The Night with the Lion is a tale with obvious roots in the tale of the Green Knight. As Zimmer points out, "Sir Owain, in his adventure, overcomes as a merely preliminary test the two trials that constituted the whole of the adventure of Sir Gawain," (130) namely, self-indulgent temptation and the fear of death. I can certainly see where these two streams crossed in the Ocean of Stories to create two interconnected but separate tales. But Zimmer suggests that the roots go even deeper, and that the symbolic elements such as the fountain and the lion come not from the confines of the island nation from which these stories were crafted, but from a time and place far removed.
"The symbols and tales of the preclassic Egypto-Babylonian civilizations were thus carried directly to the pre-Celtic and Celtic populations of Britain, Wales, and Ireland" (130). I suppose we see this in all of our stories, the great classical works of Homer and Dante always influencing literature, right up to today's Bestsellers. The earliest works continue to wash up onto the pages of our modern text as grains of sand, no longer whole, but still circulating in the ocean - still very much a part of it.
In this case, the lion "suggests the East, specifically Syria and Mesopotamia" (129). "And the symbol of the well yielding the precious water of life is one long familiar to the sunstricken countries of the Near East, which are forever haunted by the fear of drought and the danger of death by thirst." How funny, Zimmer points out, that a place as rainy as the land of the Celts would pick such a symbol as holy. But I think it illustrates a great point - that such tales are not only passed down from generation to generation, but are carried around the world. Even in a time when long distance travel was somewhat limited, along with precious commodities and religious ideals, stories were one of the things that were carried around the world. I think it speaks to the significance of stories in nearly every culture that these are the cultural treasures that continue to endure even today.
What I'm getting at here is that we think of these Celtic tales as distinctly from that part of the world, but when we take a closer look, some of the most important parts of these stories come from another culture entirely. What the Celts were able to do is integrate these Eastern grains of sand into their own ocean and produce their own enduring tales. Zimmer says "to this day the genius of the Celtic race remains second to none in its power to weave the magic tapestries of the everlasting mythical romance of the human heart" (130). But that tapestry contains fibers made elsewhere.
This is an important lesson for us, as English students. As readers and writers, we should know how deep the elements of our stories truly go. And we should not exclude elements from cultures we know little about or think have strange or naive literary histories. Taking a world view and incorporating cultures other than our own is how some of the greatest works have endured centuries of telling and retelling, as well as publishing and translation hurdles. Particularly with our ease of travel and the proliferation of texts and English translations of works outside our comfort zone it is impossible to simply claim ignorance of world literature. We should be doing exactly the opposite. We should be immersing ourselves in the stories we know little about and thinking about how they have influenced other texts, including our own!
Frye calls this the problem of "cliche mythology" (166) or "social mythology" (168). A combination of media, teachers, parents, etc. serve to water down these powerful mythologies until they are barely recognizable and, in a word, naive. Much like the disnification of the Grimm fairy tales, we choose to supplement a softer story for the hard truths exposed in these texts.
I asked myself "but how is this (watering down these ancient stories) different from taking the grains of sand from such stories and incorporating it into your own work, just as the Celts did with the stories that were relayed to them from the East." The best answer I can come up with is that they did take bits and pieces - a lion here, a magical fountain there, but they didn't water it down (no pun on fountain intended). They used the symbolic much in the same way I imagine the ancient Mesopotamians did. The symbolism stayed in tact and, therefore, the power of the lion remains. Even now, some 5,000 years (or so) later, this symbol persists in the minds of college students, like me. That's the kind of enduring work we all wish we could produce.
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