atmosphere of the story is that of the western Celtic seaboard, where lay the mystic land of Lyonesse, then “unswallowed of the tides,” and “the wind-hollowed heights and gusty bays Of sheer Tintagel, fair with famous days.”[102] Whence the French romancers derived the story it is impossible to say; but it is probable that it existed in the form of scattered popular lays long before the middle of the twelfth century. Fragments of two _Tristan_ poems by the Anglo-Normans, Béroul and Thomas, otherwise known as Thomas de Bretagne, have come down to us.[103] These two poems were the foundations, respectively, of the German metrical versions of the story by Eilhart von Oberge and Gottfried von Strassburg.