By Malcolm Guite
Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite is not only a captivating story, it is also a work of true scholarship. In this excerpt from its appendices, Guite gives us a glimpse into the painstaking research behind his telling of this remarkable tale.
Introduction and Overview
This book is the first installment of a project I have contemplated for many years: an epic retelling of the legends of King Arthur.
I have loved these stories since I was a child, and I heard them from my mother who was a great storyteller herself, but also had extensive knowledge of the mediaeval sources, especially the great gathering of those stories and their rendering into Middle English by Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth century. So, the stories that first moved me were not some sanitised Hollywood version, but the real thing: haunting, numinous, continuously suggestive of the holy and beautiful reality of God and His saints and angels shimmering through the fabric of the stories of the knights with all their aspirations and all their human flaws. At the heart of those early versions of the stories is the Holy Grail itself: the presence of Christ and His gospel, moving as an unbearably beautiful light through the mists and magic of pre-Christian Celtic Britain, drawing even the wizards and the faery folk towards Himself, baptising the imagination of our ancestors, fulfilling and disclosing the true meaning of our earliest stories.
As a student at Cambridge I rediscovered these stories in their original sources and became aware of how so many modern versions of them seemed to marginalise or even erase the deep Christian impulse that had formed their original telling, and as a poet I longed to restore that lost element in the hope that a new telling might baptise the imagination of the growing generation brought up in a secular world, trapped in “the immanent frame” and deprived of their inheritance in the gospel.
I saw how beautifully writers like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had reawakened our desire for the marvellous and mysterious, and how their stories, often drawing subtly on Arthurian motifs, had reached out with truth and beauty to so many who had scarcely known, until they turned the pages of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, how much they longed for these tales of imagination and how these tales reawakened what Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, called that “inconsolable secret,” our yearning for the “far-off country,” which we glimpse when, for a while, the veil is lifted and we see how God moves in and through His creation and draws us back to Him.
I wrote the concluding chapter for the major study The Inklings and King Arthur. In that chapter I wrote about Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams, saying:
Though all three of these writers were more than capable of making their own imaginary worlds, and two of them did so with unparalleled success, all three were nevertheless drawn again and again to the numinous worlds of Camelot and Avalon and to the intriguing and tragic figure at their heart: Arthur himself, the once and future king.
I wondered then if I might be called to take up the tale myself, learning from these masters, and make an epic poem that would appeal to many of their readers and continue their vital mission to “slip past the watchful dragons” of secularism and awaken again in the modern world that openness to beauty and mystery which prepares the heart for the coming of Christ.
In That Hideous Strength, the novel by Lewis in which Merlin returns and finds there is still a “Pendragon,” an Arthur figure, in Britain, Lewis suggests that there is a kind of “good haunting,” that modern Britain, for all its apparent shallowness and apostasy, still remembers, and can respond to the deep meanings and values of these old tales: the courtesy, the ritual, the sacramental vision. So Lewis writes:
. . . something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred, behind every Milton, a Cromwell: A nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers . . . Don’t you feel it? The very quality of England. If we’ve got an ass’s head it is by walking in a fairy wood. We’ve heard something better than we can do, but can’t quite forget it . . . don’t you see it in everything English—a kind of awkward grace, a humble, humorous incompleteness?
I remembered this passage when, at the death of Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, Britain suddenly remembered herself, remembered why we have the hallowed Abbey of Westminster, why we have the beautiful, symbolic rituals and gestures of immemorial tradition in church and state. People who’d been told they only had an attention span of five minutes queued for days to walk out of a noisy world and, in awestruck silence, stand and genuflect in the ancient chamber where Her Majesty lay with a guard of honour, with bright swords, with the fabled beauty of the crown resting on her coffin, laid aside for the greater glories of Heaven. It felt like a kind of national awakening, a national remembering of the true Christian Kingdom of Logres that always haunts modern Britain, and it filled me with hope: hope that I might make a poem that would reach down to that root, re-kindle that memory, and awaken us even further.
But there is something more remarkable about the power of the Arthurian legends. Yes, in one sense they are a British national epic and a deep root into the memory of these islands, but in another sense, they reach much further out, more widely, to other nations and to humanity itself. This archetypal tale stirs people deeply all over the world. Indeed, the early sources of the story are written in many languages—in Welsh, in Latin, in French, in Anglo-Norman, in German. In the Middle Ages the whole of Europe fell in love with the stories of Arthur. Saint Francis was moved by them when he wanted as a young man to be a knight, Dante tells of how Paulo and Francesca were smitten by the tales of Guinevere and Lancelot, Percivale of Wales became the Parzifal of high Germanic art, and in Spain, Cervantes’ Don Quixote was inspired to his adventure by tales of the Knights of the Round Table.
As well as its resonance across Europe, the story of Camelot has had an enduring appeal to English-speaking people across the world. Mark Twain imagined A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and there is certainly something in the legend of Camelot—its holy and mysterious foundation, even its fall and foundering amidst our sin and brokenness, and especially its role in the coming and the vision of the Grail—which still calls out and reaches deep into hearts and minds in North America, but sadly the versions they get have often been shorn of the very elements of grace and mystery which make the story worth telling. My aim is to make a poem that restores the spiritual elements that have been shorn away and renews their deepest meaning.
The whole poem, if I live to complete it, will be a series of twelve “books” (it is a tradition, following Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Tennyson, that an epic consists of twelve books) which will come out in series, in four volumes, each containing three “books.” Galahad and the Grail is the first of these volumes. It begins, as Aristotle suggested epics should begin, in medias res, in the midst of things, with this cycle of ballads telling the legend of the Holy Grail, the inner meaning of all that came before and all that follows afterwards.
Having given you some account of my own “take,” my own understanding of the cluster of stories that make up “the Matter of Britain,” I shall also give you a brief overview of the major sources for these stories, the Arthurian tradition, and then an account of the particular sources I have drawn from for this volume and how I have used and developed them.
The Tradition
There is no single source, no definitive version of this story, and that is what keeps it alive and makes it exciting. It is a story, or rather a cycle of stories, we can see developing over centuries. Each retelling draws on its predecessors, unfolds and enlarges what was already implicit, and also brings in new elements, episodes, and characters. As we trace the history of the earliest Arthurian sources we can see a move from chronicle to romance, from romance to faery tale, and finally a movement into the deepest mysteries of spirit and faith. The Arthuriad, the “Matter of Britain,” is, to borrow one of Tolkien’s images, a “tree of tales.” The leaves you turn in this book are just a few of the fresh leaves that the great tree puts out with every generation.
Earliest References
The earliest references to a figure who might have been the historical Arthur come in early Latin chronicles. The first is Gildas, a British monk (British, not English, for he is writing about how, after the Romans left, the original Britons found themselves fighting the invading Saxons—the very people who would later become the “English”).
Gildas wrote De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Downfall and Conquest of Britain) around AD 547, largely as a denunciation of the sins of the Britons which had brought the disaster of conquest upon them. After detailing various losses to the invaders, he speaks of an heroic figure, a Romanised Christian Briton who for a while turned the tide. Gildas names this man as Ambrosius Aurelianus.
But later, the Welsh monk Nennius, writing around AD 800 in his Historia Brittonum (The History of the Britons), identified him as “the magnanimous Arthur.” Nennius also introduces for the first time the vital figure of Merlin, though he would not be given that name until Geoffrey of Monmouth took up the tale in the twelfth century. At this stage, Nennius confusingly names him as Ambrose, but he tells a story that will later become part of the Merlin legend: that he had a human mother but an unearthly father and that he is able to unveil and reveal hidden truths. For he shows Vortigern (an earlier king) two sleeping dragons, one red and one white, and how the red dragon represents the Britons and the white dragon the invading Saxons, and how, at the coming of Arthur, the red dragon will regain the kingdom from the white. So we see at this early stage the magical, fabulous, and folkloric elements entering the tale and being woven in with the history.
Geoffrey of Monmouth
The next chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth, is the one who gathers these stories together, tells us much more about Arthur and Merlin, and really establishes the Arthurian legend. Because of the immense popularity of his book, he spread the story and the fame of Arthur all across Europe. His Historia Regnum Brittaniae (The History of the Kings of Britain) was finished around 1138, and, together with his later Vita Merlini (The Life of Merlin), it became a foundational text for almost every subsequent development and retelling.
It is clear that Geoffrey had read both Gildas and Nennius, for he draws on and refines what they had to say, but he clearly had a great deal more material than they had access to. He tells us that his source was a book written in the British language and given to him by his friend the Archdeacon Walter. No trace of this book remains, and scholars are divided as to whether it was just a literary fiction, something invented by Geoffrey to give his marvellous stories some historical verisimilitude, or whether he did indeed possess and translate some Welsh or possibly Bretagne source which has been lost over the centuries. Of course, he may also have been drawing on an oral tradition of folk tale and poetry, for he is writing in Wales where storytelling was a highly developed and poetic art, and his family came from Brittany, a place that is also alive with the traditions and legends of Arthur. What is certain is that Geoffrey is the first of the sources available to us to introduce many of the most important elements of the story of Arthur as we have come to know it. As we have seen, it is Geoffrey who names Merlin for the first time, identifying him with a Welsh prophet-poet called Myrddin whom we know from other Welsh sources. Geoffrey’s Arthur is without question a Christian king, and yet he is still in touch with magical and mystical elements and stories that clearly come from an earlier pre-Christian Celtic world. It is the bringing of these elements, through story and imagination, into the light of Christ—this baptism as it were of the pre-Christian imagination—that gives the Arthurian tradition some of its distinctive flavour and certainly its height and depth. Holly Ordway brings this out very well in her account of the mediaeval sources published in The Inklings and King Arthur. In a helpful summary with some very apt quotations from the original sources, she writes:
Geoffrey develops the reign of Arthur . . . complete with dialogue and circumstantial detail. The Christian elements are reinforced alongside elements that have a Welsh flavour: in battle Arthur carries “a circular shield named Pridwen, on which there was painted a likeness of the blessed Mary, Mother of God, which forced him to think perpetually of her. He girded on his peerless sword called Caliburn, which was forged in the Isle of Avalon. A spear named Ron graced his tight hand: long, broad in the blade and thirsty for slaughter.”
Arthur marries Guinevere and goes to war; Geoffrey is the first to give a detailed account of Arthur’s continental campaigns. In the Historia, Arthur then sets up court at Caerleon in a fashion that is a precursor to the courtly depiction of Camelot in later writings. “Britain had reached such a standard of sophistication,” Geoffrey writes, “that it excelled all other kingdoms in its general affluence, the richness of its decorations, and the courteous behaviour of its inhabitants . . . The women became chaste and more virtuous and for their love the knights were ever more daring.”
These judiciously chosen quotations, embedded in Holly Ordway’s summary account of the Historia, make it clear how an Arthurian tradition which had only surfaced briefly in historical chronicles was now moving from the chronicle genre to something more recognisably like romance. And indeed, the many writers who used Geoffrey’s Historia as their starting point made that transition completely and created a new romance genre of intriguing interlacing stories of courtly love, chivalry, and Celtic magic and marvel.
Welsh sources: The White Book and The Red Book
Before we turn to these French sources, which clearly respond to and develop Geoffrey’s Historia, we must look briefly at a Welsh book which came to be known, in Lady Charlotte Guest’s famous translation, as The Mabinogion. This survives in two mediaeval manuscripts, the White Book of Rhydderch or Llyfr Gwyn Rhydderch, written c. 1350, and the Red Book of Hergest or Llyfr Coch Hergest, written about 1382–1410. Both these manuscripts were written well after Geoffrey of Monmouth, but scholars believe they contain material which is itself much earlier, or at the latest contemporary with, Geoffrey. The story, which links with the Arthurian tradition and is found in different forms in both books, is called Culhwch and Olwen.
This is the earliest Arthurian prose text we have in Welsh, though Arthur’s court is really a background and launch point for other adventures, some of which are also told by the French writer Chrétien de Troyes, and it is not clear who borrowed from whom or if they are both working with another source text which we have lost. Holly Ordway helpfully summarises what is distinctive about this text:
Although Arthur has a minor role here, it is interesting to note the way that his story is already intersecting with folklore and other story traditions in interesting and imaginatively fruitful ways. Here we see Arthur as part of a decidedly fantastical Celtic story, with both court and characters sketched larger than life—sometimes literally as with Kei, of whom it is said that “He could be as tall as the tallest tree in the forest when he pleased.”
Some French Sources
The widespread dissemination of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia kindled the imaginations of a whole host of named and anonymous French writers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They took up the tale from Geoffrey and developed it in all sorts of marvellous ways. Many of the features of the story which we now regard as essential make their first appearance in the works of these writers, including the first mention of the Round Table and the introduction and development of the quest for the Holy Grail. The Grail itself is given an astonishing backstory which reaches deep into John’s Gospel and also draws on the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which, although not part of the official New Testament canon, nevertheless had wide circulation in the Middle Ages. These French romancers also introduced two vital new characters into the story: Lancelot, the almost perfect knight and yet a tragically flawed hero, and finally Galahad, Lancelot’s son, in whom the tradition of chivalry finally flowers at last into true holiness, and who achieves the Grail in his father’s stead and brings about, in Tolkien’s famous term, a eucatastrophe out of the catastrophe of his father’s sin.
The most significant of these writers is Chrétien de Troyes, writing in the second half of the twelfth century, probably between 1150 and 1190. Chrétien wrote five Arthurian romances: Erec et Enide, Cligès, Lancelot, Yvain, and Perceval: the Story of the Grail. As well as Geoffrey’s Historia, Chrétien had other, possibly Welsh, sources which we do not possess. Some of the stories he tells are also in The Mabinogion and there is no way of knowing if The Mabinogion is the direct source for Chrétien or if there is some other collection of tales, now lost, which is a source for both the Welsh and the French renderings. Whatever the case, it is Perceval that introduces the quest of the Grail (at this point not yet the Holy Grail). Perceval finds the Grail Castle, with its mysterious Fisher-King, and witnesses a procession with a beautiful dish and a spear dripping blood, but fails to ask the vital question: “What does this mean?” As a result of this failure, the Grail itself and the whole castle disappears, and Perceval tries in vain to find it again. At this point the book ends with so much left unresolved. As Richard Barber writes in his introduction to Legends of the Grail:
This unfinished story by one of the most highly regarded writers of the day aroused great interest among other authors in north-eastern France and the neighbouring countries. It seems almost certain that Chrétien had intended the spear and dish carried in the Grail procession to echo the Last Supper and Crucifixion, and there is no doubt about this once we come to the writers who elaborated and eventually completed Chrétien’s story. Over the next forty years, four continuations of the story of the Grail were written, while other authors prefer to start out again and retell the story from the beginning.
Two of these continuations are especially important, from my perspective, because I have drawn on them in this retelling, and because parts of them were also included in Malory’s great translation and gathering of so much of this material in his Le Morte D’Arthur, which, as we shall see, is the main source and inspiration for my own retelling.
The first of these continuations is from Robert de Boron. Whereas for Chrétien the Grail is an episode, one amongst many wonders and mysteries, for de Boron the Grail is central: it is the entire point and hinge of the story and the hidden focus and purpose of the establishment of Camelot and the quests of the knights. Also, in The Romance of the History of the Grail, probably written sometime between 1200 and 1210, de Boron takes the story right back to the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection, and makes Joseph of Arimathea, whom we encounter in John’s Gospel, a central character. It is Joseph of Arimathea who receives guardianship of the Grail, the vessel used in the last supper, he who collects Christ’s blood in it after the crucifixion, he who is honoured by the risen Christ, having, as John tells us, lent his own tomb to bury Christ, and he who eventually, after many adventures and vicissitudes, brings the Grail to Britain and establishes a group of keepers of the Grail centred on a Fisher-king who will preserve it and revere it until the coming of the Grail Knight.
The second important text from this period, which I have consulted as an original source as well as drawing on Malory’s use of it, is The Quest of the Holy Grail (La Queste del Saint Graal), one of the three prose romances in French that are usually referred to as the Vulgate Cycle, or the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. This anonymous book was probably written around 1190 and scholars believe its author was probably a Cistercian monk. This is because it has a high sacramental theology. It carries the excitement of those theological developments which the church really began to focus on and try to define: the way in which Christ, His body and His blood, and in that body and blood all He is and does for our salvation, are really made present in the sacrament of Holy Communion. The story explores and delights in that deep mystical and sacramental theology, but, as a story, it also does something radical with it. In mediaeval Catholicism only the priests held and received the wine from the chalice, a mystery which took place in the holy sanctuary, by the altar, where the laity were not permitted to enter. Lay people just received a wafer on their tongue, brought to them in the nave of the church by a priest. But The Quest of the Holy Grail invites us into an imaginative supposal, a radical and daring supposal for the time, almost a thought experiment: What if Christ, in His sovereign freedom, chose to bring His own sacrament out of the enclosure of the church’s sacred space? What if the Grail were to appear in the midst of a king’s secular court? What if in some castle somewhere a knight, an unordained person, were to encounter the blood of Christ? Might we even imagine a procession of the holy vessel borne not by ordained men, but by women, by the Grail maidens? How would that be? Could the best of secular culture, even at its highest, survive such an unexpected encounter with the absolutely holy? Would any knight, however brave and chivalrous, be worthy? These are the questions, opened through the imagination of a story-teller, which the Queste del Saint Graal explores. And it is partly in answer to these questions that the Queste introduces a final development of the story: the coming of Galahad. This is the book in which Galahad first appears and takes up where both Perceval and his father Lancelot left off. The author of this book wants to show that however great Lancelot was as a secular knight, however great his prowess as a warrior and as a courtly lover, something is still missing. True knighthood must have a profoundly spiritual dimension, indeed a spiritual inner core, if it is to have, at last, a redeeming and transforming encounter with the pure holiness of the living God made present to us in Christ through the Holy Grail. This book, together with de Boron, is central to my understanding of the Grail, and, as we shall see, it was also vital for Charles Williams’s understanding, which is why he always referred to the Grail by its title in this book, the “Graal.”
England takes up the tale again: Some Middle English Sources
So far the stories of Arthur have been written in Welsh, in Latin, in French, and even, with Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, in German, but the time came when they were also being told in the vernacular English. This is a more remarkable development than it might seem, for of course, according to Gildas, Nennius, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, it was the Anglo-Saxons, the ancestors of the English, whom Arthur fought and defeated to establish his kingdom—this is partly why, through the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Arthur was so popular with the Normans, who had also fought and defeated the English in 1066. But he was too good a hero, and the stories around him were too compelling, for the English to miss out on them, and soon they made him their own. It starts with the poet Layamon translating a French retelling by Wace in a long (sixteen-thousand-line!) poem called Brut. The poem is a whole history of Britain, which Brut, a refugee from the Trojan War, was supposed to have founded, so only part of it is about Arthur. But that part expands considerably on the earlier sources and gives us some entirely new material: stories that were of deeper interest to the English, including, of great interest to lovers of Tolkien, that Arthur is given gifts at his birth by the elves and dwelt amongst them for a while, and that his sword Caliburn is elf-made. There is also an emphasis, which is deep in the English tradition, of elegy and heroic defeat. So a great deal is made of Arthur’s final battle brought on by the treachery of Mordred, and Layamon also gives us, for the first time, Merlin’s prophecy that Arthur will come again.
This elegiac strain is taken up again and given even more emphasis by two anonymous poems, both called Le Morte Arthur, one in stanzas, a form derived from French and Italian, but the other written in the deeply English alliterative verse form. It is this Alliterative Morte Arthur, written around 1400, which is incorporated sometimes verbatim into Malory’s great work which shares its title, and this is also the poem that inspired and lies behind Tolkien’s unfinished Arthurian poem The Fall of Arthur. Once more the story is built around slender hope and extraordinary courage in the face of almost inevitable defeat.
And finally, before we come to the full flowering of this whole tradition in Malory’s great compendium, there is the famous alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
This poem, which survives in a single manuscript from 1400, is a literary masterpiece and has been well translated into contemporary English by Tolkien himself, and more recently by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage. It is written in alliterative metre and in a north-west English dialect, part of a local alliterative revival that self-consciously distanced itself from the Frenchified court and the rhyming couplets of Chaucer, though in fact there is a little rhymed quatrain at the end of each alliterative stanza called by the scholars a “bob and wheel.” This poem takes up the splendour and beauty but also the “trawthe” or integrity at the heart of Arthur’s court, and, as many writers had done before and would do afterwards, avails itself of the idea of the knights going out from court on quests and challenges as a point of departure for every kind of marvellous story. I say more about this source in the volume of my own poem which deals with the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table, but here I will just remark that, like the Queste del Saint Graal, the story becomes a way of exploring, and almost testing to destruction, the deepest codes of chivalry, especially of courtesy, honesty, and truth-telling, and it is also imbued with a deep sense of Christian faith. Indeed the poem ends, as Holly Ordway observes, “with a prayer that comes naturally from the entire ethos of the poem: ‘Now that bear the crown of thorne/He bring us to his blysse! Amen. (Now let our Lord, thorn-crowned/ bring us to perfect peace. Amen.’)”
Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
The crowning glory of all this mediaeval English Arthurian tradition, and also the first translation and drawing together of so many of the individual sources we have traced in Latin and French, is the work by Sir Thomas Malory which Caxton published in 1485, the first Arthurian book to appear in print, as Le Morte D’Arthur. From 1485 to 1934 Caxton’s book was the only known version of Malory’s text. It is this version, a massive single tome which Caxton divided into twenty-one “books,” that became the source material for almost every subsequent telling of the story, including my own. This is the version to which Tennyson turned for his Arthuriad, The Idylls of the King, and which T. H. White drew from, sometimes very playfully, for his twentieth-century prose retelling, The Once and Future King. In 1934, however, there was an exciting discovery in Winchester of another version of Malory’s text—now known as the Winchester Manuscript. Caxton said he was printing from a text from Malory, now lost, but this new manuscript turned out not to be Caxton’s lost manuscript book, but a significantly different version of the material, yet still clearly an early text. It was edited and published by the scholar Eugène Vinaver in 1947 under the title The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. The title change is significant. Vinaver argued that what Caxton published as Le Morte D’Arthur was never intended by Malory to be a single work, but was actually a series of different translations, formed into separate books, sometimes with overlapping texts and different accounts of the same events, such as we have in the original French and Latin sources. It’s a fascinating playground for scholars, but I decided, for my own work, to stay with Caxton’s original. However, Vinaver’s insights have helped me in my selection of material, in simplifying and clarifying, avoiding doubled episodes, and some confusion that arises from reading Caxton, who doesn’t seem to have realised that what he presents as separate episodes in sequence are in fact different versions of the same incident. For example, there are in his Grail stories not only the great mystical ship of Solomon but also several other ships, including one that is clearly not a real ship at all but an allegory of the Christian Faith itself—a ship of faith—which only the faithful can enter. It seemed to me better to have a single ship in the story, Solomon’s ship, and to allow the story itself to hint at some of the allegorical and symbolic qualities of that ship. Vinaver’s scholarship set me free in a sense to do this—to select and clarify, to choose a particular path through the dense and sometimes confusing thickets of interlacing story with which Caxton’s volume presents us. But I still used Caxton as my primary text, not only because it contains wonderful renderings of so many earlier sources, but because it is the classic version, the one for all the readers in the centuries since, not just the scholars.
The Caxton text is wonderful, but it is also vast and daunting, and many a reader, rather like the knights errant whose adventures they are following, has become lost in the labyrinthine maze, the dark and enchanting forests of his prose. But now, at last, the great Arthuriad was in print; it was available to so many more people than any mediaeval manuscript, each of which had to be laboriously copied by hand, could ever be. It was Caxton’s decision to publish his version of Malory so early, at the dawn of the age of printing, that meant the tales of Arthur, of the Knights of the Round Table, of the mysterious quest of the Grail, of the tragic end of all the hopes of Camelot, and of Arthur’s passing and the mysterious promise of his return, became embedded in the heart of the English literary tradition and in the hearts and imaginations of so many English readers over the centuries.
My Personal Approach to the Sources for This (Re)telling
It remains for me to say something of my own approach to these sources for this volume, for this particular retelling of the Grail legends, and to place myself, if I can, in the tradition of telling and retelling since the publication of Malory’s book in 1485.
As I have already mentioned, Malory has been my primary source, but I have also gone behind him to draw on some of his own sources (especially Robert de Boron and the Queste del Saint Graal). I have of course also been conscious of my great predecessors since Malory, especially of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the monumental Victorian poetic retelling, and also of the way this story was rediscovered and in some sense remade by the great high modernist poets of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot, obliquely, in The Wasteland, whose very title draws on a deep Grail theme, and Charles Williams, many of whose writings are shot through with Arthurian motifs, but especially his early Grail novel War in Heaven, his extraordinary two volumes of Arthurian poetry Talliesin Through Logres and In the Region of the Summer Stars, and of course the fragment of his unfinished masterpiece, The Figure of Arthur, a prose account of the history and meaning of the whole Arthuriad, but especially the Grail stories, which Lewis published posthumously for him, together with Lewis’s own commentary on Williams’s poems in Arthurian Torso in 1948.
Another great modern poet whose work and whose whole approach has influenced me deeply is David Jones, and I have included some very salient lines from Jones in the epigraphs which preface my work. T. H. White is clearly another important twentieth-century Arthurian writer, and though his approach is radically different from my own, I have taken some suggestions of his and developed them in different ways, but I will reserve comment on that for an appendix to my retelling of the story from Arthur’s birth to the establishment of the Round Table in a future volume. I have already mentioned, at the beginning of this appendix the influence of C. S. Lewis’s account of Britain and Logres in That Hideous Strength, and it goes without saying that the Inklings are a deep influence on my imaginative apprehension of the entire realm of Faerie, and especially of how adventures in that realm, with a baptised imagination, can bring us closer to the heart of the greatest tale of all, the tale of our salvation in Christ. But it is a younger Inkling, a young friend of Lewis, and his first biographer, Roger Lancelyn Green, who has been especially helpful to me as I began to find my way through the mazes of all these early sources. Lancelyn Green is a master of storytelling and has published retellings of Greek and Norse myths for younger readers, and published in 1953 King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, a wonderful and lucid retelling of the Arthurian stories. Time and again, as I was working my way through the thickets and pathless woods of Malory and other early sources, I found that Lancelyn Green had been there before me and pioneered a path, clarifying, simplifying, and always emphasising and bringing to the fore the most important and resonant elements and images. I have not followed him at every turn, and have included many things that he omits, but I still wish to acknowledge him as having shown me how it might be possible to be faithful to the original material but also shape it and retell it in a way that makes it available, makes it clear and compelling, for a new generation of readers and especially for the young and those who are not mediaevalists or trained literary scholars.
Another master storyteller who has taken up Arthurian themes is contemporary writer Martin Shaw, especially in his book Snowy Tower, a retelling of Parzival. Shaw is someone who, like me, seeks to break us out of the reductive materialism, the immanent frame, that has been imprisoning us since the Enlightenment, and through the power of story and myth to reawaken our sense of wonder. In this sense he represents a continuation of the Romantic resistance to the dead hand of reductive scientism. So he tells and retells the old stories in ways that allow us to hear them afresh in our own time. Both as a writer and an oral storyteller, he is alert to the mythic resonance of each story, and his telling of these tales is intended to be transformative for his listeners and readers, to shape and reshape their lives and the way they perceive the world. I am in full agreement with him on this, on the power of imagination to transform and heighten perception, to unveil levels of reality and depths in ourselves which we might otherwise miss. To my surprise he got in touch with me when I had begun to read some early drafts of my Grail poetry on my “Spell in the Library” YouTube channel, encouraging me to keep going. I was surprised at first, since I wondered if his particular take on Arthuriana might resist my emphasis on Christ in the Grail, but on the contrary he approved of my approach. In fact, it turns out that in his own re-tellings and re-readings of these great Grail stories and other tales, he himself was coming to acknowledge the mysteries of the Christ event around which they circle, and he has now been received into the Orthodox church. I was able to spend some time with him in the course of composing this ballad cycle, so some of the poetry in this volume was first read to him and I am grateful for his example and encouragement.
Readers who would like to see in more detail where I have followed Malory closely in this volume and where I have developed or clarified the story in my own way and for my own readers can consult books 11–17 of Le Morte D’Arthur, which have been, as it were, my main primer. But as those who make the comparison will see, I am not simply turning Malory’s prose into the ballad form that I have chosen, I am telling the story afresh, as a person in my own time, for readers in this age, as Malory did for his own age in his turn. And, like all my predecessors, I have imagined and added completely new episodes to the story, as for example my “Galahad & the Naiad.” Like every re-teller I have changed emphasis, highlighted some things more than others. For example, in Malory the appearance of the White Hart with the four lions and his transformation into Christ in the chapel is no more than a couple of paragraphs in chapter nine of book seventeen. Malory tells the story but makes nothing of it, whereas for me it seemed of immense significance, and I have made it a major theme in my narrative and dedicated a whole section to it. Likewise, Malory introduces to us a nameless maiden who is Percival’s sister and who arrives with the Grail ship and takes the three Grail knights and Lancelot on to the next stage of their adventures, sacrificing her own life in the process. It is clear that without her the Grail would never have been achieved, and that the Grail knights depend on her wisdom, knowledge, and courage. But I had to dig deep into earlier sources even to find her name. She emerges as a heroic figure with a Grail quest of her own in my “Quest of Fair Dindrane.”
I shall discuss some of these shifts of emphasis and distinctively new shapings of the narrative in the following appendices on the Wasteland and the Grail itself, but I shall conclude this reflection on my sources and the use I make of them by mentioning some non-Arthurian works that nevertheless influenced my story and the way I have chosen to tell it.
The first of these is Coleridge’s great poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and here it was the form, rather than the content which exerted its influence. Though I was deeply moved by Tennyson’s blank verse and by the modernist verse experiments of Williams and Jones in their Arthurian poetry, and also the alliterative verse of the Green Knight poem, and more recently John Heath-Stubbs’ poetic sequence, Artorius, I did not feel that any of these forms would work for the kind of clear, accessible, and yet, in some sense, incantatory effect I was hoping to achieve. But having spent many years studying Coleridge’s Rime (the subject of my 2017 book Mariner) I became more and more impressed with the way he had mastered and effectively re-invented the traditional ballad form. He kept its strong rhythms and rhymes, but he varied stanza lengths and achieved astonishingly complex and beautiful poetic and symbolic effects without ever losing the essential simplicity of the form. His achievement encouraged me to make the ballad form the essential vehicle for my retelling, though within that form I also insert other forms such as the riddling couplets and triads evoking the history and mystery of Solomon’s ship. I acknowledge my debt to Coleridge by bringing in his Christ-like albatross at a crucial point in the story of Dindrane, though this moment is also multi-layered, for it is also an allusion to C. S. Lewis’s own nod to Coleridge when Lucy sees the saving albatross in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and hears it speak with Aslan’s voice.
Another writer, from whom I take one of my opening epigraphs, is, unexpectedly, Rudyard Kipling. This is not the regrettably imperialistic Kipling of the Barrack-Room Ballads but Kipling the children’s writer, whose book of magical children’s stories, Puck of Pook’s Hill, shaped my mother’s childhood reading and my own in turn. The book is a love song to one little valley in England where two children meet Puck on a midsummer’s day and are allowed, by the magic of oak and ash and thorn, to experience their own valley in a whole series of different historical periods. In this work, as in the writing of David Jones, time is not an arrow that flies past us, but a series of deeply interwoven layers of meaning and reality that build up slowly over one place like leaf mould—each past season nurturing the next. The book opens with “Puck’s Song,” a poem in ballad form which concludes with these stanzas:
Trackway and Camp and City lost,
Salt Marsh where now is corn—
Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,
And so was England born.
She is not any common Earth,
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare.I was utterly enchanted (and still am) by this vision of England and awestruck to know that my little island is also, and always will be, “Merlin’s Isle of Gramarye,” and it is from this verse that I have drawn the title of my own Arthuriad. But a second song in this book has also exerted a deep influence on me (and indeed on wider English folk song), and that is “A Tree Song,” in which the three ancient trees, oak and ash and thorn, come to stand for all the deep-rooted continuities of place and nature. Indeed, in the stories the leaves of oak and ash and thorn become the passkeys or portals protecting the children and allowing them to move back and forth between all the times that oak and ash and thorn have flourished. Here are the opening stanzas (you will note that in the name of “Brut”—the eponymous original Briton in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia—Kipling himself is making an oblique Arthurian allusion):
Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.
Sing Oak, and Ash, and Thorn, good sirs,
(All of a Midsummer morn!)
Surely we sing no little thing,
In Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!
Oak of the Clay lived many a day,
Or ever Æneas began.
Ash of the Loam was a lady at home,
When Brut was an outlaw man.
Thorn of the Down saw New Troy Town
(From which was London born);
Witness hereby the ancientry
Of Oak, and Ash, and Thorn!This is a little motif in Kipling’s children’s tales, but when I came to write my account of the three Grail knights’ fraught passage through the Wasteland and I needed some emblems of place and soil and nature which have been desecrated and need to be healed, I remembered, as from depth and time immemorial, the tree song I had learned as a child, and like a seed in leaf-loam I found that it enabled me to imagine the three dryads who befriend the Grail knights in their direst need.
All these disparate elements and many others have gone into the mix, into the deep well of the imagination, but they cannot remain disparate. In the end something new must be formed, something which combines and recombines the old elements and makes them, the author hopes, a new work, living and breathing and growing in the minds of his readers to “something of great constancy.”
Malcolm Guite is a poet, scholar, and Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He has published five collections of poetry and many other books including Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder, 2017).
In 2023 he was awarded the Lanfranc Medal for Education and Scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury. He lives in Norfolk and travels extensively to give poetry readings and lectures and also has a popular YouTube channel he calls “A Spell in the Library.”
Amazed by the first installment of this epic poem! I am anxiously awaiting the second book this November.
Oh no not 12! Edmund Spencer set out to write 12 and we only got six! We need all of them!! 🙏