The Arthurian Wing · Reading Path
The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology
Movement IV — The Vessel and the Cycle · Unit 19 of 36
Robert de Boron: The Christening of the Grail
Who decided the Grail was the vessel of the Last Supper — and what machinery did that one decision set in motion?
The Argument
Chrétien had left the graal luminous and undefined. A Burgundian poet named Robert de Boron, writing around 1200, defined it — and the definition conquered. In his verse Joseph d'Arimathie, the vessel of the Last Supper passes to Joseph, the secret disciple who buried Christ; in it Joseph catches the blood from the washed body, and in prison the risen Christ himself delivers the vessel back to him with secret words. Freed after long years, Joseph's company carries the Grail westward; a third table — after the Last Supper's and in prophecy of Arthur's Round — is established with an empty seat for the unworthy; and the keeping of the vessel passes to Bron, the Rich Fisher, who bears it to the vales of Avaron in the west. With one stroke Robert fused Otherworld vessel and eucharistic chalice, bolted the whole Arthurian future onto sacred history, and gave Glastonbury (which knew a good thing when it saw one) the Joseph legend it would elaborate for centuries — the mission of 63 AD, the twelve hides, and in the fifteenth century the Holy Thorn.
Robert's sequel Merlin (surviving in fragment and prose redaction) is equally consequential. His Merlin is conceived by a devil on a virtuous woman — the fiends' plot for an Antichrist — but baptism turns the weapon: the child keeps the devil's knowledge of the past and receives from God knowledge of the future, a double sight standing exactly on the hinge of the two testaments. And in this book Merlin institutes the tradition's own memory: at intervals he withdraws to Northumberland, to his mother's confessor Blaise, and dictates the whole history — Joseph, the Grail, the kings, his own works — so that (the text says) all who hear it will be the gladder for it. Blaise writing in the wilderness while Merlin narrates is this path's tutelary image: the wild seer and the scribe, sight become book. This site's Scriptorium is, knowingly, Blaise's desk.
The Texts
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Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval (the Boron trilogy, prose redactions) — Joseph of Arimathea and Merlin · Robert de Boron
The christening of the Grail; the devil's son baptized into prophecy; and Blaise, the hermit-scribe who takes it all down.
Edition trans. Nigel Bryant, Merlin and the Grail (2001)
The Scholarship
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The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief — the chapters on Robert and the relic tradition · Richard Barber
How a vessel in a poem became a relic with a history.
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Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition · ed. James P. Carley
Where the relic tradition was going, and who profited.
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Merlin: A Casebook · ed. Peter H. Goodrich & Raymond H. Thompson
Merlin's transformation from prophet to architect — the hinge this unit turns on.
The Practice
Lectio Read the prison scene — Christ delivering the vessel with words "sweet and precious" the text refuses to repeat. Note how Robert's reticence does the work Chrétien's mystery did.
Scriptio Write Blaise's colophon: the hermit's own note at the end of a day's dictation from Merlin. What does the scribe believe he is making, and for whom? (Answer: "a reader not yet in the room" — then make Blaise say it his way.)
In the Anatomy
Doors from this unit
- Return of the Scriptorium — Blaise's desk, made a practice: the site's rule of reading, writing, and keeping.
Movement IV — The Vessel and the Cycle