The “Holy Grail” makes its first
appearance in literature in the 12th century in a work by Chrétien
de Troyes, Perceval. Here, Perceval
was a knight of the legendary King Arthur’s Round Table on a quest to find the
"Holy Grail." The story was subsequently told and re-told, embellished and
altered by various writers, including both Wolfram von Eschenbach and Sir
Thomas Malory. In later versions of the Grail quest, Sir Galahad replaced Sir
Perceval as the principal hero, but the theme remained popular and was increasingly
depicted in works of art as well literature.
People in the Middle Ages understood that, like King Arthur and the
Knights of the Round Table themselves, the Holy Grail was a symbol, a
spiritual gift. It was not until the 19th century that people -- increasingly
lacking spirituality and thinking of themselves as more “rational” and
“scientific” -- crudely turned the Holy Grail into a mere thing. Just people in the 19th and 20th
centuries insisted on trying to identify the “real King Arthur,” modern
scholars and enthusiasts have tied themselves in knots trying to explain just
what the Holy Grail was ― even inventing the idea that it was the blood of
Christ in the form of genetic descendants of Christ and Mary Magdalen.
Another 20th/21st
Century invention is that the Templars were in search of the Holy Grail when
they excavated under the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Indeed, it has even
been argued that the Templars went all the way to Ethiopia in the 12th
century in search of the Holy Grail (now transformed into the Ark of the
Covenant). Most recently, the History Chanel’s “Knightfall” builds on the
notion that there was a connection between the Templars and the Holy Grail.
This connection is as spurious
and ridiculous as the idea that there was
a Holy Grail in the first place. There can be no evidence of a connection
between the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail, because people in the Middle
Ages, least of all the practical and hard-headed Knights Templar, weren’t gullible
enough to actually think that the Holy Grail was a thing. Since the Templars (at least in theory) disdained secular
literature and courtly love, the venue in which the legends and tales of the
Holy Grail played out, would have been particularly disdained by the Templars. They probably would not have deigned to admit they knew of the tales at
all.
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| Copyright Fireforge Games |
Literature, whether disguised as
pseudo scholarship or, more honestly, fiction, that depicts a relationship
between the Knights Templar and an object called the “Holy Grail” belong in the
realm of fantasy and should be recognized and treated as such.
For
readers tired of clichés and cartoons, award-winning novelist Helena P.
Schrader offers nuanced insight to historical events and figures based on sound
research and an understanding of human nature. Her complex and engaging
characters bring history back to life as a means to better understand
ourselves. Her Jerusalem Trilogy has won 15 literary accolades including Best Biography 2017 (Book Excellence Awards) and Best Christian Historical Fiction 2017 (Readers' Favorites).
As enlightening as always, thanks!
ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely sure I can agree with your judgment that mediæval people didn't think of the Grail as a thing. Part of the problem is, of course, that "mediæval" covers far too long a period to generalize, so the way people thought of the Grail (if they thought of it at all) in the 12th century would certainly have been very different from the way they thought of it in the 15th.
ReplyDeleteWolfram certainly seems to think of it as a sort of shape-shifting vision representing "sælde" and some hint of that lasts down possibly even to Wagner; even considered as an object, the Grail is associated with an aura of heavenly bliss.
On the other hand, the tremendous popularity of allegory in the middle ages, certainly in the 14th and 15th centuries, did tend toward a sort of reification of concepts, of the sort that turned a "bead" from a prayer into a small rounded globule. By Malory's time, I THINK most people did think of the Grail as a definite object, though exactly WHAT that object was was still not entirely fixed. I'm fairly sure more thought of it as a dish rather than as a cup, and that it held the Paschal lamb rather than the wine, though there still also lurks the older conception that it was a vessel used to catch Christ's blood as it was shed from the Cross.
Of course, one must completely repudiate the grotesque, ham-fisted distortions of both history and legend made by modern purveyors of "historical" sensation fiction. They fail as history, as legend, and even as good story-telling; though they are, alas! generally all-too-successful as propaganda.