Abstract
In the first millennium of Christian history, particularly from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, the Church was generally hostile to any form of the supernatural which was not miraculosus — that is, issuing from God and Christ. All pagan imagery was suspect and usually suppressed.1 For that reason alone there is little ‘Christian fantasy’ in the whole of that period: what supernaturalist Christian literature there is is almost always either a retelling of biblical narrative, as in Avitus’s Poematum de Mosaicae Historiae Gestis (AD 507) or ’Caedmonian’ Genesis (c. 700–850),2 or else in the mode of a vision of heaven or hell.3 The use of the ‘marvellous’ or mirabilis — stories of monsters, fairies, enchanters and magic, for instance — was more or less outlawed.4
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Notes
Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Marvelous in the Medieval Imagination’ (1985), in The Medieval Imagination, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988) pp. 28–9.
For accounts and translations see Watson Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of ‘Paradise Lost’ in World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952) pp. 3–43.
See Howard Rollins Patch, The Other World: According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).
See Roger Sherman Loomis, ‘The Origin of the Grail Legends’, in Loomis (ed.), Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959) pp. 274–95.
There are recent translations of Chretien and Perlesvaus by Nigel Bryant, published as Perceval: The Story of the Grail (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982) and Perlesvaus: The High Book of the Grail (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1978), respectively; and of Wolfram’s Parzival by A. T. Hatto (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1980).
And than any of its successors: see for instance Eugène Vinaver, Malory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929) pp. 70–84.
Pauline Matarasso, in the Introduction to her translation The Quest of the Holy Grail (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1969) p. 28, remarks, ‘Whereas to the author of the Quest the tale was merely a vehicle for expressing spiritual truths in an idiom which would make them live in the minds of a sophisticated but secular public, for Malory the tale was paramount, the doctrines, in so far as he understood them, of very secondary importance. Furthermore the Quest with its overt condemnation of the pride and pomp of chivalry conflicted with Malory’s conception of the knightly ideal.’
See Frederick W. Locke, ‘The Quest for the Holy Grail’: A Literary Study of a Thirteenth Century French Romance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1960);
and Pauline Matarasso, The Redemption of Chivalry: A Study of the ‘Queste del Saint Graal’ (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979).
On the facility with which the medieval mind could let enchanted mingle with terrestrial geography, unseen with seen, see Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) pp. 3–13, 27–8; Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, p. 33.
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© 1992 Colin Manlove
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Manlove, C. (1992). The French Queste del Saint Graal. In: Christian Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12570-8_2
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