Merlin and the Grail: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval: The Trilogy of Arthurian Prose Romances attributed to Robert de Boron

225 Pages·2016·2.71 MB·English

by  Robert de Boron

ARTHURIAN STUDIES XLVIII
MERLIN AND THE GRAIL
It is hard to overstate the importance of this trilogy of prose romances in
the development of the legend of the Holy Grail and in the evolution of
Arthurian literature as a whole. They give a crucial new impetus to the
story of the Grail by establishing a provenance for the sacred vessel – and
for the Round Table itself – in the Biblical past; and through the
controlling figure of Merlin they link the story of Joseph of Arimathea
with the mythical British history of Vortigern and Utherpendragon, the
birth of Arthur, and the sword in the stone, and then with the knightly
adventures of Perceval’s Grail quest and the betrayal and death of
Arthur, creating the very first Arthurian cycle. Ambitious, original and
complete in its conception, this trilogy – translated here for the first time
– is a finely paced, vigorous piece of storytelling that provides an
outstanding example of the essentially oral nature of early prose.
NIGEL BRYANT is head of drama at Marlborough College. He has also
provided editions in English of the anonymous thirteenth-century
romance Perlesvaus, published as The High Book of the Grail, and
Chretien’s Perceval: The Story of the Grail.
ARTHURIAN STUDIES
ISSN 0261–9814
Previously published volumes in the series are listed at the back of
this book

Contents
Introduction
The Modena manuscript
Authorship and sources
Sacred relics
The trilogy’s construction
Style
Further reading
Joseph of Arimathea
Merlin
Perceval
Related Titles
Copyright
Three for three:
Sally, Jevan and Will
Introduction
‘With the obvious exception of Chrétien de Troyes, the most influential
writer within the French romance tradition may well be Robert de
Boron.’ So Norris J. Lacy has written;1 and it is surely no exaggeration.
Not only in the development of the Grail legend, but in the evolution of
Arthurian literature as a whole, it would be hard to overstate the
importance of this trilogy of prose romances. Relatively short though
they may be, these works attributed to Robert de Boron not only gave a
vital new impetus to the story of the Grail left unfinished by Chrétien de
Troyes, but were also to prove an inspiration to later writers, showing
the way forward by combining a series of narratives to create the very
first cycle of Arthurian tales. For the redactor of the version translated
here was not content merely to take the Grail as the object of a chivalric
quest and go back in time to tell the story of its origins in the Biblical
past; nor was he content to move on and see the Grail quest brought to a
conclusion; he went further, and gave his audience a resolution to the
whole Arthurian story by finishing his Perceval with an account of the
betrayal and death of Arthur and the end of the knights of the Round
Table. This trilogy is astonishingly ambitious, original and complete in its
conception.
The Modena manuscript
The Joseph of Arimathea has survived in seventeen manuscripts, most of
which also contain Merlin, but only two go on to contain the entire
trilogy of Joseph, Merlin and Perceval: manuscript E. 39 of the Biblioteca
Estense in Modena, and nouv. acqu. no. 4166 of the Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris (formerly named the ‘Didot’ manuscript after a past
owner – hence the title Didot-Perceval often applied to the third part).
These manuscripts have not necessarily been used as the bases for
modern editions: both Richard O’Gorman in his parallel edition of the
verse and prose versions of Joseph (Toronto, 1995) and Alexandre Micha
in his edition of Merlin (Geneva, 1979) argue at length for the superiority
of other manuscripts, each editor finally opting for a different text. But
Bernard Cerquiglini, in his edition of the complete trilogy,2 follows the
text simply of the Modena manuscript. Uncritical though some may feel
this to be, it has the great virtue of presenting a medieval reality: it gives
a single, complete text as it would have been experienced by a
contemporary audience.
Of the two manuscripts that contain the complete trilogy, the Modena
text is unquestionably the better – notably in the Perceval section. In his
fine edition of the Perceval, William Roach refers to the Modena redactor
as ‘a careful and thoughtful workman... [whose manuscript] gives a
straightforward, clear text, admirably suited to conveying the impression
that the Joseph – Merlin – Perceval – Mort Artu tetralogy is a unified and
harmonious whole... [while the Paris ‘Didot’ manuscript, although it tells
essentially the same story, contains]... hopelessly garbled passages.... The
text of the [Didot] manuscript is so corrupt that the reader may often
wonder whether some of its readings do not represent misprints or
errors of transcription on the part of the editor.’3
This, therefore, is a translation of the trilogy (or tetralogy, if you think
of the Mort Artu as a separate section) as compiled by the anonymous
writer of that specific manuscript, now in the library at Modena, and as it
would have been read – or, more probably, performed and heard – by a
specific group of people in the thirteenth century.
Authorship and sources
But what exactly did the redactor whose work is preserved in the
Modena manuscript do with Robert de Boron’s material? What exactly
did Robert himself write?
A simple account would have it that this trilogy is a translation into
prose of a trilogy originally written by Robert in verse. However, only
one manuscript of his verse version survives,4 and it contains only Joseph
and the first 502 lines of Merlin. Whilst it might be reasonable to
conjecture that Robert wrote a complete verse Merlin that is sadly lost,
this is by no means certain; and there is no reason at all to suppose that
he ever wrote a verse Perceval. Indeed, there is a very good reason to
think that he did not: in the course of this prose Merlin we come across a
passage in which the redactor comments that ‘my lord Robert de Boron,
who tells this story, says, like Merlin, that it is in two parts, for he could
not know the story of the Grail’ (below, here). It is true that an ambiguity
in the sentence structure at this point makes it just about possible that it
is Merlin who ‘could not know’ – but it would be a strange thing to say
about a being who has knowledge of all things past and future, and I
have translated the sentence to make it clear that it is Robert who ‘ne pot
savoir le conte dou Graal’.
But what exactly did he ‘not know’? Some scholars have suggested
that Robert did not even know Chrétien de Troyes’ unfinished Perceval
which, in the mid-1180s, introduced the Grail to an intrigued world.
However, given the degree of excitement generated by Chrétien’s
tantalising, unresolved theme, which prompted the composition of no
fewer than four direct Continuations and other brilliant developments in,
for example, Perlesvaus and The Quest of the Holy Grail, it does not seem
likely that any writer interested in Arthurian matters in the 1180s and
1190s would have been unaware of Perceval. In any case, if Robert did not
know Chrétien’s work – or they were writing simultaneously – it would
be difficult to explain the phrase ‘and so the rich Fisher King departed –
of whom many words have since been spoken’ (below, here, which
corresponds to a similar passage in the verse Joseph, vv. 3456-8).
It must be said, however, that it is almost certain that neither the
Fisher King nor the Grail was exactly Chrétien’s invention. Robert refers
to a ‘high book’ as his source (below, here), just as Chrétien in his
dedicatory prologue speaks of ‘the book’ given to him by his patron
Count Philip of Flanders as the basis of his Perceval. Many motifs and
narrative elements in Arthurian romances have been attributed to Celtic
oral tradition, and this has long been assumed to apply also to the Grail.
R. S. Loomis was notably sure that ‘Chrétien did not invent his story, and
later romancers, even when they knew and drew upon his poem, drew
also on an amorphous mass of traditional material.... The legends of the
Grail are a conglomerate of materials paralleled in the literature and lore
of Ireland, Wales and Brittany.’5 It is certainly possible that Robert drew
on this independently of Chrétien; but I believe it most likely, amidst all
the speculation, that he knew the contents of Chrétien’s Perceval as well
as something of the ‘amorphous mass of traditional material’, and was
prompted by both to the idea for his hugely influential story of Joseph of
Arimathea. I would suggest, therefore, that the prose redactor’s reference
to his ‘not knowing’ the story of the Grail was to Robert’s being unable,
perhaps because of his own death, to know the way the Grail theme had
subsequently been developed in, for example, the Second Continuation,
from which several episodes in the prose Perceval are derived.
Robert’s inspirational idea was to make the Grail clearly,
unambiguously Christian by giving it a Biblical early history. It is very
easy, especially when coming to Arthurian literature for the first time, to
forget that the so-called ‘Holy Grail’, connected with Christ, the Last
Supper and the Crucifixion, is not explicitly Christian in the first Grail
romance. It is not the famous holy chalice – in fact it is not a chalice at all,
and not exactly referred to as holy.6 In Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval it is
even introduced on its first appearance with an indefinite article – ‘un
graal’ – and in a most downbeat way at the start of a sentence: Un graal entre
ses deus mains Une damoisele tenoit.7
What kind of vessel this grail is Chrétien never specifies, though he
does tell us that it is made of pure gold and encrusted with surpassingly
beautiful jewels, but in a later passage Perceval’s hermit uncle tells him:
Don’t imagine that [the one who is served from the grail] is given pike or lamprey or salmon; he’s
8
served with a single host....
Chalices are not ideal for serving fish: Chrétien’s grail is implicitly a dish
or platter.9
Some might go as far as to say that nothing, in fact, in Chrétien’s ‘grail
procession’ is explicitly Christian – and certainly, nothing is in an
orthodox sense: there are golden candlesticks, the grail, a silver trencher,
and a lance that sheds blood from its tip.
But the ‘unchristian’ nature of Chrétien’s grail and its accompanying
procession can be – and has been – overstated. In relation to the bleeding
lance, for example, although it is true that Chrétien makes no definite
mention of the lance that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, and although
there has long been the suggestion that the bleeding lance is an echo of a
pagan fertility ritual,10 I think it inconceivable that an audience in the
1180s would have failed to think – instantly – of that relic sensationally
found on the First Crusade, the Holy Lance. Moreover, Chrétien’s grail
contains a host. 11 Now, Leonardo Olschki, in his forthright monograph
The Grail Castle and its Mysteries (Manchester, 1966), declares that ‘there is
not the slightest reference to Christian liturgy in the whole procession’
(pp. 14-15) and emphatically denies that the grail and its host are