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In the twelfth century, a French poet wrote a verse romance about a
young knight who witnesses a mysterious procession centered on a
radiant vessel, a "grail." Left unfinished, the poem inspired other
writers of prose and verse, until the story was completely
rewritten into the Arthurian romances, in which the vessel becomes
a relic of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail. For hundreds of years,
the Grail story has haunted the western imagination. But the
original medieval texts are full of inconsistencies, as different
writers attempted to complete the story in varied ways. This
dictionary illuminates a path through the Perilous Forest of
literature and legend. Entries summarize the stories of the
principal characters, sacred objects and places associated with the
Grail. An Afterword shows how mysteries of the grail continue to
enchant the scholars and creative writers who have transformed the
medieval legend into modern mythology.
The early chroniclers of Britain presented the island as the
promised land of the Roman goddess Diana. Later, when the story of
Arthur was transformed by Christian mythology, a new literary
concept of the island was promoted: the promised land of the Holy
Grail. As the feminine enchantment of the Goddess gave way to the
masculine crusade of the Grail Quest, the otherworld realms of the
fays or fairy women were denigrated in favor of the heavenly
afterlife. The dualism of the medieval authors was challenged by
modern writers such as Blake and Tolkien, as well as by the
scholars of the Eranos conferences. This book explores the conflict
between Goddess and Grail-a rift less about paganism versus
Christianity and more about religious literalism versus spiritual
imagination-which is resolved in the figure of Sophia (Divine
Wisdom).
Starting with William Blake's lost painting The Ancient Britons,
this book shows how the visionary artist and poet reworked the
Matter of Britain - the corpus of legends presenting an alternative
history of Britain - into his own mythology. He thus adds to a
tradition of Arthurian epic begun by Layamon in the 13th century
and continued by Edmund Spenser in the 16th, in which a
Romano-Celtic warlord becomes an icon of the English imagination.
This book shows how Britain became the promised land of a pagan
goddess where mythical events are as important as those of history,
and how the figure of Arthur is transformed into a British Messiah
whose Christian realm is in continuous interaction with the
Otherworld of Faerie, an imagined place between the spiritual and
the earthly. Arthur as perceived through Blake's vision is the
earthly embodiment of the fallen Albion; this exploration of the
mythic underpinnings of the English sense of nationhood reveals an
imaginative consciousness that links us to "human existence itself.
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