The Origin of the “Holy Grail” Continued
While the first literary rendering of the grail myth was left incomplete after Chrétien de Troyes died before finishing his work, Robert de Boron picks up the legend and provides a “pre-history that Christianized the grail,” according to Joan Grimbert, the chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at The Catholic University of America. “This is an incredible transformation,” she notes, and inspires other writers to pick up the theme in what is known as the Lancelot grail cycle or the Vulgate cycle. The cycle, which dates from 1215 to 1235, provides an extended development of the grail story with strong religious overtones in which the grail is a coveted source of divine power.
Fast forward eight centuries, and novelist Dan Brown offers up his own take on the Holy Grail in his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code. Heavily influenced by the non-fiction book, Holy Blood,Holy Grail, published in 1982 and greeted with widespread scholarly criticism, Brown’s novel presents the character of Robert Langdon, a Harvard “symbologist,” who explains that the chalice used by Christ is simply an allegory to “protect the true nature of the Holy Grail, a woman.” It is Mary Magdalene-- a follower and wife of Jesus who has Christ’s children--whose womb is the actual Holy Grail that carries the “royal bloodline” of Jesus. The subsequent conspiracy to suppress this explosive truth, Brown’s characters and less than skeptical readers come to believe, has been kept secret by a power-wielding church through the centuries.
Norris Lacy, a professor of French and Medieval Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is the author of The Da Vinci Code: Dan Brown and The Grail That Never Was, a paper published in the scholarly journal Arthuriana. “There are so many things wrong with it that it’s hard to know where to start,” Lacy, the Honorary President of the International Arthurian Society, said about Brown’s grail theory. But isn’t The Da Vinci Code simply fiction anyway? Lacy, who notes that Brown has more recently backed down from defending the veracity of his material, addresses the “it’s-just-fiction” argument. “Indeed, Brown himself, whether as a matter of conviction or of commercialism, has done everything possible to persuade readers that he does believe just what the book says,” Lacy writes. “He has insisted on the accuracy, the factual nature, of his information and theories.”
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