Tuesday, 28 November 2017
The nature of the Holy Grail
My mother-in-law sent me recently a link to an article about the Holy Grail. Back in another life, I used to be an academic and a medievalist at that, specialized in the Arthurian legend and the work of Chrétien de Troyes, who was the first to introduce the Grail in Le Conte du Graal. It remains to this day my favourite Arthurian romance. In the story, the Grail is not a cup like in subsequent versions and the many adaptations, but a plate or a bowl, to contain large amount of food. While it is mentioned that a wafer is in it, so there are associations with the Eucharist, there is no explicit association with Jesus's death and his blood. Its origins remain obscure, as well as its ultimate purpose. Perceval/Percival does not ask the question that could potentially reveal its nature: "Whom does the grail serve?" The romance being unfinished, we will never truly know about its core subject, the rest is pure speculations. My bet, and I might be wrong, is that what the Holy Grail is was never meant to be revealed. It was meant as a MacGuffin: it makes the story flow, it creates tensions and motivations for the character, but otherwise we do not know because we do not need to know. Moral of this post: sometimes I miss academia.
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3 comments:
What about the view that the Grail is the continuation of the ancient pagan image of Cerridwen's Cauldron, the womb of the Great Goddess, the source of all life? That's my fave interpretation. There is much that is pagan about the Arthurian legends.
It most likely has Pagan roots, but by the time it became what is known as Arthurian literature, then the Pagan elements are seriously modified that it has become almost alien to the legend and I wonder if we don't read too much into them. Furthermore, too often Pagan interpretations are intoxicated by a modern vision (and practice!) of Paganism that is itself foreign to the source material and would have been utterly incomprehensible by the culture the legend comes from. By the time Chrétien de Troyes writes his story, how much of the Great Goddess, the Cauldron and what have you is there in the Grail? My bet is: not a whole lot. And in the end, it tells us fairly little, if anything, about the text as it stands.
Oh yes, but I didn't mean that Chretien de Troyes or any of the other Christian interpreters of the Grail legend would be aware of its pagan roots. Roots are just that -- antecedents, foundations, the past on which the present is built. Their traces remain but are heavily overlaid, in this case, with a Christian interpretation.
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