Congratulations--You're a Grail Author

When I started reading (or actually, finishing) a children's book series in July that dealt with British mythology, I didn't know I'd be spending a month's worth of blog posts writing my own version of the Grail story. It was completely unplanned, as my blog posts usually are. I found out, though, that I haven't been able to let go lately of what's sometimes called the Matter of Britain, a key part of which is the Grail literature. It's not all that surprising since I've never really gotten over my fascination with King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Grail that started around age eight. It only takes a little encouragement to reignite the spark.

From what I can tell, Arthurian studies is a subset of medieval studies (or possibly Celtic studies, depending on whom you ask), and Grail literature is a further subset of that, so it's sort of like that riddle wrapped in a secret rolled up in an enigma that you've heard about (apologies to Winston Churchill). My initial research into this area a few years ago showed me that there's a lot of controversy surrounding the "origins" of the Grail material. It's a fascinating subject, but the great thing about just trying to tell the story is that you don't really have to worry about who's right or wrong on all of that. There are many versions of the Grail story, and while there are common elements, there are so many differences between them that it's hard to say just what the "official" story actually is. There really isn't one, unless you consider Chretien de Troyes' version as a starting point (and he actually didn't finish his).

I really just thought it would be fun, considering all the different versions of the story that are out there, to put together my own narrative with all the parts I like and some bits of my own thrown in. Being completely ad hoc and spontaneous, it's certainly no more the cat's pajamas than any other version (and probably less so), but it did satisfy my yearning to tell a cohesive story, and more than that, to try to get at that most elusive idea of all--what is the Grail, exactly, and what does it mean?

What initially attracted me to the story as a child had something to do with this indeterminacy. Arthur's world, as I experienced it, had a mysterious quality that made it hard to pin down. While the setting had an ostensibly Christian background, there were supernatural elements that made it uncanny--wizardry, inanimate objects with a life of their own, strange beasts, magical occurrences, and an atmosphere both solemn and eerie. It didn't belong to the world of fairy tales exactly, but it seemed to hail from some long ago and far away iteration of medieval Britain, or at least a through-the-looking-glass version of it. There was nothing else like it.

Anyone familiar with the Grail story in any of its renditions would have recognized in mine such standard features as the Quest, the Grail Castle, the Maimed King, the Perilous Bed, the Chapel of the Black Hand, and the Loathly Damsel. I didn't necessarily order the elements in the same way or put them to the same use as other writers have done, being most concerned with just playing around and seeing what I could come up with within the broad outlines of convention. In other words, I did the same thing as everyone else and used artistic license.

To my own ear, my version picks up on some of the tragedy depicted in renderings such as Tennyson's, in which the Quest for the Grail, ostensibly begun as a high adventure, is actually the beginning of the unraveling of the Round Table. I initially thought Gawain's stay in the Grail Castle might be somewhat light-hearted, more in the spirit of Wolfram von Eschenbach's humorous telling, but as soon as Gawain encountered the lions in the vestibule, things started going in a different direction. I initially pictured the great hall of the Grail Castle as a more welcoming place, comfortable and luxurious, but then a monkey appeared on the candelabra and things took on a more haunted aspect. To be true to what I think of as the spirit of the stories, I had to adhere to a serious tone, though I found Gawain's (understandable) reactions to things to be sometimes humorous.

If you were expecting Perceval, Galahad, or Lancelot as the hero and wondered why Gawain is in there, that's easy. Gawain does appear in some of the traditional stories as a Grail knight, and I consciously settled on him because I wanted more of a workaday, everyman knight than a paragon. Given all the fantastic adventures he was about to encounter, I thought a more lucid, practical-minded character would be a better foil to the general strangeness than a saint would be. While Gawain is a fine knight, he is also a human one, and I wanted someone I could relate to, someone whose reactions I could understand. (This isn't necessarily the way I would have seen the story as a child, when all of the knights seemed much alike to me, but as an adult I tend to differentiate more.)

It was for that reason also that I left out the Siege Perilous, a motif that appears in some of the traditional stories in which the Chosen Knight, by reason of his superiority, is the only one who can occupy a certain seat in the King's Hall without coming to grief. I always liked the idea of this seat, which by some kind of magic is able to differentiate the true from the false (sort of like the Sword in the Stone can select the true king), and I thought about putting it in. I decided against it because in the end it seemed contrary to both the character of Gawain and the theme of my story, insofar as it has one.

Well, you might be saying, fine, but what about those things you didn't explain--like what did the running girl throw in front of the knight that caused the horse to stumble? What was all that about? (The answer is: I don't know, though maybe it'll come to me one night while I'm making dinner or mopping the floor. All I know is this was not a damsel who required rescuing.) Well, then, you ask, what about the Grail, huh? Did you, Wordplay, ever get around to saying exactly what that is?

As far as that goes, I'm not one of those who think a satisfying Grail story is a reductionist one. I will say that to me, the old myths and tales of the magical horn or cauldron of plenty seem to have a strong echo in the Grail, so that there is the idea of a mysterious source of abundance. It's obvious though, that this source of bounty, whatever it is, is tied to much more than just material plenty, seeming to be not only somewhat ambiguous in nature but also somewhat self-referential. If you're wondering how many times the Grail actually appeared in the story, and whether the cup in the Grail castle is the same Grail that appeared in Arthur's hall, I've got to say, those are some really good questions.

I thought I could tell the Grail story in one post, or at the most two, and was really surprised when it took four. I sat down to do each one feeling some enjoyment as the story unfolded but also the dread of someone who's taken on an ambitious project. It was dissertation time all over again! It seemed kind of brazen, to be honest, but I started it on the spur of a moment, and once started, it seemed best to go through with it, one of my motivations actually being to find out what was going to happen.

Somewhere along the way, I started thinking about the great Henry James, a writer whose labyrinthine prose both fascinated and infuriated me when I read him at an earlier stage of life. At the end of his novel The Wings of the Dove, one character says to another something to the effect of, "Well, let's just go back to the way we were before all this happened." And the other character says, quite simply, "We can never be as we were." I had that in mind as I wrote my ending, as something of that spirit of change seems to permeate the Grail story as I understand it.

As for Gawain, I hope he got a good dinner and a good night's sleep after his return, but whether he did or whether he didn't, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.