Having written about the Grail so often over the years I felt it was time to say something about Sir Thomas Malory’s version of this great tale in his magisterial book Le Morte d’Arthur. This work has inspired and influenced novelists, poets, playwrights and film-makers through the ages, and continues to be read to this day. As my own edition of the text, with marginal notes, will soon appear in a brand new version, this seemed a good moment to explore a single aspect of one of the greatest Arthurian works of all time.
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The Grail is as elusive today as it ever was. By its very definition it is something hard to find - an object of such rarity and power that many have sought it but very few found it - or claimed to have found it. Today, thanks to the writers of popular novels like Dan Brown, or historic detectives such as the authors of the Holy Blood & the Holy Grail, it is more popular than ever. Just why is not hard to understand. The Grail represents something just out of reach, the impossible quest that asks everything of its seekers.
Yet most of those who write about the Grail seem concerned not with the central idea of service, which stands at the heart of virtually every Grail text, but the whereabouts of a physical object, or totrace its mysterious origin, or to discover within the stories hidden patterns of history, lost windows ontothe past. Most of the theories have something of interest; most are entertaining, and some are genuinely inspiring. Yet it seems to me, that in seeking for this kind of answer to the riddle of the Grail these writers are looking in the wrong place.
During almost three decades spent pouring over dusty books and manuscripts, I have often feltlike one of King Arthur's knights, endlessly following overgrown pathways, delving ever more deeplyinto the great forest of Arthurian tradition. But in all of this time I have never once come across anything that indicates that the Grail itself ever actually existed in the physical world.
What I have found is the trace of an idea, a strand of belief in the infinite, a story of an endless quest for truth. The Grail, to borrow a word from the scientific community, is best understood as ameme, the cultural equivalent of a gene, an idea born at the beginning of human history, imbedded so deeply within our consciousness that we are scarcely aware of it, though it remains very much alive inus today.
This Grail is not a physical object, but rather an idea carried by history itself, and by some of our greatest works of literature, including the one we are going to be examining tonight. Above all, it isdream that all may follow, a lifelong journey that winds itself in and around our daily lives like a goldenthread.
Just how old is the Grail? The answer may come as a surprise to some - that it is a great deal older than the Christian era, and its terrain more extensive than the period when the Arthurian myths made it familiar throughout the Western world. In fact, the oldest references come not from the Celtic ormedieval Christian sources with which we are most familiar but from a far earlier time. In both classicalGreek myths and the Vedic hymns of ancient India, dating from many hundreds of years before the beginning of Christianity, there are references that point directly to the Grail; while in the Persian Empire an object displaying many of the qualities of the Grail also flourished. Even earlier, in the prehistoric world of our distant ancestors, it is possible to see a type of proto-Grail in the very first objects crafted by human hands.
There are three aspects of the Grail that we need to address if we are to understand why so many writers of the Medieval period –m including Sir Thomas Malory, chose to write about it. The first is thatin almost every version of the story the Grail is perceived not just as a sacred object, but as something which comes directly from a divine source, and which serves as a medium by which human beings can draw close to deity. This is the prime motivation in the medieval stories of the Grail Quest, where the knights who go forth in search of the marvellous vessel do so not only because it is a great adventure, but because they want to be closer to God.
The second factor, present in virtually every reference to the Grail, in both early and late, paganand Christian sources, is that what the vessel contains is often more important than the vessel itself.Thus, at the conclusion of the great medieval quests, when the Galahad drinks from the holy chalice, or looks into it, he discovers something within that connects him directly with a spiritual source.
The third aspect of the Grail in these stories is that it transforms those who come into its presence.Virtually all the sacred vessels of the kind to which the Grail belongs refer to vessels which give food, inspiration, even life itself to those who eat or drink from them, and that those who do so are changed forever.
This then, is the nature of the theme dealt with in the many dozens of Grail texts, both those that deal directly with the Quest or that that touch upon it only indirectly.
Here I want to look at one particular version of the Grail story, that which is to be found in the pages of one of the greatest books of the Middle Ages – and perhaps the first real English novel – the Morte D’Arthur of Sir Thomas Malory.
Malory came late to the Arthurian scene - the Morte wasn't published until 1485, sometime after the great early Grail texts of the 12th and 13th century - but its influence has been immense, and Malory's version of the Grail story is perhaps more accessible to us today than any of the more rarefied, theologically weighted versions that preceded it. As Malory himself said of his great hero Lancelot: ‘He was a great knight - for a sinful man.’ He might have said the same about himself - and about his book.
Le Morte D’Arthur is very possibly the greatest Arthurian romance of all, and as such it inherits the sum of all that had gone before it. It is still the source from which most of what we commonly know about Arthur derives. Robert Graves memorably referred to it as “an enchanted sea for the reader to swim about in, delighting at the random beauties of fifteenth-century prose rather than engrossed in the plot.” It has been quoted, misquoted, paraphrased, bowdlerised, extracted and re-told countless times for virtually every generation since its inception.
Few people will fail to find something to delight or inspire them within its pages. This story has everything: love, war, heroism, spiritual striving, comedy, tragedy, mystery - and a great cast of characters. And, in the hands of Thomas Malory, it becomes a rich, haunting and moving tapestry which is still, more than six hundred years after its composition, one of the finest pieces of writing in English to be found anywhere. T.E. Lawrence took it with him into the desert, along with the Odyssey of Homer, and consciously modelled his own life on that of Arthur's chivalry. Malory's book has the power to move us and thrill us just as much today as it moved and thrilled its first readers.
Original cover to my 2000 edition of Malory’s great book.
Painting by Anna-Marie Fergusson
Today we cannot even be sure whether he intended to write a single book or a cycle of stories. Even the title is problematical: Malory called it The Book of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; William Caxton, who published the book in 1485, also edited it, and with the prevalent high-handiness of editors then and now, decided it would sell better if it had a shorter and snappier title. He took the title from the final tale in the collection, 'The Death of Arthur', and gave it a French twist, so that it became Le Morte D'Arthur, by which name it remains known to this day. Caxton also decided to edit the original version, which appears to have been a loosely connected cycle of tales, into a continuous text, calling the tales 'Books' and dividing them into chapters, to which he then added rubrics, descriptive headers which described the content of each chapter and added unity to the whole.
One of the great 20th-century writers about the Grail, Charles Williams, said of Malory’s account of the Grail, that it turned a tedious parade of theological imagery into a powerful spiritual story. I believe that he was right in this, and that the reasons why Malory's particular version is so powerful can be found in the history of the man himself.
Imaginal image of Malory writing his great book in prison.
In fact, we know either surprisingly little – or possibly too much, depending on one’s point of view - about our author. Several contenders have been proffered as the ‘real’ Malory, each with its defenders and detractors. But one figure remains the most probable person that we can point to when it comes to identifying the character of Sir Thomas Malory.