Arthur and Europe

I've wondered why the earliest and some of the greatest Arthurian legends were first written down by Frenchmen (Chretien de Troyes, eg). Turns out, the answer is pretty simple. As Richard Barber explains in his The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, "In the late eleventh century, the Normans overran the ancient border between Celt and Saxon lands, which had remained much the same for give centuries, and established lordships in south Wales; by Chretien's day, they had ventured as far as Ireland. In Wales, they came into contact with the local lords, and intermarried with their kin; so a bridge between the two cultures was created. Out of the Celtic past came tales and wonders of a magical heroic time. The Norman lords, descendants of the Vikings, had never encountered such spell-binding tales; and within a few decades these tales - by what means we cannot say �Ebecame know to a wider circle in Britain and on the Continent. Shadowy figures such as Bledri or Bledhericus, said to be a translator of such stories, elude us when we try to approach them, and we can only guess at some wildfire fashion for the new-found stories which carried them as far as Italy and Sicily within less than a century of the Norman invasion of England."

Barber's book is a remarkable summary of the grail through the centuries, and definitely the place to go if you're wondering about various medieval versions of the Arthurian stories, the Victorian fascination with Arthur and the grail (e.g., Tennyson and the pre-Raphaelites, leading to Eliot), Grail scholarship (Jung, Jessie Weston, Joseph Campbell), and recent films about Arthur and his adventures (everything from Excalibur to Monty Python). I found Barber somewhat disappointing as a cultural history. Though he explains the significance of the grail to individual poets, scholars, and mystics, he doesn't give sufficient attention, in my judgment, to the large historical and cultural meaning of the grail at various times (e.g., how Arthurian lore aided and abetted Victorian nationalism and imperialism). But as a compendium of the facts concerning the grail, this is about as good as a single volume can get.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, September 13, 2004 at 01:29 PM

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