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The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology

Movement IV — The Vessel and the Cycle · Unit 23 of 36

Revision and Dissent: Post-Vulgate and Prose Tristan

How did the next generation quarrel with the cycle — recentering it on the Grail, or flooding it with worldly adventure?

The Argument

The Vulgate no sooner stood than it was rebuilt twice, in opposite directions. The Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal (c. 1230–40) — surviving in fragments, Spanish and Portuguese translations, and long stretches embedded in Malory — strips the Lancelot love story nearly out, tightens everything toward the Grail, and darkens the theology: its signature invention is Balin, the ill-starred "Knight with Two Swords," whose every act of prowess breeds ruin and who deals the Dolorous Stroke — piercing King Pellehan with the sacred spear, laying three kingdoms waste with one blow. In the Post-Vulgate the Waste Land has a date, a culprit, and a wound; providence has become something closer to doom; and Arthur's begetting of Mordred is punished from the start. Fatalism this systematic is new in the tradition, and Malory's haunted early tales (Unit 27) inherit its temperature.

The Prose Tristan (c. 1230–40, then expanding for two centuries) pulls the other way: it hauls the Tristan legend (Unit 17) bodily into Arthur's world, makes Tristan a Round Table knight and Lancelot's peer and rival, and dilutes the old fatal potion-tragedy into an endless, sociable sea of jousts, tournaments, and quests. Its inventions are durable: Palamedes the Saracen knight, noble, unbaptized, hopelessly in love with Iseult, forever pursuing the Questing Beast; and Dinadan, the tradition's one ironist, a brave knight who asks out loud whether love-service is madness and errantry a racket — the matter developing an immune system of self-criticism. Together these two responses define the poles between which Malory will compile: doom-tightened Grail history and expansive chivalric society. Read selectively; know the shape.

The Texts

  1. The Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal — the Merlin continuation: the Balin section

    The Dolorous Stroke: the tradition's darkest invention, and Malory's favourite.

    Edition in Lacy's Lancelot-Grail (Post-Vulgate volumes); reconstruction by Fanni Bogdanow

  2. The Prose Tristan — selections

    Tristan at the Round Table; Palamedes and the Questing Beast; Dinadan's loyal heresies.

    Edition trans. Renée L. Curtis, The Romance of Tristan (Oxford, selections)

The Scholarship

  1. The Romance of the Grail: A Study of the Structure and Genesis of a Thirteenth-Century Arthurian Prose Romance · Fanni Bogdanow

    The Post-Vulgate reconstructed from its scattered witnesses — heroic philology.

  2. A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle — the Post-Vulgate and Prose Tristan chapters · ed. Carol Dover

    The best short account of what the revisers wanted.

The Practice

Lectio Read the Balin narrative start to finish. List every warning he receives and overrides; then say what the story believes about warnings.

Scriptio Write Dinadan's table-talk for one supper at Camelot — six lines of affectionate heresy about quests, from inside the fellowship. Keep him brave; the critique only counts from a man who rides anyway.

In the Anatomy

The Bleeding Lance The Wounded King The Waste Land

Movement IV — The Vessel and the Cycle

  1. 19. Robert de Boron: The Christening of the Grail
  2. 20. The Vulgate Cycle: Architecture of the Lancelot-Grail
  3. 21. The Queste del Saint Graal
  4. 22. La Mort le Roi Artu: The Tragedy Machine
  5. 23. Revision and Dissent: Post-Vulgate and Prose Tristan
  6. 24. Where Did the Grail Come From?

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