The Grail Legend in Modern Literature. Arthurian Studies LIX by John B. Marino (review)

Abstract

JOHN B. MARINO, The Grail Legend in Modern Literature. Arthurian Studies LIX. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. vi, 175. ISBN: 1-84384-022-7. $70. John B. Marino's volume on the grail legend in modern literature is longer on ambition than on delivery. Aiming to trace emergent forms of grail scholarship into the literature of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marino displays broad knowledge of the relevant textual histories, but fails to treat enough literature to keep the reader of modern literature interested. The treatment of modern literature is delayed by a fourteen-page introduction on Arthurian film, which, while interesting and well done, holds little indication of what lies ahead. Then the first of four chapters deals exclusively with source texts. While the chapter is brief and displays impressive fluency with these texts, it is left to the reader to make the links between this chapter and those that follow. The second chapter, on Christian versus pagan origin theories of the grail and their competing influences on modern literature also begins with a long cataloguing of source texts, here in the forms of medievalist literary theory. Roger Sherman Loomis, Jessie Weston, and James Frazer get honorable mentions, again demonstrating Marino's facility with criticism. The first major texts Marino covers are John Cowper Powys's Glastonbury Romance and Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon and its prequels. These are key texts in what Marino envisions as a 'culture war' between Christian and pagan grail versions. Here, for the first time, appears a hint of denigration in Marino's writing about neo-paganism a la Bradley-a hint that grows stronger as the book proceeds. (In one footnote, Marino goes so far as to suggest that gendered approaches to the Grail legend are both consonant with Bradley's work and, simultaneously, worthy of ridicule [101].) Marino depicts Bradley as explicitly anti-Christian, a sense that might not be conveyed by her work. Later, when Marino concedes the point that Bradley is a Christian, he goes on to write that her Christian characters hold 'beliefs that are highly unorthodox by the standards of the Bible, Roman Catholicism and fundamentalist Protestantism, to name a few forms of Christianity that profess a claim to absolute truth' (77). By the close of the chapter, Marino has ceased discussing the treatment of the grail in modern literature in favor of railing against 'relativism. …