Merlin and the Grail

by Robert de Boron

  Sacred relics

  Just as intriguing, and likewise connected with the subject of relics, is the care with which Robert traces the handing on of the Grail: at one point the bequeathing of the vessel from one guardian to another is even to have a witness arranged by God (below, here). The insistence with which the Grail’s provenance is marked might suggest that the authenticity of holy relics was a matter of deep concern for contemporary audiences. We should not be surprised by this. Throughout the twelfth century, ever since the First Crusade, Christians had returned with relics from the East: apostles’ bones, dust and stones from holy places and above all items connected with the Passion had found their way to Northern Europe. How reliable was the provenance of thorns from the Crown of Thorns, the nails that had pierced His hands and feet, or the hairs reputedly collected by John after Mary, in grief, had torn them from her own head at the foot of the Cross? Famously questioned was the authenticity of the dramatic discovery by Peter Bartholomew, guided by his vision of the apostle Andrew, of none other than the Holy Lance with which Christ’s side had been pierced. This relic is particularly interesting in relation to the story of the Grail, of course; because although, as discussed above, Chrétien does not give an overt Christian explanation for the lance with the bleeding head, the presence of this relic in the public consciousness makes it almost inevitable that his audience would have made an instant connection. It is not in the least surprising that Chrétien’s first anonymous Continuator has Gawain learn that the bleeding lance is indeed the lance used at the Crucifixion – the lance of Longinus – as stated likewise here in the prose Perceval (below, here).

  But indeed, the very existence of precious relics, let alone their authenticity, was becoming a cause for concern: given the disastrous progress of the Crusades in the late twelfth century, the loss of holy places and their attendant relics to the Infidel was surely much on the minds of Robert’s listeners. As recently as 1187 the True Cross itself had been lost to Saladin at the catastrophic battle of Hattin. It is interesting to notice the stress placed on the rarity value of anything connected with Christ in Robert’s handling of the story of Veronica: her cloth is emphatically ‘the only thing they found which had touched Our Lord’ (below, here).

  The preoccupation with holy relics in the twelfth century could well be an important element in the appeal and motivation of the Grail story. And what price a relic as wonderful as the vessel used by Him at the Last Supper – containing, moreover, the Holy Blood? The family to whom such a relic was bequeathed would be special indeed,18 and the redactor whose work is preserved in the Modena manuscript, in adding Perceval to Joseph and Merlin, is extremely careful to draw the connection between Joseph of Arimathea, Bron, Alain li Gros and Alain’s son: ‘a line devoted to Our Lord, and He has so exalted them that He has given His flesh and His blood into their keeping’ (below, here).

  The trilogy’s construction

  Careful connections, not only between characters but also between the different sections of this prose trilogy, have been underestimated by some scholars: Pierre Le Gentil, for example, has written of ‘astonishing discrepancies between the two earlier romances and the Perceval’.19 Admittedly, the trilogy is, in Le Gentil’s words, ‘loose in construction’, but only two significant elements that Robert promises in Joseph will be resolved remain unfulfilled by the end of the trilogy – the exact fate of Moyse after plunging into the abyss (though a resolution is very satisfactorily given to the motif of the perilous empty seat), and the further exploits of Petrus. The Modena redactor is otherwise very precise in drawing his stories together. His main device is Merlin himself, who, having knowledge of all things past, present and future, knows everything about the stories of Joseph, Bron, Vortigern, Utherpendragon, Arthur and Perceval, and dictates them all to his scribe Blaise. He thus provides a link between the three parts, an explanation of how they came to be together in one book, and indeed an authority. And authority for the story was, perhaps, not unconnected to authenticity for the relic.

  The ‘astonishing discrepancies’ are far less noticeable than the connections. In Joseph of Arimathea, Joseph is told to make a table ‘in the name of’ the table of the Last Supper (below, here), and it is part of Robert’s plan that another table, with another perilous empty seat, will be made in its name (below, here). Sure enough, the redactor (or Robert himself, if he did write a complete verse Merlin), carefully connects apocryphal Biblical matter with the mythical–historical material about early Britain by having Merlin order Utherpendragon to establish a similar table ‘in the name of the Trinity, which these three tables will signify’ (below, here). At this point the redactor (or Robert) also plans ahead to the Perceval by predicting that the empty seat will be filled by the son of Alain li Gros.

  And having combined Biblical matters in Joseph with mythical British history in Merlin, the connection with the world of chivalric romance in Perceval is fully prepared at the end of Merlin by the idea of knightly deeds and great feats of arms at tournaments being necessary for the successful completion of the Grail quest (below, here). If there are any lingering doubts about the clarity of the trilogy’s conception, it should be noted that the final pages of Merlin even prepare us for the Mort Artu section by Merlin’s prediction about Arthur conquering the Romans (below, here), a conquest which, he says, will be dependent in turn upon the successful outcome of the Grail quest (below, here).

  The trilogy’s construction may be ‘loose’, but it is an ingenious melding of disparate materials, compressing and connecting historical time in a strikingly meaningful way, and its inconsistencies, far from being astonishing, are in the circumstances remarkably minor.

  Style

  Robert has also been unduly criticised for his style. Fairly typical is Le Gentil’s view that he was ‘a poet endowed with boldness and piety but with mediocre talent’ (op. cit., p. 251). No-one would argue that the octosyllabic lines of his verse Joseph are the most sprightly – they do not remotely compare with, for example, the verse of Chrétien de Troyes or Gerbert de Montreuil. But looking at the style of this prose redaction it is hard not to be impressed by the pace, fluency and vigour of the storytelling, and by how brilliantly it could be made to work upon the ear. For it must not be forgotten that what we have here is a script for performance. It cries out to be read aloud.

  There are innumerable indications that this early prose literature was intended for the ear rather than the eye. Indeed in this trilogy there is not a single reference to ‘reading’ the story: the word used is – invariably – ‘to hear’. And the writer of the manuscript refers not merely to ‘all who hear this tale’ (below, here) but also, more strikingly, to ‘hearing’ the book. ‘I’d like you to set it down in a book,’ Merlin tells Blaise, ‘for many people who hear my words will benefit from them’ (below, here); later he assures him that ‘The Book of the Grail will be heard most gladly’ (below, here); and the trilogy ends with Merlin’s prayer for God’s blessing upon ‘all who would willingly hear his book and have it copied’ (below, here). That is not to underestimate the importance of writing, of the book; indeed it is very clear, as Evelyn Birge Vitz argues, that the creators of these stories valued texts ‘as bearing authority.... They recognised the clout of the written word... [but] we cannot begin truly to appreciate the interpersonal and interactive, nor indeed the dramatic and musical, qualities of medieval romances unless and until we actually perform them, and hear and see them performed’.20

  The oral nature of the writing – to coin a paradox – is crucial in appreciating the style of this prose trilogy. In the hands of a talented performer this material has tremendous potential. Time after time the reader may be inclined to think phrases – or whole passages – strangely matter-of-fact and underwritten; but it is the very spareness of the phraseology which, in performance, could be most intensely dramatic. The conception of Arthur, for example, appears on the page to be absurdly understated:

  Utherpendragon and Igerne lay t
ogether that night. And he begat an heir who was later to be called King Arthur. (Below, here)

  But a good performer would understand that, coming immediately after the possibly erotic, very nearly comic ‘as soon as Igerne heard that the duke had come she had taken to her bed, and when Uther saw her lying there in all her beauty, the blood stirred throughout his body. Merlin and Ulfin removed their lord’s boots as fast as they could, and put him to bed,’ the simplicity of the sentences quoted above is startling, potentially full of sudden gravitas, ending wonderfully with the resonant name of Arthur.

  Equally underexploited at first glance is Gawain’s death (below, here), which could seem ineptly brief: ‘ill befell Gawain: his helmet was not laced on, and a Saxon wielding an oar dealt him a blow to the head that struck him dead’; but it is totally unexpected – as is the pathetic, ignoble nature of the weapon – and timed well by a good performer this would be deeply shocking, especially because it is followed by a brilliant, abrupt change of tone as the performer is required to launch into an anguished lament.

  Most extraordinarily underwritten of all, perhaps, is the exchange between Kay, Entor and Arthur about the drawing of the sword from the stone (below, here). A modern novelist would almost certainly describe for the solitary reader, curled up alone in a chair, the looks on the characters’ faces, exactly what went through their minds and how they felt. The medieval writer had no need to do this, because he knew that a skilled performer would reveal the subtextual emotions and reactions in his delivery to the gathered, communal listeners.21 Once again the spareness with which it is written, apparently simplistic, is due not to artistic naivety22 but to an experienced, highly developed sense of what would work startlingly and movingly when performed. Kay’s initial impulse to be deceitful, then his inability to lie to his father, then Entor’s instant realisation of the truth of the situation, cannot be quoted because they are not on the page; they are between the lines, waiting to be revealed by the performer. And for any sensitive performer, when Entor tells Arthur that he is only his foster-father, the stunningly simple sentence

  When Arthur heard this, he wept

  is perfectly judged. The pacing of this passage, from a performance perspective, is masterly.

  In terms both of structure and of style this trilogy has been judged far too much in terms of modern expectations. Its diverse contents make it a remarkable piece of work, combining a new apocryphal gospel (Joseph of Arimathea) with a retelling of mythical British history (Merlin) and with chivalric romance (in Perceval) to create the earliest complete ‘Arthurian cycle’. Stylistically, it is a finely paced, vigorous piece of storytelling which, for a talented performer, would provide a highly accomplished and potent script.

  Nigel Bryant

  Further reading

  BAUMGARTNER, Emmanuele. ‘Robert de Boron et l’imaginaire du livre du Graal’, in Arturus Rex, Acta Conventus Lovaniensis, 1987, Vol. 2, ed. W. Van Hoecke, G. Tournoy and W. Verbeke, pp. 259-68, Louvain, 1991.

  CERQUIGLINI, Bernard. La parole medievale, Paris, 1981.

  –––––. ‘Sur la prose du Joseph d’Arimathie: Forme et statut de la parole’, in Perspectives Medievales 3 (1977), pp. 43-8.

  DUGGAN, Joseph J. ‘Oral Performance of Romance in Medieval France’, in Continuations: Essays in Medieval French Literature and Language in Honor of John L. Grigsby, ed. Norris J. Lacy and Gloria Torrini-Roblin, Birmingham, Alabama, 1989, pp. 51-61.

  –––––. ‘Performance and Transmission: Aural and Ocular Reception in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century Vernacular Literature of France’, in Romance Philology 42 (1989), pp. 49-58.

  GOODRICH, Norma Lorre. Merlin, New York, 1987.

  GOODRICH, Peter, ed. The Romance of Merlin, an Anthology, New York, 1990.

  GOWANS, Linda M. ‘New Perspectives on the Didot-Perceval’, in Arthurian Literature VII, D. S. Brewer, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 1-22.

  HARDING, Carol Elaine. Merlin and Legendary Romance, New York, 1988.

  LACY, Norris J., ed. Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, New York and London, 1996.

  LACY, N. J., KELLY, D., and BUSBY, K., eds. The Legacy of Chrétien de Troyes, 2 vols, Amsterdam, 1987-88.

  MACDONALD, A. A. The Figure of Merlin in Thirteenth Century French Romance, Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter, 1990.

  MEISTER, P., ed. Arthurian Literature and Christianity, New York and London, 1999.

  MICHA, Alexandre. Etude sur le ‘Merlin’ de Robert de Boron, Geneva, 1980.

  PICKENS, Rupert T. ‘“Mais de çou ne parole pas Crestiens de Troies” – a re-examination of the Didot-Perceval’, in Romania 105 (1984), pp. 492-510.

  SCHMOLKE-HASSELMANN, Beate. The Evolution of Arthurian Romance, Cambridge, 1998.

  ZUMTHOR, Paul. Merlin le Prophete. Un theme de la litterature polemique, de l’historiographie et des romans, Lausanne, 1943, reprinted Slatkine, 1973.

  Notes

  1 ‘The Evolution and Legacy of French Prose Romance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. R. L. Krueger (Cambridge, 2000), p. 169.

  2 Robert de Boron, Le roman du Graal (Paris, 1981).

  3 William Roach, ed., The Didot Perceval, According to the Manuscripts of Modena and Paris (Philadelphia, 1941), pp. 37, 4, 5, 317.

  4 Edited by William Nitze: Robert de Boron, Le roman de l’Estoire dou Graal (Paris, 1927).

  5 ‘The Origin of the Grail Legends’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 274-94.

  6 In a late passage in Chrétien’s Perceval there does appear the line ‘Tant sainte chose est li graals’ (Roach’s edition, v. 6425), but it could be argued that in context ‘sainte’ means ‘holy’ only in the sense of ‘sacred’, and is not specifically Christian.

  7 Verses 3220-1 of Roach’s edition (Geneva, 1959).

  8 Chrétien de Troyes and his Continuators, Perceval, the Story of the Grail, translated by N. Bryant (Cambridge, 1982), p. 69, corresponding to Roach’s edition, vv. 6420-3.

  9 If, as seems likely, the word derives from the Latin gradalis, it would imply a wide, fairly deep vessel. See Mario Roques, ‘Le Nom du Graal’, in Colloques internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris, 1956).

  10 See Jessie L. Weston’s famous (but now the object of much scepticism) From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge, 1920).

  11 In fact, Chrétien makes no reference to the host when Perceval first visits the Grail Castle. It is not mentioned until later, when Perceval meets his hermit uncle. This passage is thrust so briefly and abruptly into the middle of lengthy adventures centred on Sir Gawain that some scholars have suggested it is an interpolation. There is in my view nothing stylistically or thematically to substantiate this, though if it were the case, it would simply make Robert’s idea of the Grail’s Biblical origins even more remarkable.

  R. S. Loomis ingeniously suggested that the presence of a host in Chrétien’s grail was explicable in terms of a misunderstanding of the Welsh word ‘corn’ (a horn – King Bran’s magical horn of plenty in an old Celtic story) when translated into the French word ‘cors’, the equally magical, all-feeding body of Christ (R. S. Loomis, op. cit., p. 288). I am inclined, however, to think that Loomis’s philological speculation is unnecessary, and there is certainly no need to think in terms of a misunderstanding: Chrétien merely needed to have some knowledge or memory of the Celtic tale, because to make a deliberate translation of a magic feeding vessel into a vessel containing a host is simultaneously brilliant and, in terms of symbolism, very simple.

  12 Perceval, tr. N. Bryant, p. 67; Roach’s edition, vv. 6292–3.

  13 Corresponds to Roach’s edition, vv. 6514–15.

  14 Perceval, tr. N. Bryant, p. 70.

  15 Dating the composition and establishing the interconnection of Arthurian romances are notoriously difficult, but I believe it most likely that:

  (a) Robert knew Chrétien’s Perceval. He may also have been aware of other material relating to the Grail.
(R. S. Loomis offers one small but possibly telling example when he points out how the name of Robert’s Fisher King, Bron, though linked to the Biblical Hebron, is remarkably close to Bran, a corresponding infirm king with a mysterious vessel in the eleventh-century Welsh Branwen [Loomis, op. cit., p. 280] – if it is a coincidence, it is an extraordinary one. ) Inspired to make the sacred vessel unambiguously Christian, Robert wrote his verse Joseph of Arimathea quite shortly after Chrétien’s poem – early enough, I would suggest, to influence even the First Continuation to the extent of turning the grail in that anonymous author’s mind into the ‘Holy Grail’ (though I am aware that the First Continuator was almost certainly influenced in his thinking by Celtic stories of magic vessels of plenty).

  (b) The final composition of this prose trilogy was shortly after 1200, late enough for the Perceval section (which, although Robert doubtless intended to resolve what he had begun in Joseph, is in my view the work of a talented redactor and in no way from Robert’s pen) to be influenced in turn by the Second Continuation.

  16 ‘The Modena Text of the Prose Joseph d’Arimathie’, in Romance Philology, Vol. IX (1955-56), pp. 313–42.

  17 L. H. Loomis in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 44 (1929), pp. 511-15, quoted in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), p. 100.

  18 In this connection it is worth noting Mary E. Giffin’s article ‘A Reading of Robert de Boron’ (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Vol. 80 [1965], pp. 499-507), in which she argues that local concerns, place-names and personal names relating to Robert’s patrons and his area of Burgundy correspond in a surprising way to proper names in Joseph.

  19 ‘The Work of Robert de Boron’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, ed. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 251–62.

  20 Evelyn Birge Vitz, Orality and Performance in Early French Romance (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 33, 282.