In search of the Grail

IMAGINATION AND BELIEF

By Richard Barber

Harvard University Press, $27.95, 464 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY ERIC WARGO

Late in the 12th century, the French writer Chretien de Troyes penned a prose romance about an immature would-be knight named Perceval, who encounters a wondrous, strange vessel serving an unknown personage in a mysterious castle.Adhering rigidly to his first lessons in courtly manners — not to talk too much — the young hero doesn’t inquire about the odd spectacle he has witnessed. He then goes on a series of adventures wherein he learns (among other things) that, to show proper compassion to his host, he should have asked.

This story, left unfinished when Chretien died in 1190, is the first mention in literature of a “Grail.” But already within five decades after his death, a handful of other writers either supplied continuations to his narrative or, like the French poet Robert de Boron and the German knight Wolfram von Eschenbach, wrought their own imaginative accounts.

This small body of French and German works inspired, over the next eight centuries, an astonishing range of artistic masterpieces, from Thomas Malory’s picturesque “Morte d’Arthur” to Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” to the poems of T.S. Eliot and Charles Williams — not to mention a host of postmodern satires by such lights as Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco and Monty Python.

This literary phenomenon, from start to finish (yes, including even Monty Python), is the subject of “The Holy Grail,” a vast, occasionally dense, but consistently fascinating new study by Richard Barber, a foremost expert on medieval life and literature and author of “The Knight and Chivalry.”

It is essential reading for anyone interested in Arthurian romances and, chapter after chapter, offers sober correctives to countless misconceptions about the Grail and its supposed secret meanings.

What was the Grail? Nowadays, it has come to mean whatever we want it to mean. But for Chretien, who started it all, it was basically a literary device, Mr. Barber says — the medieval equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock’s “MacGuffin,” which takes different forms in his films (a secret formula, a hidden code, etc.) but always serves primarily to drive the plot.

It is there to provide an occasion for our young, naive hero to fail to ask a rather obvious question — What is this? Whom does it serve?—and thereby to need to undergo an education in compassion and courtly civility in order to become fully a knight and a man.

But gripped by the very same questions left unasked by Perceval and unanswered by Chretien, many readers have delved more deeply into the symbolism than perhaps they should. Some have gone backward: Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries, influenced by the study of folklore and anthropology, argued that the Grail motif derived from earlier oral traditions, such as pagan Celtic myths. Others sought Islamic influences imported from the East.

But Mr. Barber systematically shows that there is little secure evidence for “true sources” of the Grail outside the romances themselves — which were, after all, imaginative stories.

What must be sought instead, Mr. Barber argues, is context, and he makes a strong case that the context for the Holy Grail is none other than the orthodox Christianity of the European courts of the period.

No two writers describe the Holy Grail the same way, but it is always somehow linked to the Mass — either to the host, for which it may serve as a receptacle, or to the holy blood (it was sometimes described as the cup in which, according to an apocryphal account, Joseph of Arimathea collected Christ’s blood after the crucifixion).

Apart from the scenes directly involving the Grail, the stories lay heavy emphasis on knights’ redemption by participating in the Mass, and the Grail typically appears at the center of a mysterious and awe-inspiring (and very Mass-like) ritual, which sinful knight-protagonists, in their impurity and ignorance, cannot yet fathom or appreciate.

If we nowadays read esoteric secrets into all this, it is because we don’t grasp how important and contentious the Eucharist rite was when the stories were written. Instead of being coded heretical texts, as some modern interpreters have claimed, the Grail narratives were conservative assertions of orthodox Christian belief against heretical groups (like the Cathars) who were then rejecting the Mass and the priestly authority that administered it.

“To assert the power of the Eucharist was to raise a standard against the heretics,” Mr. Barber writes, “and it is possible to read the Grail romances as a kind of call to arms to the chivalry of Europe against the forces threatening the church … The Grail romances do not conceal a secret — they reveal the attitudes of the time.”

By putting the Holy Grail back in the context of the court and church, Mr. Barber explains not only the popularity of Grail romances during the later Middle Ages but also their decline in popularity with the Reformation. It took the Pre-Raphaelites, in England, and Wagner, in Germany, to revive interest in the Arthurian romances during the 19th century.

Jesus’ blood has of course become extremely timely again. Besides spilling in unprecedented quantities from the big screen, a particular interpretation of the Holy Grail as Jesus’ royal bloodline (parsing the French “san greal” as “sang real,” royal blood) has received renewed attention due to Dan Brown’s bestselling novel “The Da Vinci Code.”

Readers coming to Mr. Barber’s study looking for this and other sensational Grail theories of recent years will be sorely disappointed. Mr. Brown’s thriller is not mentioned — being evidently too new to have made it into Mr. Barber’s otherwise comprehensive survey of the Grail in popular culture.

The main source of Mr. Brown’s ideas, a 1982 work of what Mr. Barber calls “fictional history” by Michael Baigent, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” is dismissed in a few pages as a baseless but “ingeniously constructed series of suppositions.”

Other popular and influential 20th-century Grail interpretations — from the work of Jessie Weston, who saw the Grail as representing pagan fertility beliefs, to the popular writings of Joseph Campbell, who saw it as the object of an inner spiritual or psychological quest — are also quickly but respectfully dismissed.

Mr. Barber may certainly be forgiven for not spilling as much ink on each and every modern Grail theory, story or film as on the medieval writers who claim the bulk of his attention. Yet there is perhaps more coherence, and perhaps even more worth (albeit not as history or as criticism), to the panoply of postmodern Grails — even the most loony — than meets the author’s medievalist eye.

The Grail is a mirror, as he says, for our individual preoccupations (political conspiracies, inner wholeness, UFOs, whatever). The ability of a single symbol to capture so many imaginations, both heated and sober, across time and space merits a different kind of book.

Mr. Barber has written a monumental study of the Grail in literature, but the study of the Grail and Grail pseudo-scholarship as a modern myth or folklore genre in its own right remains to be written. Mr. Barber himself acknowledges this.

That said, I doubt that anywhere else will one find so thorough and comprehensive an examination of the Grail, nor as careful and interesting a survey of the medieval stories that started it all. “The Holy Grail” is a major contribution to Arthuriana and will surely be the definitive analysis of what could perhaps be called literature’s ur-MacGuffin.

Eric Wargo is an associate editor at the Biblical Archaeology Society in Washington.