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Early forms
There are two veins of thought concerning the Grail's
origin. The first, championed by Roger Sherman Loomis,
Alfred Nutt, and Jessie Weston, holds that it derived
from early Celtic myth and folklore. Loomis traced a
number of parallels between Medieval Welsh literature
and Irish material and the Grail romances, including
similarities between the Mabinogion's Bran the Blessed
and the Arthurian Fisher King, and between Bran's
life-restoring cauldron and the Grail. Other legends
featured magical platters or dishes that symbolize
otherworldly power or test the hero's worth. Sometimes
the items generate a never-ending supply of food,
sometimes they can raise the dead. Sometimes they decide
who the next king should be, as only the true sovereign
could hold them.
On the other hand, some scholars believe the Grail
began as a purely Christian symbol. For example, Joseph
Goering of the University of Toronto has identified
sources for Grail imagery in 12th century wall paintings
from churches in the Catalan Pyrenees (now mostly
removed to the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya,
Barcelona), which present unique iconic images of the
Virgin Mary holding a bowl that radiates tongues of
fire, images that predate the first literary account by
Chrétien de Troyes. Goering argues that they were the
original inspiration for the Grail legend.
Another recent theory holds that the earliest stories
that cast the Grail in a Christian light were meant to
promote the Roman Catholic sacrament of the Holy
Communion. Although the practice of Holy Communion was
first alluded to in the Christian Bible and defined by
theologians in the first centuries AD, it was around the
time of the appearance of the first Christianized Grail
literature that the Roman church was beginning to add
more ceremony and mysticism around this particular
sacrament. Thus, the first Grail stories may have been
celebrations of a renewal in this traditional
sacrament.[4] This theory has some basis in the fact
that the Grail legends are a phenomenon of the Western
church (see below).
Most scholars[who?] today accept that both Christian
and Celtic traditions contributed to the legend's
development, though many of the early Celtic-based
arguments are largely discredited (Loomis himself came
to reject much of Weston and Nutt's work). The general
view is that the central theme of the Grail is
Christian, even when not explicitly religious, but that
much of the setting and imagery of the early romances is
drawn from Celtic material. |
