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The Holy Grail: History and Legend

Juliette Wood’s expertise on the legend of the Holy Grail is already well known to scholars of folklore. In this conveniently-sized volume, she traces the history of the Grail legend from its first appearance in Western Europe in the twelfth century to the present day. She begins by considering the sources of the Grail romances—a ‘romance’ in this context is not a love story but a chivalric adventure story, often with a fantasy element—and sets out the leading characters and events in the medieval stories. She then describes how the legend was given a new lease of life in the nineteenth century, when the Grail stories’ mixture of chivalric ideals, Celtic connections, and Christian piety made them attractive to a wide range of English-speaking readers, both in Europe and North America. The book explores the Grail’s roles in modern novels and poetry, fantasy role-playing games, and computer games. One chapter considers how the Grail stories became linked to Glastonbury, while another traces how conspiracy theorists, treasure-seekers, and mystery-makers have linked the Holy Grail to the Templars, the Cathars, and locations such as Rennes-le-Château in the south of France and the Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire, England. The final chapter describes ‘chapels, monuments and relics’ linked to the Holy Grail, including locations such as Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, Scotland; and various vessels that have been identified with the Holy Grail since the Middle Ages, such as a green glass dish in Genoa, Italy, and an agate bowl in Valencia Cathedral in Spain. Readers seeking the ‘ultimate truth’ of the Holy Grail will not find it here. Wood’s concern is not to seek the spiritual truth of the Holy Grail, but to trace how others have described and interpreted it down the ages. She explains that there is no single legend of the Holy Grail, ‘no consistent “grail story”’ (20), but many different uses of the theme. Because the first Grail story was composed in the late twelfth century, its author Chrétien de Troyes integrated it into the fictional chivalric world of King Arthur and his knights, which Chrétien and his contemporaries had created. During the medieval period, audience interest lay with the knights who sought the Holy Grail and their individual stories; it was not until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that readers’ attention shifted to the nature of the Holy Grail itself. Wood explains the modern fascination with identifying the supposedly ancient, pre-Christian origins of the Grail story, and her study shows that such a search is ultimately futile: the search for the Holy Grail began with Chrétien de Troyes in north-eastern France in the 1180s. Juliette Wood does not attempt to ‘debunk’ the various legends she describes; her purpose is to explore the history of the legend and its appearances in modern culture. There is, inevitably, a certain amount of debunking: she finds no evidence, for example, that the Templars or the Cathars had any connection with esoteric mysticism. However, her principal aim is to explore how and why the legend of the Holy Grail has developed as it has, and to set out its manifold modern manifestations. The result is an invaluable introduction to, and overview of, the medieval stories of the Holy Grail, their characters and themes, and a very useful guide to the traditions and stories of the Holy Grail, both medieval and modern.