Ireland and the Grail (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ireland and the Grail Matthieu Boyd John Carey, Ireland and the Grail. Celtic Studies Publications xi. Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2007. Pp. xii, 419. ISBN: 978–1–891271–15–1. $29.95. Among specialists of medieval Celtic literature, John Carey has earned a reputation as an unusually meticulous and productive scholar. Ireland and the Grail displays his customary thoroughness and daring. It is a milestone in that, as Carey states, it is ‘the first attempt to present a detailed and text-based case for a Celtic background to the Grail legend since […] 1975, the first argument for such a background to have been undertaken by a specialist in medieval Irish since […] 1955, and the first such argument to propose a new interpretation based on the Irish evidence since […] 1930’ (p. xix). This alone makes the book a must-read. Carey argues that a group of medieval Irish texts, contained in the lost eighthcentury Book of Druim Snechtai, influenced a lost body of Welsh stories, and that these in turn influenced both surviving Welsh texts—such as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi and Culhwch ac Olwen—and also the earliest French texts that mention the Grail—especially Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte del Graal and its Continuations, but including Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie and others. (Ch. 20 provides a lucid overview of the entire argument, and non-Celticist readers might well begin there.) Most of the book considers various features, often linked to personal names such as Bran or Mongán/Amangon/etc., that are shared among selected Irish, Welsh, and French tales; Carey seeks to show that these originate in Ireland and are passed on as a cluster all the way to France. In Chs. 9 and 17, he suggests precisely how his Irish stories could have influenced the Welsh ones (Irish scholars regularly visited ninth-century Wales), and how the predecessors of the Welsh stories could, in turn, gain currency on the Continent (the Welsh storyteller named Bleddri who may have visited the count of Poitou in the early twelfth century). Another distinguished Celtic scholar, Patrick Sims-Williams, has taken a skeptical position on both of these issues, and Carey rightly acknowledges the soundness of his views (e.g., pp. 44–45); but he asserts that there is still value in ‘an investigation in terms of concrete details, not of assumptions and generalizations.’ Indeed, all of the specific claims that Carey makes are plausible and warrant serious consideration. We are not likely to see these arguments made more convincingly (though that is not to say they are the only arguments that can be advanced in favor of a Celtic origin for the Grail legend). The related work by Roger Sherman Loomis, notably The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (1963), is largely superseded here; it should be remembered that Loomis, though a fine Arthurian scholar, was never more than an amateur Celticist. A great virtue of the book is that Carey translates generously from the lesser-known texts that he is dealing with, summarizes them [End Page 79] fully, and adverts to any relevant scholarly controversies. Speculative remarks are clearly identified as such. Even readers who are unfamiliar with the medieval Celtic languages and literatures ought to find that Carey leaves them well equipped to make up their own minds on the evidence; even if not fully convinced of the author’s hypotheses, they should continue to find Ireland and the Grail a valuable sourcebook. Ch. 18, though it obviously cannot address all competing theories of Grail origins, is particularly useful in comparing Carey’s work to other approaches, such as the ‘eucharistic approach’ (Carey’s phrase) recently championed by Richard Barber in The Holy Grail (2004). (Another contribution along similar lines is G. Ronald Murphy’s Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzifal [2006]). I cannot respond to Carey’s detailed arguments here, and in any case they often hinge on whether certain parallels are found to be convincing; this is partly a subjective matter. However, a few points may be singled out for comment. In Ch. 2, Carey (following Loomis) discusses the many similarities between...