In Our Time - The Holy Grail

Episode Date: May 15, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Holy Grail.Tennyson wrote:“A cracking and a riving of the roofs,And rending, and a blast, and overheadThunder, and in the thunder was a cry.And in the blast there smote along the hallA beam of light seven times more clear than day:And down the long beam stole the Holy Grail”.The sacred allure of the Grail has fascinated writers and ensnared knights for a thousand years. From Malory to Monty Python, it has the richest associations of any artefact in British myth. But where does the story spring from? What does it symbolise and why are its stories so resolutely set in these Isles and so often written by the French?With Dr Carolyne Larrington, Tutor in Medieval English at St John’s College, Oxford; Jonathan Riley-Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University; Dr Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at the University College of Wales in Cardiff.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. 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, Tennyson wrote, A cracking and arriving of the roofs and rending and a blast, an overhead thunder, and in the thunder was a cry.

And in the blast there smote along the hall a beam of light seven times more clear than day, and down the long beam stole the Holy Grail. The dread allure of the Holy Grail has fascinated writers and ensnared knights about a thousand years ago, and it goes on, from Mallory to Montepython. It has one of the richest associations of any artefact in British myth. But where does it spring from?

What does it symbolise? And why are its stories so resolutely set in these islands and so often written by the French? With me on this quest for the truth behind the Holy Grail like Caroline Larrington, tutor in medieval English at St John's College Oxford, Jonathan Riley Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, and Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University. Caroline Larrington, the Grail first appears in medieval literature when Cretian de Trois writes his romance Percival in the 1180s.

Can you outline that story for us? Fundamentally what happens in Cretian is that Percival, who's a knight who's had little education, little formal training, he's been brought up, rather removed from knightly society by his mother, who doesn't want him to become a knight, has arrived at the court and is involved in really quite a different adventure when he stumbles across a castle next to a lake. And on the lake, there are two fishers who point him in the direction of the castle.

So he goes off to spend the night at the castle, and while he's there, he's welcomed very warmly, and he sees a curious procession in the hall at dinner time. Some maidens pass through the hall carrying a candelabra, a sword, a spear, and, importantly, for what's going to develop, a large flat serving dish, which is called a graal. And this is really quite an ordinary dish. It doesn't have any particular meaning as far as the word is concerned.

Now, Percival has been warned by his uncle not to ask foolish questions, and so although he's deeply curious about what this person, procession means. He knows better, he thinks, than to ask any questions about where the procession is going, because it passes through the hall and disappears into a side room. But he resolves the next morning on his way out of the castle to ask quietly and discreetly what was going on. But when he wakes up the next morning, the castle is empty. Nobody is there. He gets his horse and he rides off into the forest where he meets a maiden, who turns out, in fact, to be his cousin. And she's astonished to learn.

that he's come from the Grail Castle and asks him with mounting excitement whether he asked the question and the question which he should have asked is whom does the Grail serve and Percival has to admit in a rather shamefaced way that he never really got round to asking the question

and his cousin curses him and Percival goes sorrowfully off on his way resolving to get back to the Grail Castle but of course it's not so easy and in fact in Créthian's version the story is incomplete so we never actually see Percival get back.

So we have the growl there, which isn't quite the grail. We have the bleeding spear, the candelabry. And we also have Jonathan Rialdusmith. The two fishermen, by the lake, who point him to the way. One of them turns out to be the Fisher King. And that's invented at a time, 1180s, Kretti, I was writing this, when the Crusades weren't going so well. Crusades are taking Jerusalem in 1099,

and they lost it, about to lose it in 1187. There's any connection between the Fisher King figure there and the Crusades? I don't actually think there is a connection, direct connection. I mean, there is obviously a very strong connection indirectly between the idea which lies behind Créthian and, of course, is developed later of a relic, and particularly a relic of the Passion, or right at the beginning of the Passion, The Last Supper, although even that's a bit dubious, given the way that the Grail takes all sorts of curious forms,

including that of a stone. But there's obviously a link between that and the holding of Jerusalem, the enormous number of pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the 12th century, the place that relics of the passion had in the 12th century, and beyond all that, of course, given that we are dealing here with quest literature, which of course is as old as mankind,

and particularly the simpleton or the innocent on a quest is just, you know, must be from very, very primitive times, given that what was obsessing these people was what had turned out to be the greatest collective quest of all, which was the First Crusade. Can I ask you whether knights like Percival, who are roaming the country, as it were, to do good at nights, were based, could have been said to have been based on 12th century nights, nights at that time, real knights, if we put it that way, in history. You have spoken of the

breeding habits of the lesser French nobility in this respect. Yes, I mean, I think there is an element of transference that may be going on here. I mean, we are all involved in guesswork. Well, you're less than me, I know. But the fact is that if you look at the French

middle ranking and lower nobility in the, for most of the 12th century, the situation of most of the young men born in to that class was extremely uncomfortable because what happened was that in any family one son

was chosen as the breeder and was allowed to marry Was it the oldest or wasn't the sort of fittest? Was it Darwinian or age? It was Darwinian. I mean it was very often the oldest but it wasn't necessarily the oldest. One was chosen as a breeder because of course you wanted to hold

the estate together. You didn't want to divide it among sons. So one was chosen as a breeder and the others weren't necessarily sent in the church. They were just supposed to hang around and make themselves useful. Now, what you got then in the kind of atmosphere of frustration

was young men making themselves off. They had no chance of marriage in their own district. So traveling as far as way as they could in the hope of catching the eye of some heiress. Now that is knight-errantry, but it is a knight-erentry... It's a knight-erentry, which is born of sexual frustration.

and in a sense of course insofar as it is influencing Quest literature what is happening is this has been transferred into a kind of search for purity by the innocent rather than the search for a wife by people who are sort of throbbing with desire

I think we can move to Jude Edward on that note the next stage in the writing of this is after Kretti is German Wolfram von Aschenbach in 1200 He writes Pasifel which Wagner based his opera upon It also tells the story of a knight and a fisher king and a grail.

How does it differ from Kretians briefly? And who were those stories written for? Well, Wolfram's stories like Kretiennes would have been written for an elite. This is not popular literature and this is not folk literature. This is definitely very, very self-conscious literature written for a particular, very small group of people who would have shared broadly the same lifestyle. With Wolfram, Arthur is actually even less important.

Gordant. Wolfram and indeed the whole of the German tradition, Arthur, is less important. I suppose it was that bit farther away from Britain, basically. And Ponceval has an extraordinary complicated thing. I won't even try to summarise all of it. But Parsavall is more than ever linked with Gawain. So you get this idea of Patsavall as being the spiritual knight, the knight who finds the grail and embodies all of chivalry.

And Gawain, much more the kind of knight that Jonathan was talking about, as the knight of the worldly chivalry. And he's the ladies' man. I mean, he's a womanizer as Gawain, except in the English tradition. He is really always after the girls. Then, of course, Wolfram also adds a third character, a pagan, piebald half-brother,

half-Sarison brother of Potserval. So you get the Crusades coming in, but coming in really not realistically, but really as an image. So Patsavon is very, very, very, of what you can do with the quest symbolism. Here's Percival the spiritual night, Gaw and the earthly knight,

and this other third character dragged in as the kind of alien who's brought in. Now, Partsival is also very much more complicated in terms of his relationship to the Grail, because his mother was a grail guardian and his father was related to Arthur. So you get all of the Arthurian stuff

and all of the grail stuff in Ponceval. And of course, Ponceval knows none of this when it starts. the whole of the story in Volfram more than anybody else is parts of all going through increasingly complex stories, increasingly complex adventures, where he begins to find out who he is. Can you tell us just a little bit about the Fisher King at this stage?

The Fisher King and his wound and why he's wounded. The Fisher King is wounded in the leg or in the thigh, and he cannot walk, he limps. And in the early ones, he's kind of sitting in this boat fishing, literally, because this is the only thing he can do. He can't be knightly anymore. And particularly in Volfram, it says very clearly it's a thigh wound. And Volfram says that the Fisher King cannot die because the Grail keeps him alive.

So the Fisher King is waiting for his successor. He's waiting for the young man to take him over. Now, one has to jump ahead to understand what the Fisher King isn't. Modern thinking tries to make the Fisher King castrated. But there's really nothing of that. nothing of that in the tales. You have a knight who cannot be a knight any longer, waiting for the young man for his successor to take over it. And this would have resonated beautifully in the middle ages where you had to have an active air in order to keep your

estates together. Did Crittion and, therefore, Aschenbach, take their stories of King Arthur from Geoffrey of Monmouth in his history of kings in 1138 old? And does, and double question, sorry, and does it also go back to Celtic sauces, which we haven't yet talked about? That's one of the main sources for the grail. Now, Jeffrey doesn't actually mention the grail. Jeffrey's Arthur is, well, he's a bit of a thug, actually. He's very, very aggressive. But there is one point in Jeffrey where there's a break between the fighting.

And Jeffrey says, and the best men in the world came to Arthur. And that's the world of the romances. Now, one of the main sources for this must be Celtic stories because the matter of Britain included all of the stories of what we now call the Celts. And one of the important elements there is a search by heroes. These are recorded in the Mabinogian. Mainly elsewhere, but principally in the Mabinogian.

And to some extent in Irish as well. And these have a hero who goes off searching for an other world talisman. It's specifically another world object. And sometimes this object is actually a cauldron, which is why the grail, why the growl comes in. Which will feed everyone with what they want all the time. It's a cauldron of plenty. And it's a cauldron of plenty. Jonathan Raleigh, Smith, before we come to the next person who wrote about, Robert Dubaron,

is there any sense of these grail stories beginning to come together? We have a cauldron, we have a gral, a platter, a plate. We have, as you mentioned, we have a stone. And there are other things coming up as what the grail is. How closely did you see this now being associated with the relics coming back from Jerusalem? Do you think that is much the most powerful force in the idea of the grail, the quest, these knights, these wounds and so on. Are the crusades giving it the energy that it has?

Well, anyone at the time listening to one of these stories, I mean it wouldn't matter what story actually of all the early ones or what form would have recognised a common denominator in all the forms that the grail takes. And that is what in Latin is called Virtus, which is power. Now that power was associated at the time, particularly with relics. That is a holy person, and particularly, of course, Christ,

but a holy person had a kind of intrinsic power which was taken over by whatever relic we were concerned with. It could be, in fact, a bit of clothing, not necessarily a piece of body. and so anyone hearing one of these stories would have once have thought of a relic we are at the moment in a period in which veneration of relics and particularly the relics of passion are heightening

and heightening and the great climax is to come by which time of course the grail legends have been sort of have become mature the grail is not part of the is not one of the relics of the passion that is collected The Grail is absent. You get the cross, you get the crown, you get the lance of Langeinus. But there are no medieval relics that claim to be the grail.

Just a sec, the one thing that isn't fitting in yet, then we can discuss a bit more generally. We haven't got to Joseph Ivarimathia, and he turns up in the account by Robert de Barron, written again by Frenchmen in France, in 1,200. Can you briefly, Caroline, tell us where Joseph of Varamathia fits into this, the grail story? Well, Joseph of Varumathia is, of course, an attested gospel figure. He's the one who provides the sepulchre for Christ.

And Robert de Boron seems to have made use of the apocryphal gospels, the gospels which weren't accepted in the Bible, to put together a story in which Joseph, really while Christ is hanging on the cross, realises the importance of Christ, goes around to the upper room where the last supper took place and finds the dish that was used both for the serving of the pascal lamb,

which also seems to serve as a cup. then he returns to Calvary and takes down Christ's body, takes it to the sepulchre to bury it, and collect some of the blood that's dripping from Christ's wounds at that point into this dish. Thereafter things become rather complicated, he's imprisoned, he's fed by the dish, the magical food source, as it's now become.

He's eventually released from prison. He goes to a neighbouring city of Saras with his son Josephus, who becomes the first bishop. and they collect a king, they convert and then collect a king from that city, and they all head off to Britain, carrying the grail, in order to convert Britain to Christianity, and to bring this sacred relic to British soil. And this is the beginning of a line of grail-keeping kings,

the last of whom appears in the quest of the Holy Grail, in the form that we know it in English and in French. And the grail has a sort of intermittent appearance, It lives with the grail keeper, but it sometimes appears elsewhere, as in Camelot at the beginning of the Grail quest. And another important feature here is the idea that the table of the Last Supper is reproduced by a second table, the table, the table in effect of the Holy Grail, where the Grail in effect sort of lives when it's not out and about. And the third table is the round table. So the round table constructed by Merlin for Arthur's Court is supposed to reflect these previous.

previous tables and make us a fundamental link between the worldly chivalry of Arthur's Court and this preceding type of chivalry. What do these, what does all, there's quite enough in place now, as it were? So what's this telling us about the society? You say it's top-down, Julia, that it's not folklore and so on. Jonathan's talked a little about the knights and a great deal about the sort of relics and so on. Can we discuss what is this saying to the society which it's addressing?

Are these teaching things? I say this is how you should behave. Are they describing society in a profound way? What's it saying about these? Obviously, people of great intelligence. How seriously are they taking them to start with? It's teaching through narrative. And narratives are extremely powerful.

And I think primarily the narratives were enjoyed for themselves, for their own sake. They liked the narratives. Just enjoyed the stories? They simply enjoyed the stories. So they're not to say saying they regarded as entertainment, full stop. So they didn't have much significant. But entertainment was never entertainment false stuff. And this is where they're an idea of their own sense of chivalry,

their own sense of the complexity of chivalry, their own sense of virtus, their own sense of what it meant to be good. You were not just a brave knight. You had to be a good knight as well. So you have these stories which are wonderful in and of themselves, and they're universal and timeless stories. But for them, they also had a particular meaning. Jonathan, you said there's never been such a century for guilt.

They have elsewhere, yes. Yes, they have elsewhere, I said that, yes. Now, what, and you've given us some terrible example. I mean, for instance, there's one vision that someone has of men climbing up a red-hot ladder, and they fall back into a barrel of boiling pitch, and this is for sexual offences, but the sexual offences are making love to their wives on a Friday. Oh, more on a Friday. It's the whole of Lent, the whole of Advent, the whole of a 40-day fasting period,

the summer, certain Saints days every Wednesday, every Friday, every Saturday. And pregnancy. And you couldn't fight on those days either. In other words, without being silly about it, because this does lead to another important point you're making, it's far better to be a virgin. Well, I think

I mean, they were problems, they've faced real choices but in a sense the choices were not real. By that I mean you could go into the church, you could go into religious community, you could abandon the world, and hope by doing that to achieve salvation. But that was irresponsible if you were the head of a family.

It was impossible to do. So a choice actually was not a real choice. One must understand that this is a world in which goals are set for married men, for nights, for whatever. and these goals are very rarely achievable. And people understood that. The point I've always made about the age of faith and this feeling of guilt is that the difference between then and now

is they achieved their goals no more than we did. In fact, they behaved many often worse than we did, but they worried about it, and that was a difference. They worried about not achieving the goals, even though they knew perfectly well that those goals will be very, very rarely achievable. Is it at all surprising to Caroline that the idea of the Grail comes to reside in the British Isles

and then fastens on Glastonbury in places like that, although mostly written about by French historians? Again, the connection with Glastonbury is a very late one. Although Joseph is very early connected with Glastonbury, the actual connection with the Grail being somehow hidden in Glastonbury is something that seems to come out of the 19th century tourist trade in effect. But the idea that the Grail should come here originally, I think is just part of a conversion story.

It's part of a late origin myth for the British people, if you like. Where did Christianity come from? Not apparently from St. Augustine, but right from somebody who had held Christ in his arms and buried him, which makes her more dramatic story makes Britain more prominent in Christian culture. It gives us something of a chosen people, to be of us. Yes, and of course most nations like to argue that they were particularly chosen in some way. And even now you begin to evolving in the last century

is the idea which is now promulgated again in the Glastonbury Torres trade that Christ came to Glastonbury as a young man with Joseph. And of course these were French historians, yes, but they were Norman French historians and of course it was the Normans who ran Britain. So in the sense the Normans were creating

an Anglo-Norman myth in which Britain was seen as central because that's where the Normans were. Because they needed their own myths having cut themselves off from France. Jonathan. Yes, the Glastonbury legend is actually itself, about the time Cretien de Troire was writing,

of course, the body of Arthur was theoretically found at Glastonbury. And then in the most amazing ceremony in the later 13th century, King Edward I of England and his wife, Eleanor, presided over the translation of Arthur's body, into a tomb right in the centre of the nave at Glastonbury. And this was quite an extraordinary sort of celebration of this Arthurian past. And what has always puzzled me, and no one has ever explained to me,

is why a man like Henry VIII, who was so committed to, as it were, that nations passed, actually... Well, so committed to it that he vandalised most of it, yeah. But destroyed, you'd have destroyed Glassenbury. You would have thought of all places, he would have preserved it. But I think this is because it was starting then to be part associated with things that were prior to the Reformation. Juliet, can I ask you or can I ask any of you?

The Thomas Mallory, Sir Thomas Mallory, he of the imprisoned person who wrote Mort D'Arthur in 1469. Does that mark the end of this, as it were, a romance of the Grail? It marks the culmination of the medieval romance, because Mallory is writing at a time and he recognised that his world was ending. He was writing during the War of the Roses, and the Tudor period was not a period of courtly. It was just different. And Mallory was basing his sources really on a translation of the French grail, a completely developed grail, where this grail quest had become both the quest that the knights most wanted to do and the way that the Arthurian world was going to unravel. And it was perfect for Mallory, because Mallory realized his world was unraveling. So it certainly

represents the end of a medieval grail. Now, you had another period, the Tudors were interested in it, until Henry VIII, where the whole thing, because of the Reformation, I think, the whole of the idea of the Grail and the whole of the quest disappears for a while, for a long while. Sorry, can you talk about that, Carlin? Does the Grail idea just fade as the Reformation comes in,

and if so, why? I think it's certainly true that the kind of complications of Eucharistic belief after the Reformation meant that focusing on the Grail itself and the kind of questions of transubstantiation and so on, which were very much at issue in the Reformation, made it too dangerous, perhaps really, to concern oneself with. But I want to go back to the point that Juliet was making about Mallory.

Mallory is not actually, I think, terribly interested in the religious side of the Grail quest. His main interest is Lancelot and the Knights who fail. And he makes it very clear that Gawain, for example, gets absolutely no way. in the quest because when he's rebuked by a hermit for going around and killing people and behaving in a worldly way, he says, well, that's what knights do. I'm sorry, I have to go. And Lancelot gets to the Grail Castle and almost makes it, almost gets to the inner sanctum, but is pushed back by a kind of divine force field and falls into a coma. And I think Mallory is much more interested in the political implications in the sense. Arthur is absolutely dead set against the Grail quest. It's very much

emphasised in Mallory, it will mean the destruction of the round table. And indeed, when the night straggled back from the quest, nothing is ever the same again. It's the beginning of the end for the round table. That's fascinating. We have time for a telling postscript, but it is just a postscript. This is, as you intimated earlier on this, all this is revived in the 19th century. Saudi translates Malory, as it were. Tennyson writes his epic poem, the Mamig Nougan is re-translated.

it all comes up again, and then we go on to THY, we go into Camel. Why does the 19th century find itself so attracted to it, Jonathan? Well, I think, first of all, of course, it's partly a reaction to the Enlightenment. I mean, there's a way in which these things simply go in cycles. So that the 17th century was a very romantic century, but in a different way. It's the 19th century which really sees a revival of an interest in not only sort of medieval buildings, but also medieval culture and everything related to that culture. But as always, I mean, it's true of us as well.

It takes what interests it and then transforms it into something which is a reflection of itself. Overwhelmingly, the 19th century sees the Middle Ages as a precursor of imperialism. And it sees medieval knighthood, the Crusades and the rest of it, is all setting out models for the imperial ventures. the new quests which it's involved in. And of course, at the same time, it sees in the Middle Ages not only that imperial picture, but also a series of ideals

which can soften the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Juliet, what's your view? It becomes the ideal quest which can never quite be achieved. And I think, again, this imperial world, rather liked to think that it could achieve everything on a physical level, and therefore it had almost the kind of luxury of having this wonderful magical request that they could afford not to quite win. Do you think that Jonathan Hitch of you briefly,

do you think that the Grail has plaited itself into our national mythology and sense of ourselves, or it's something that had its great moment for 150 years, had a bit of a revival, and now is featuring out into show business? Well, it's certainly now show business. There's no question about that. Well, I think Quest literature will always be with us. And that always takes certain forms, including, as we've said, a sort of naive, innocent, a series of hurdles that are put in front of it. And actually, the Grail story turns out in the end to be a jolly good one.

Julia? Well, I think it's now become popular culture, where it was elite culture and sort of very controlled in the Middle Ages. it's now completely escaped. And you can say everything. It's become folklore. It's become folklore. Definitely.

So it's a great percolating down. Absolutely. Absolutely. You get it across the internet. You get it through media. No, it's become much better known now than it ever was. And I think completely beyond anyone's control, I mean, it's become very much, very much a kind of grail,

a receding ideal. Because it speaks so much to the individual now. The popular idea of the Grail quest is becoming what you can do, doing your best, achieving your dream, I think a very American sense of self-realisation. And it's undergone a great change in that respect, but it's changed to fit the ideals of the society, which is using it as a thing to think with. Right, and it still has purchase. Very much so.

Or we wouldn't be here. Thank you all very much, Caroline Larrington, Juliet Wood and Jonathan Riley Smith. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about... about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.