A heady brew

Medieval chalice

On the Trail of the Holy Grail
by Stuart McHardy.
Luath Press Ltd, 2006.

Another of this author’s Arthurian titles (his 2001 The Quest for Arthur was also published by Luath Press) takes him on a quest from the pages of medieval writers to places in the Scottish landscape, and from the early medieval period back into the mists of time.

Along the way he encounters folklore and legend, Dark Age warriors and Goddess worship, Pictish symbol stones and natural wonders. It’s all a bit contentious, especially his insistence that every crucial aspect of the Arthurian legend, from Arthur himself to the location of Avalon, is to be firmly set in Scotland. McHardy flits in a gossipy style from one discipline to another, taking a nugget from one or another scholar and linking it indiscriminately to antiquarian speculation.

In fact, despite describing himself as a ‘cultural ecologist’ McHardy is actually a typical speculative antiquarian, mixing fact and fancy in a heady brew that leaves you with a hangover.

A fantastical building

Edward III’s tomb effigy, Westminster Abbey (Wikipedia Commons)

Edward III’s Round Table at Windsor:
The House of the Round Table and the Windsor Festival of 1344
by Julian Munby, Richard Barber, Richard Brown.
Boydell Press, 2007.

Historical re-enactments have always been popular, especially in the late 20th century, from the Society for Creative Anachronism in America, through English Civil War society The Sealed Knot and Dark Age re-enactment group Britannia in more recent years, to the 500th anniversary of the last great tournament in Wales (which was celebrated at Carew Castle in West Wales in May 2007).

Sir Rhys ap Thomas, a supporter of Henry Tudor before he became king, marked his admission to the Order of the Garter with what became known as the Great Carew Tournament of 1507, and appropriately enough his family’s poet, Rhys Nanmor, compared Carew Castle to King Arthur’s palace.

But the enthusiasm for historical re-enactment goes back much further back than this, as this book (volume 68 in Boydell’s excellent Arthurian Studies series) based on detailed documentary analysis and recent archaeological excavation shows.

Not too unwieldy

Howard Pyle: How Arthur Drew Forth ye Sword

King Arthur in Legend and History
by Richard White.
Routledge, 1998.

In the 1930s a scholar such as E K Chambers could bring out a study of Arthurian matters¹ and, while inter alia translating or paraphrasing key passages in his discussion, would quote the original medieval texts in Latin on the supposition that his readers would be able to read and understand them.

Nearly a century on a knowledge of Latin is not, if you pardon the irony, a sine qua non for the average reader, so we must all be grateful to Richard White for including not just a translation of most of Chambers’ extracts but of a large number of other key Arthurian texts, not all of them in Latin.

Ripping yarn, religious myth

Edward Reginald Frampton ‘The Passage of the Holy Grail to Sarras’. http://www.wikigallery.org

The Legend of the Grail.
Nigel Bryant, compiler and translator.
Arthurian Studies LVIII.
D S Brewer, 2004.

While many readers assume that Thomas Malory’s famous epic is the epitome of Arthurian romance, fewer realise that what this author did was to extract the meat from several earlier French stories and serve them up not only in English but in a strong narrative arc that we know under the title Caxton gave it, Le Morte d’Arthur.

In The Legend of the Grail Nigel Bryant imagines what a monkish redactor or scribe in, say, the 1240s would have done when confronted with the many different French versions of the Perceval romance.

Would he not have done something similar to what Malory achieved more than two centuries later and prune, conflate and effect consistency?

A little light on the Dark Ages

Civitas to Kingdom:
British Political Continuity 300-800
by K R Dark.
Leicester University Press, 1999 (1994).

Continuity used to be a dirty word for certain old-style archaeologists, wedded as they were to the concept of “waves” of invaders to the British Isles and keen to stave off latter-day druid mystics and leyline enthusiasts. Now the balance has righted a bit, it is good to see attempts to address the likely dynamics of social, cultural, political and religious change in the post-Roman period.