In Our Time - The Fisher King

Episode Date: January 17, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests will be delving into the world of medieval legend in pursuit of the powerful and enigmatic Fisher King. In the world of medieval romance there are many weird and wonderful creatures – there are golden dragons and green knights, sinister enchantresses and tragic kings, strange magicians and spears that bleed and talk. And yet, in all this panoply of wonder, few figures are more mysterious than the Fisher King.Blighted by a wound that will not heal and entrusted as the keeper of the Holy; the Fisher King is also a version of Christ, a symbol of sexual anxiety and a metaphor for the decay of societies and civilisations. The Fisher King is a complex and poetic figure and has meant many things to many people. From the age of chivalry to that of psychoanalysis, his mythic even archetypal power has influenced writers from Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century to TS Eliot in the 20th. With Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John’s College, Oxford; Stephen Knight, Distinguished Research Professor in English Literature at Cardiff University; Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh, Cardiff University and Director of the Folklore Society

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the world of medieval romance, there are many weird and wonderful creatures, golden dragons and green knights, sinister enchantresses and tragic kings,

strange magicians and spears that bleed and talk. Yet in all this panoply of wonder, few figures are more mysterious than the Fisher King. and trusted as the keeper of the Holy Grail itself, he resides in a castle made of magic where he lies blighted by a wound that doesn't heal. He's a complex and poetically magnetic figure and has meant many things to many people.

From the age of chivalry to that of psychoanalysis and beyond, he's been Christian and pagan, tragic and enduring, a sinner, a fertility god and a symbol of sexual fear and desire. With me to discuss the Fisher King of Stephen Knight, distinguished research professor in English literature at Cardiff University.

Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh, Cardiff University and Director of the Folklore Society, and Caroline Larrington, tutor in medieval English at St. John's College, Oxford. Caroline Larrington, the first mention of the Fisher King in his late 20th century poem called Percival, The Story of the Grailist,

by a poet called Cretien de Troyes. Can you tell us what story he tells? Yes, well, Cretion's writing about 1180, and the first time we see the Fisher King is when the Knight Percival, who is the hero of the romance Percival or the story of the Grail is on his way home to see his mother, who unfortunately has died when he left home. And as he's riding along, he comes to a large body of water

where there are two men sitting in a boat. And the first one of them is fishing. And he hails them and asks if there's a way across the water. And the fishermen tells him that there isn't. He then asks if he can get lodging somewhere, and the fisherman directs him to his castle, tells him he must pass through a cleft in the hills, and then he'll see it.

So Percival heads for the castle, which he finds eventually, and has a very warm welcome, and finds that the fisherman is there to welcome him and apologises because he can't get up. He says he finds it impossible. And during the course of dinner... Because of his wound.

Because of his wound. But he doesn't make that very explicit at that point. In the course of dinner, there's a procession of mysterious objects. which pass before them every time they have a different course. They see, first of all, a lance which bleeds from its tip, then there's a candelabra, then there's a maiden carrying a grail, which in Cretian's time seems to be a sort of flat dish,

and then there's somebody with a silver platter. And it passes from one side of the hall and into a side room. Percival is intrigued by this, but because his uncle has told him that you shouldn't ask foolish questions about things you don't understand. he resolves that he'll ask about this process the next morning. But when he wakes up the next morning, the castle seems to be empty. There's no sign of his host, so he takes his horse and departs.

And the next thing that happens is that he meets a maiden who asks him where he's been. He says he's been at the Grail Castle, the Castle of the Fisher King, she says. And she asks him if he asks the question, whom does the Grail serve? Anne Percival has to admit that he didn't. And the maiden curses him and tells him that because of this, the king will now not be healed of his wound. And she explains that the king spends his time fishing because he's wounded through both thighs

as a result of an accident during a joust. And so he can't ride a horse and can't hunt, can't do any of the aristocratic masculine pastimes you would expect, and can't really leave his castle either because that would also involve riding. And Percival decides to return to the castle, but he can't find the way back then now. And Crotion didn't find him.

finished the story which you have so expertly summarised for our listeners. Nobody can be any doubt whatsoever they were there in the late 12th century there. He didn't finish the story but other poets picked it up. They were called the four continuations of Kretchen because this flowed through the

high mid-late is this story and these remunces and this story. Can you pick out one, can you give us some sense of the four continuations and anything particularly significant there? Well it was clear that almost as soon as Kretien probably died before he finished writing the

Cont de Graal that everybody wanted to know how the story would end. The first continuation sends the knight Gawain to the castle. These are other writers continuations at Gawain. Gawain goes to the castle and he sees not the Grail procession but the grail floating around in the hall, delivering

food to whoever wants it. And at that point the dead body of a knight at the side of the hall with a broken sword is introduced but Sil Percival doesn't get back to the Grail Castle and the first continuation. In the second continuation, he finally does make his way back,

but now part of the task is to mend the broken sword, which lies by the body of the knight. And Percival puts the two pieces of the sword together, but there's still a tiny crack in the sword, and this means he has to go and avenge the death of the dead night. And although the Fisher King explains to him the meaning of the items in the Grail procession, Percival has all got some work to do.

He's got that revenge story to complete before he can become the king. In the third continuation, he does actually make it back to the Grail Castle, has the meaning of everything in the procession explained to him. He asks the question, which of course he now is well-kewed to do, and the Fisher King is healed. So Percival goes back to Arthur's Court triumphantly, but then news comes that the Fisher King has died, and Percival comes to take his place and reigns as the Fisher King in that castle.

So that's the, that is the start of it. Steve Knight's, the Fisher King's mysterious, fragmented figure. He was given a backstories, I understand it, by another French bird, Robert de Bonn, which this was just after Cretien. We're talking in the early 13th century now, I think. Yes, that's right. We usually date Robert's work about 1,200. Yeah, so what did he have to say about the Fisher King's origins? The main thing Robert does, I think, he's intensifies the Christian nature of this. As Caroline's told the story, it's sort of in a Christian moral context. You've got to ask what is the matter with the main king and so on. And, you know, he's advised on good Friday. but it's not specifically Christian. Robert changes that. What is the Grail, though? Who was the girls? It's own grail, a grail, as Carolyn's head, and it's a dish.

It's like a sort of dish, perhaps the dish they served the last supper in, but it's just a dish. What Robert does is makes it the shallace. And this is a very complex story, and a very brilliant one, and it's the first of the cycles. There's a Joseph, a Merlin, and a Percival. And the Percival has a little short, Mort D'Arthur on the end. But the Joseph is really the key element. Robert takes us back in time. to the crucifixion. And Joseph is Joseph of Arimathea, who is a soldier working for pilot,

who loves Christ, comes to love him in his message, and he seeks to look after Christ's body at the crucifixion. He has also come into the possession of a chalice which Christ used to give the sacrament at the last supper. And with this chalice, he catches some of Christ's blood on the cross. And he looks after the body, he gets into trouble and so on, so on. And a little while later, the Holy Spirit advises Joseph that what it wants him to do is to construct a table for the grail. And there will be the grail showers. And at this table, and this is the key thing for our topic today,

Joseph is to ask his brother-in-law, Bron, Celtic name, come to that, to catch a fish. And this is to be their supper. So in memory of the last supper, this is the grail supper. And so Bron is called the rich fish. a king. And what Joseph has done is change it from this sort of a king who fishes because he's maimed,

a mysterious thing, to someone who uses the fish, the Christian symbol. Ithos stands for Jesus Christ the Son of God, the Greek word for fish. And fish being a symbol of early Christianity. Very much. And Joseph has centered this grail story

in the church. And the context is interesting. As Karol said, Kretin is presumably writing about 1180. In 1187, the West loses the Holy Land. And one of the things that we argue about, and I think you've already discussed, is in another programme,

is that the Grail story seems a sort of compensation for the loss of the Holy Land. We haven't lost the most sacred object. It's somewhere here in the West, if we're pure enough, to find it. And it's this tie-up that Robert makes. Then in the Merlin, and this is in verse and prose,

and perhaps Joseph didn't translate it, this is linked to Arthur's kingdom. Through Merlin unusually used, and set him aside, and then in the Percival, usually called the Deider Percival, Percival achieves the Grail, and all of a sudden it's the Fisher King that Carolyn's been talking about. What Joseph does, it gives us two Fisher kings, Bron the rich Fisher, who is deeply Christian, but also Bron the maimed king, and so he unites the Christian and the mystic elements. Just to bring Arthur into this, because we're not going to stay with Arthur at all,

but you've mentioned Arthur, he's mentioned two or three times. Can you just put him in the context of this discussion? Well, what happens in the Grail story The Fisher King is a maimed king And it's very interesting Certainly if you're interested in politics It seems to me that one of the focuses of this, of many, is that royalty can be weak

But the Fisher King is not Arthur who dies And may never return It's a royalty that can be regenerated There's a notion of regenerating royal power But only through Christian wisdom and mythic wisdom I'm thinking more pedestrianly This being, Percival being part of Arthur's court and Arthur, being a figure in the background, that will do.

Percival does join Arthur's court. He's not a very successful knight, but he turns out to be the wonderful one, the holy fool who becomes the mystical king. Briefly, would these be, have been seen by the audience, which was initially the court elite, this is elaborate French, the historians are told it, as real people, or are they aware there in front of,

were they aware, do you think, do we know? Well, of course, the word, historia, histoire, means story and history. They are mythical stories. They're sort of what Elliot called objective correlatives. We think about ourselves and our lives through these images. Julie Wood, at the end of the 12th century, when the grail stories were more or less coming to an end,

it was comparatively short run, about 120 years or so. It was picked up by the German poet, much acclaimed in this time, Wolfram von Eschenbach, in his poem Passible. What did that bring, as it were, to the table? Well, it produced probably the most complex, version of the Grail story. Wolfram does something very interesting

and that he turns his grail into a stone, which in a sense allows him to sidestep the whole of this Christological business of the connection with the Last Supper. But he doesn't sidestep the Christian. He just refocuses it. And what's interesting about Wolfram is there's a huge focus on Percival,

as a character, and on the Grail King, the maimed king, and Fortas. In fact, we have a name for it there. as a character. Unfortas is the name of the Fisher King, the Grail King in Volfram, Tharneschenbach. And as with the other Grail stories,

Percival is related to the Grail King, and this is one of the things he discovers is, A, his relation and B, the responsibilities of it. But because we don't have the sort of Last Supper story quite so strongly in Volfram, he can really focus on that. And the character, An Fortas, has been wounded.

We get the backstory elsewhere. that he was the grail king are supposed to be purer than pure. An Fortas was prideful and went chasing after women, which he shouldn't have. Therefore he was wounded in the genitals. Therefore he cannot be a king. But he also cannot die.

The grail, which is the stone, keeps him alive. But he is in pain. He's in terrible pain. And you really get this sense of anguish with Enfortus in the way that you don't in any of the others. And his pain can be relieved temporarily by touching him with the spear that injured him, and that's the bleeding spear.

It's not the lance of Lunginus. It's the lance that injured the king. And you get him much more as a personal character. You also get Percival. The Parciful character is much more personal as well. The same thing happens. Passivell comes to the Grail Castle. He sees the procession.

The stone is brought in. It's put in front of Antfortas. Food is given to everyone. Parciful doesn't ask the question. He goes away. And he has basically the same set of adventures which allows Parcival

to realize who he is, how he fits into the Grail family. But when he goes back and asks the question, he doesn't say who does the Grail serve. He says the very personal thing, Uncle, what ails you? And that is what heals the king. So it's the personal connection between

Parzival and An Fortas. Before we move on now, what are people making of this story? What does it mean to them? What are they reading into it? Can we just get some idea of The story is a story of a story. Fine. Then what? What's gone beyond that? What is it a metaphor for? They liked stories which had deeper meaning. They were very used to reading the Bible. They were very used to seeing history as somehow completing Bible history. So this sort of story, which was a good story, but yet had something else about them, is really what they would expect of this story. Otherwise, they would have thought it very dull. But the Grail stories focus on the ideals of this warrior elite. what you had to be was a good Christian

and a good Christian warrior and you couldn't just be it says very clearly in Poncevalu, you cannot win the grail by force you can only win the grail by other means so you have to be a good knight and of course Anfortis can't be because he's wounded but you will also be a knight who is aware of the Christian message, aware of higher things

but we're talking about history as Stephen pointed out in literature as we now receive it at that time being something that taught you things You were Reddit or Reddit, often were ready, in order to learn things. Absolutely. And so what were they learning? Just briefly. They were learning the ideals of the nightly world.

Yes. And the Christian ideals of the nightly world. When did this rage through 125 years or more, when did it lose its power? Well, it's still being retold in English. The Greil story is retold in English, and Mallory, of course. But by that time, it's very clear that Mallory doesn't have very much idea of who the Fisher King is. He's only mentioned a couple of times in Mallory. And there the word Pescher, Fisher, has become a personal name.

So when Gallaad appears at Arthur's court, he tells the old man who brings him, please give my regards to my grandsire, King Pescher. And one of the complicating things about the later versions of the story in the medieval period is that the Fisher Kings duplicate themselves. they become a lineage rather than a single figure. And so you find a number of people in 13th and 15th century versions of Arthur, all having this title. But by this time, they've more or less given up fishing.

And their main job is being guardians of the Grail Castle. But I think it's probably after Mallory. I think it's probably into the early 16th century where the interest of partly, I suppose, as a result of the Reformation in Western Europe, interest in the Grail store and the film, Fisher King diminish it. There's a sort of anecdotal view that Don Quixot killed it off.

What do you say about that, Stephen? Well, I think as... Don Quicks, it certainly is an ironic representation of medieval romance. And what, you know, we generally say, is that the Grail story, in the sense like the Arth and the Murna's stories, are too medieval and, as Karen says in some parts of Europe, too Catholic to be of interest, whereas classical story is beginning to provide these, you know,

myths which you learn through. and... The translation of the classical text into European languages. And so, in a sense, these stories go into the underworld, but, you know, they're going to be redeemed.

They're only maimed for a while. So would you have anything to say before we fast forward to the 19th century, which is when the meat comes back on the bone? Well, I think the Christian element of the Grail is they do very, very interesting things with it. And I think because we started to get interested in other things, which will take in the 19th century,

one forgets just how original and how interesting their Christian. interpretations were and how flexible. Often it said that people had to be very careful in the Middle Ages not to be accused of heresy. But when you see the kind of things that are being done in the Grail romances which were widely read and widely regarded, I mean they weren't just read by the knights,

they would be read by ladies and by clerics as well. You realise that they have a very sort of original and dynamic view of how to express their Christianity. Can you unlock that a bit? Can you tell us what is that original? Yes, because I think they sort of see, Christianity as something which is not inconsistent with a full physical life. The Grail knights live very, very rich lives.

Yet, what is important is that they be Christian, but not by denying their knighthood in any kind of way, but simply by expressing that knighthood in a particular Christian way. Yes, you remember that Percival has been told not to talk too much by the man who trained him as a knight. so he's being selfish, he's silent, he should have said, what is the matter, what is going on?

And many people say it's... Or self-control. It's the New Testament. You think, sorry, I'm for work. Self-control. Yes, yes. And the Gurnamont, government, is the name of the man who advises him.

And it's the New Testament, you know, love thy neighbor, so Christian moral which is coming through. And I see, and many others see, sort of the clerics, the clerks, the church, trying to say to government, you know, behave yourselves. It's the sort of becket.

Henry the second conflict at work. Caroline Lange. But we're also talking here mostly about the social context of the Grail Romances but I want to remind us before we move on to the later versions that the point at which

in Cretien that Percival encounters the Fisher King is important in terms of his personal development as well because he's been brought up by his mother and he doesn't really understand the rules of knighthood and has a crash course from his uncle Gernamont he has just achieved his first major adventure rather early in his career he's met the woman that he's going to marry

he's almost ready to settle down with her but then he remembers that his mother fainted as he left the house to become a knight and he needs to go and check up on her so in a sense he started the transition to adulthood he's already made his name and discovered part of his knightly identity but he's now going back to childhood he's now going back to look for his mother and it's at that point that he has this encounter

with the Fisher King, who doesn't tell him that Timas asked a question, and that would be quite easy to do. You need to go to my castle and you need to perform these rituals, but he leaves the experience open for Percival. And so it's a kind of initiation, the experience for Percival. I would like to, unless it's a... It's a very complex moral world that we have here. Now, the choices are very, very difficult,

and I think that is what confused the 19th century. Why is it complex? Because none of the main characters, are evil characters. It was very clear. There are things in Christianity you can do and things in Christianity you can't do. Here it's the question of making the best choice of having the

moral awareness to know when to keep quiet and when not to keep quiet, to having the moral awareness on the part of the Fisher King of knowing when you can be a knight and when you have to sort of hold back. And that's the complexity here. It's not good just good versus evil, but it's

moral subtlety. As Stephen said, after let's use Don Quicks, I just to keep it in. The stories went underground. They were overtaken by the stories. Tastes change, fashion change, but they didn't die. They were dormant and came up again, let us say the 19th century, which they did. When there was an attempt to understand the origins of this story, and it says the 19th century was a great century of looking for origins,

and they looked towards the Celts. Can you tell us why they looked towards the Celts, Juliet, and kick off this century? Well, the Celts were the sort of homegrown primitives, and people were very interested in understanding. Who's looking for the Celts, by the style? Is this British scholars, look at all? British scholars on the whole, but European scholars as well.

I mean, German scholars were interested in Celtic and sort of Celtic heritage. There was a general interest that the Celts represented, in a sense, the first imaginative Europeans. And the thing with the Celts is, of course, they were at home. You know, you didn't have to go off to Africa to find them or someplace. this was our primitive heritage. So it's a great deal of interest in it. And there also seemed to be good historical reasons

because these stories are called the matter of Britain. The whole of the Arthurian legend is the matter of Britain. They come out of British stories. And of course the original British were the Celts and the Normans came in and adapted these stories. So both in terms of how people were looking at the past, where are our origins? And because there seemed to be the historical reason

to think, right, these are the stories we got from the Celts. Let's now look at Celtic stories and see where these stories came from. So, Stephen Knight, what did Kretchen de Trat? Do you think you would know of these Celtic stories? And if so, which? And where from? I don't think

you can be any doubt that Kretchen and his contemporaries knew Celtic stories, quite likely through Brittany. But of course, in Britain, the Norman French were encountering the Welsh and the Cornish, but in northern France, the Normans and the Central French had long met the Bretons, and we know that these stories were being transmitted in French form. A Latina was somebody who translated them.

And they had this interest of their great stories. They are new. They also have, as we would say these days, a certain sort of post-colonial element. You know, a bit like our love of curries and chinoiserie. We appropriate stuff through, you know, we culturally validate our power, so the French find these stories interesting. But a lot of the names like Brahms, Lanselot Sands, a Breton Welsh name. What we

don't have is any exact sources and maybe there weren't any, maybe they were oral and even in Welsh or in Breton these stories appear to be changing all the time but they are there. There is of course the Christian element overrides and overlaps with this of course. It is interesting

how much of the Celtic did and whether it didn't and there's disagreement on this and there are fine points to be made which I have will make a few of them now. So Caroline can you tell us which Celtic myths were thought to in the 19th century have fed into the Fisher King as described by yourself

at the beginning of the programme, the Fisher King's story that is. Well probably the most important one would be the second branch of the Mabinoggi the story of Bran who is... How would we date that? Well it's in manuscript

I think in the 13th century but it's considerably earlier than that it's probably 200 years earlier and perhaps earlier still So this is We're not quite sure It's way before the 12th century And it is Celtic

Yeah And they're the name Brann Which is the name of the king of Britain Is of course chimes with Bronn The Fisher King whom Stephen mentioned What Brann doesn't do particularly Is any fishing

But he is a king who is maimed He's wounded in the thigh During the course of a battle In Ireland He also has He's a giant as well. He walks to Ireland from Wales, which is a convenient way of invading. He also has access to a cauldron of regeneration, which may be part of the material that feeds into the idea of the grail as a kind of cauldron of plenty. He also has his head cut off. It still talks when it's cut off.

And he orders that his head be cut off and be buried under the Tower of London, where it keeps enemies at. So these are quite a lot of differences, aren't there? Yeah, well, it is very low on fishing as a story. But the name, of course, is suggestive, and so it's. the connection with some kind of supernatural vessel. Can we, so, are we, are we, are we, are we, are we grasping out for, there were things like that which turned into that, or are we getting a, what, Juliet first did you, aren't you?

I think certainly there are parallels and certainly they would have known Celtic stories. The problem with, with this argument, is that it tends to assume that there was a coherent Celtic myth, and we have no evidence of that whatsoever. The stories that we have are themselves, the Welsh stories, very frankly, The Welsh stories are very developed. Brand sounds like Braun, but linguistically it's not a particularly good match. So there are actually quite a lot of differences and quite a lot of problems. But because of this desire to kind of find a primitive wholeness and a very utopian primitive wholeness,

there's a tendency to take all these bits and pieces and put them back together into a Celtic myth. It's serving the purpose of the 19th century rather than serving the purpose of scholarship, isn't it? They want to bring all this together. They want it to be wanting. they want the British to have started with the Celtic... Precisely. It's part of the matter of Britain, which becomes the matter of the 19th century,

the redefinition of Britain. And it means we're not classical. We are British. It's kind of giving us a kind of heritage all our own. So would it be too much to say to three scholars like yourselves that they were bending the evidence here, though Stephen, I know how, how... Defensive and you are about the evidence,

but is there a sense of which you're testing the evidence to make it fit here, not you, but the scholars like you, who are bringing the Celts into the... medieval romance isn't taking that. They certainly were taking firm positions and there were others like J.D. Bruce who took just as firm a Christian position

but it is a sort of a Darwinian quest for validating your present. I mean, John Rees, a great Welsh scholar, was the person who looked into the bronze material first. Roger Loomis says of an American. The Americans are often very interested in this Celtic material and

I think the position that was important to them was it was different from the classical certainties. This is a origin and there were attractions in that, as Juliet says. I'm interested in the particular though, and I'm sure our listeners would be. We've heard well laid out by Caroline at the top, the Fisher King. We've got a grip on that. Now, did, and we know that things circulated, things circulate, and Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and the Norman French were here, and they were there

in North France, northern France too. So there we are. There's a lot going on, and the courts are interchanged. What could you, can you really say? came from the Celtic myths, because we know there isn't one jury, is it a continuity, or were they doing it for their own purposes? Like all creative artists, I think they were doing it for their own purposes, and reshaping fragments. These fragments I have shored against my ruins, Elliot will say, in the wasteland. But the Grail itself, don't forget, was sent to the West. Percival came from North Wales.

The Grail stories themselves did, to some extent, suggest that they were from the distant front of the West. years of Europe, because we no longer controlled the Near East, we were no longer classical, we were reshaping our French, English, Celtic culture in the West. It's a Western myth,

and I think the Celtic elements that undoubtedly are there, though not only precise, my Lord, this is the evidence form, are part of that mystique. You're supposed to be the blokes who do what we can tell you is why they did it. It's actually much more interesting. We're more interested in motives that in the DNA of this.

No, I'm interested in motive. You should be interested in DNA. I think one of the continuity is kind of lies in the fact of the basic story patterns that are here. The story pattern of a hero who discovers himself and solves a riddle, achieves an object. And that object is usually mysterious or from the other world in some kind of way. So certainly in that sense. You can apply that's almost everything, can't you? You go to almost every civilization that's had any mythology whatsoever and say it's about this kind of thing.

You know, people are born, grow up, one of things happen to the men they die. And you hang anything onto that, really. Absolutely. But I think here, of course, they actually have the Celtic versions of those basic stories. And in that sense, they're drawing on those. Maybe I'm asking for too specific. Maybe I'm asking for specific evidence that doesn't. Maybe one has to go on sort of secondary resonance. It's an origin myth for those scholars.

Whatever they feel their origin is, they're finding the evidence. I'm probably asking the wrong question. It's a very pragmatic sort of 19th century quest for sources as well, when in fact what we've been doing in the 20th century more, I think is looking at analogs and looking at stories which are like these stories which exist in the Celtic, which may point us to thinking differently.

I'm afraid it does fashion it to me as where the link up is. It is intriguing. They were not really reading the texts. They were excavating in the text. They were destroying the text to dig up underneath them. This is one of the problems, is that they fragment the text. I mean, things like the wasteland. It's not actually...

I go to the wasteland. That's lighter. That's lighter. Let's go to... 1890s, the Scottish Anthropology, James Fraser, the Golden Bough, extremely influential. He tried to explain the origins of religion and as part of her, brought in the Fisher King. Now, Fraser was bringing together a work of sort of collective scholarship and emotional imagination about the Celts. So can you tell us what he put into the argument there, James? Fraser is in a sense creating a secular analysis of religion, which is quite round.

at the time he was doing it. He's also coming from a classical world. So he's looking at the classical text. He's trying to keep this whole thing secular. And then he kind of says, oh, well, look, here are the Celtic texts as well. So he kind of makes a kind of universal consensus of all of this. And, of course, Fraser felt that primitive world

depended on the continuity of the fertility cycle. In other words, if they couldn't, if things didn't grow, they couldn't eat and therefore they would die. therefore the most important thing was to keep up the cycle of fertility. And their way of looking at the seasons, not realizing that the seasonal cycle was natural, but assuming that the seasonal cycle had to be kept going by a ritual. And this ritual was the death of a king, a god king, in winter,

and the rebirth of this king in the spring. And therefore they had to have some kind of ritual, some way for the old king to die, the old god, and the new king, the new spring guard, to be reborn. And as the world modernized, this primitive myth began to fragment. And that's when you find it in things like medieval romance, in things like contemporary customs, in things like the ancient sort of epics of the Near East.

So he kind of put all of this together, extrapolated this myth, the myth of the dying god. Into the Great Golden Bower. Which is one of the most emotionally, powerful synthesis you can ever, it doesn't work archaeologically or anthropologically, but it is so powerful emotionally. And you did carry that.

I want to stay with that for a moment. Just a parenthesis, a retro-regressive parenthesis, Stephen, I should have said, when we talked about the connection between the Celts, and there was the salmon of knowledge in Celtics. There are bits and pieces of all that stuff. The catching of the salmon by the Celtic Magic King or by the young Finn,

which ever, Finn being an Irish name, not a person from Scandinavian. and the salmon which you touched it with you achieved wisdom. So there's that connection. That is one of the specific connection. They are there. It's as if Cretton had heard all these somewhere, you know, in some smoky hall. Yeah.

So I should have remembered that then I couldn't have got. Right. We're keeping with the golden bar. Julius's given an idea. That had a big importance in people's appreciation. But another book, if you want to take that up, Caroline, and also take us to the other big book was Jesse Weston's book, about 20 years later from ritual to romance.

Now what did that do? Can you bring... What are these two books together, if you concentrate more on Jesse Weston's? Well, the two books together, but Jesse Weston particularly applied the ideas that fertility, the idea of regeneration and the wasteland, and the idea that the king...

We don't tell people about the wasteland, so this is a new... The wasteland was that when the... As I understand it, when the Fisher King was wounded, because of his wound, the land around who was made infertile and he dwelt in a waste land

which would be, one is the ideas, because there's lots of different ideas. One of the things that when he was healed, the land itself would be. He lived in sterile territory because of his own sterility. That's really, really cruel.

Well, this was really Western's reading of the text, but in fact, when you look at the medieval text, mostly the Fisher King's Castle is set in a perfectly nice valley and there isn't, I think we have a kind of perhaps post-First World War view of a blackened landscape with dead trees and dying animals everywhere. But in fact, that's mostly missing from the medieval text.

But this is what Weston built on. But Weston suggested that if the story of the Fisher King was about fertility and picked up on some suggestions you find in the medieval text that when the king is maimed, it is very destructive, the castles fall down, the sky turns black and so on. And she then connects the idea of the ritual fertility of the year with the maiming of the king. king and the idea that when the perfect hero, when the Grail hero comes and asks the question,

the king will be rejuvenated, he'll leap back into life, the land will burst into blossom, the crops will grow, the animals will give birth, and a general time of plenty will begin. In the Grail stories, of course, it's a once and for all, and often long postponed de Numae to the story. But for Western it was a yearly ritual. So did the Western book, from Richard Romance and the Golden Bible, Fras, Did these two constitute what became a received wisdom about the connections? Absolutely. I think that it's probably the most influential attempt to explain the Grail romances. They become actually almost a 20th century Grail romance.

You take the two of them together. And what they create, their view of this story becomes the way people looked at this story for a very, very long time. They were quite respectable academically for a very long period. Well, they were very respectable to a person who had a very long time. to a person who had an extraordinarily fine academic training and was to be one of the great poses of the 20th century. T.S. Eliot, who took the idea of the Fisher King, Fisher King, from Jesse Weston,

for the wasteland. In part three, the fire sermon, the Fisher King makes an entrance, Stephen Knight. Yes, the Fisher King does. And Elliot is really the regenerator for the 20th century, I think. I think it is he who, you know, the Fisher King was pretty badly maimed. He'd been of little interest since Mallory, but even in Mallory. But now he comes back to the centre.

The wasteland certainly takes this Western idea and gives it as the title of poem. Wasn't the title's original poem, of course? He do the police in different voices, was its original title, to suggest the multiplicity of this poem. But the wasteland, I think, is a fair title because in the fire sermon. Slop is the name of someone, by the way. I wasn't going to be rude. The fire sermon, the Fisher King is there.

He's fishing in the day. Dahl canal, musing on the king my brother's wreck, there's a reference is clear, and he reappears in the last sequence where he's fishing with an arid plain behind him just before the last word shanty, shanty, shanty are made. And it's really interesting to see what the modernist does is connect this ancient medieval Celtic Christian myth with international language. The fire sermon is the Buddha's sermon, shanty and the language. Shanti's inner peace, isn't it? Yes, it's an appreciation, and it's a Vedic text, and the words that come between the Fisher King and Chanti

are those, I can't do this, sounds good, but it's give, sympathise, control, which is very much what Percival in the Grail Edgnes is asked to do. And the great modernist poet rejects Tennyson's idea of the Grail. Tennyson didn't like the Grail much. He thought Galahad was like Cardinal Newman, you know, too religious. But he makes something of it, and it's a question whether his wasteland, his Fisher King, can be regenerated.

Is it a very negative poem about the post-war, the blasted landscape of the war, or is it in sort of world religion, world tolerance, some possibility for regeneration? But is working the material, isn't he? And also working the material are the Freud and Jung, the idea of the Fisher King are taking us into that area. Can you set us off in that area, Julius? Yes, there was actually Emma Young. did an analysis of the Grail

romances, which is not much read and actually very, very interesting and that she is applying these ideas of archetype, this idea of the archetype of the other, the shadow, the feminine half. We haven't said very much about the importance of women.

Well, let's say it now. Well, there is this idea that the Fisher King, or the King, the ritual king, marry the land in the form of a goddess. And you do find some elements of this in Celtic myth, although not as clear as people have thought. And you obviously find elements of this in the Grail romances,

and that Percival is constantly really being told where he ought to go by these female figures. Sometimes it's the ugly damsel, sometimes it's his system. And the mother plays a role too. And the mother as well. So again, you have this Jungian idea of femininity as being basically tripartite. So it's a very, very rich field.

And as a reading, certainly people like Emma Young, and Helen Adolph, who is someone else, did a very interesting reading. And it kind of balances the Jesse Western reading and that one is not sort of trying to say here that this is an ancient ritual, but rather that this is inner psychology. Caroline.

And this, of course, takes us back from the social to the individual. And in some ways the Grail has now become not something which rejuvenates the land and rejuvenates culture, but will rejuvenate the individual. I think perhaps in modern psychological, psychological thinking about the Grail text, Percival and the Fisher King have become fused, that it's the job of the maimed modern person to go searching through life to find out their identity,

how they fit into the Grail family and to find the Grail. But when they find the Grail, it's going to produce a kind of integrated psychic wholeness for the individual who will no longer be maimed, or it be a fully realised human being. And that, I think, has gone very much away from the idea that it's the land, it's society and culture, looking for healing. Percival is remarked. Stephen Knight, then you're George. Yes, that's right.

And particularly in North America, the Jungian material has been practiced. Robert A. Johnson is a well-known practitioner. But the classical example of what Karen's saying is in the film The Fisher King. Terry Gilliams 1991 from where Parry, is that Percival or not? And they're out for both of

the leads are maimed young men who are regenerated through a sort of a sort of just love and love. But the myth has this the nature of the maindiness keeps changing. Love is, however you mispronance it. It is a useful source of regeneration, indeed.

It's interesting. Percival is remarkably absent in Eliot's poem. Eliot's poem is about the wasteland. I mean, it is exactly success. But another great former of the 20th century, 21st century, Wagner, Percival is very present in that, isn't it? Yes, and Wagner tidies up the story quite a lot. He brings in Klingsoor, the enemy-majorie.

who's the one who wounded Amphortes. The one who wounded the... Who wounded the Fisher King in the first place. And the spear is very much more prominent in Wagner's version. Also, for Wagner, the fertility aspect, because these ideas about fertility were in the air before Fraser condensed them into the Golden Bauer in the 1890s, German scholars were already

assuming that most mythology was about fertility at that point. And so Wagner makes a point about female sensuality in his opera, which isn't so clear from Volfram. That's still with us. Anthony Powell's novel, The Fisher King, is about a wounded war hero who has an amazingly beautiful young woman. And David Lodge tells that same story about Professor Arthur Kingfisher in Small World. It's a literary person who's taking,

do you think they're taking something from literary history? I do you think they feel it still has resonance. I think they feel it still has resonance. and I think it does still has resonance or we wouldn't read these books and enjoy them and talk about them. So I think they're certainly right, but they are, I think, taking things what has now become, not

just a medieval story, but a medieval story plus all of the modern analyses. And I think it's important for modern writers and it's something which is very clear in David Lodge's changing places where Arthur King Fisher appears that the moment when the question is asked, Percival returns

and the wasteland bursts back into life makes a marvelously powerful, happy ending in the same way that you find in Wolfram, that's the happiest ending, I think, in medieval literature. Well, thank you very much. Caroline Larrington, Julie Wood, Stephen. Next week we'll be talking about

plate tectonics. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.