How much of all this is pure romance, how much is genuine Brythonic myth, is uncertain; and Merlin may be an old god degraded to a mere magician. Nennius and Geoffrey in their narratives suggest the well-known "Expulsion and Return" formula—the boy without a father, taunted when playing at ball, comes into favour because he shows why a castle cannot be built. This recalls Fionn's youth and how, overcoming the beings who destroyed a dún, he thus regained his heritage,52 Merlin's father was doubtless a god, but as "the son without a father" he recalls "the son of a sinless couple" in the story of Becuma, as well as Oengus, who was taunted with having no known father.^^ The incident of his disappearance of his own will suggests the legends of heroes sleeping in hills, just as his imprisonment by his mistress recalls that of Kronos in the British myth cited by Plutarch and the stories of mortals bound by the love of immortals to the other-world. While Merlin is connected with Arthur in Geoffrey and the Romances, he is not one of the throng around the hero in Kulhwch.
The debatable ground of the Grail romances cannot be discussed here in detail, especially as the episode did not enter into the earliest Perceval romances, of Welsh origin, and is lacking in the Welsh Peredur, written in full knowledge of the Perceval-Grail stories, and in the English Syr Percyvelle. Perceval probably succeeded Gawain as the hero of the Grail, to be superseded himself by Galahad. In Wauchier's continuation of Chrestien's Perceval Gawain rode beyond Arthur's kingdom through a waste land to a castle by the sea, where he saw a knight on a bier with a sword on his breast. A procession of clergy, singing the Vespers of the Dead, entered; and then followed a feast at which "a rich Grail" provided the food and served the guests, "upheld by none." Later Gawain saw a lance with a stream of blood flowing from it into a silver cup, and finally the King of the castle entered and bade Gawain fix the two halves of a broken sword together. Unable to do this, he failed in the Quest, but having asked
