MÉLANGES

THE PASSING OF KING ARTHUR TO THE ISLAND OF BRASIL IN A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY SPANISH VERSION OF THE POST-VULGATE ROMAN DU GRAAL*

A frequently overlooked Spanish Arthurian text is found in Lope Garcia de Salazar's Libro de ¡as bienandanzas e fortunas, a vast compendium of general and local historical lore, written between the years 147 1 and 1476 '. Within his history of Britain Lope García de Salazar interpolates fragments of the various sections of the thirteenth-century « pseudo-Robert de Boron cycle », or, as it is currently designated, the Post- Vulgate Roman du Graal2. The most striking feature of the

* This article was first presented as a paper before the IXth International Arthurian Congress, August 12th, 1969, Cardiff, Wales. I thank Professors Samuel G. Armistead, Edward Dudley, Francisco Esteve Barba, Pere Bohi- gas Balaguer, David Ross, and Enrique Martinez-Lopez for their helpful criticism and valuable references.

1. The compilation is preserved in a 1492 copy by Cristóbal de Mieres : MS Bibl. Acad. de la Hist. (Madrid) 9-10-2-2100, former 12-10-6-17. An edition of the complete MS has been published by Angel Rodríguez Herrero, Las bienandanzas e fortunas (Bilbao, 1967), 4 vol. (vol. 4 first published in 1955). Selections from the Arthurian portion, based upon the Bibl. Acad. de la Hist. MS and a sixteenth-century copy, MS Bibl. Nac. (Madrid) 1634, former G-4, appear in P. Bohigas Balaguer, Los textos españoles y gallego-por- lugiieses Je la Demanda del Santo Grial (Madrid, 1925), 130-143. A critical edition of the Arthurian portion, including the founding of Britain by Brutus of Troy, is in preparation.

2. On the renaming of the cycle see F. Bogdanow, « The Suite du Merlin and the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal », in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), 331-332, and The Romance of the Grail ; a Study of the Structure and Genesis of a Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Prose Romance (Manchester-New York, 1966), 10-11.

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