Stories about King Arthur and his court figure prominently in our culture. Movies like Walt Disney’s classic The Sword in the Stone present a comical version of the Arthurian legendarium. That version, of course, was based on T. H. White’s modern interpretation rather than the classical version of Sir Thomas Malory.
The Arthurian legends have shaped children’s literature through works like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, and, of course, C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. There are so many adaptations of these stories that sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s part of the ancient story and what’s been added by modern authors.
Malcolm Guite helps contemporary readers experience an authentic version of the Arthurian legends in modern language. I had an opportunity to interview him about the first volume in the larger project, which will include four volumes.
What is Galahad and the Grail?
Galahad and the Grail is a cycle of ballads. This first volume is disposed into three books and then the ballads themselves are divided into staves. And it is a retelling in a strong enchanting or spellbinding ballad form. So you get this kind of incantatory rhythm and it tells the story of the appearance of the Holy Grail in the court of Camelot and of the quest for the Holy Grail.
There’s lots of adventure, but I’m also trying to restore the kind of Christian mystery that I felt was at the heart of the original medieval tellings of the story. I’ve loved these stories since I was a child.
I’m trying to restore the kind of Christian mystery that I felt was at the heart of the original medieval tellings of the story.
One of the needs that we bring to this story in our own age is a question about disenchantment and reenchantment. Charles Taylor famously said that we’re trapped in the immanent frame, that we live in a kind of disenchanted world and all the rest of the world is just dead stuff to exploit.
But as soon as we read old tales and old stories, it’s very different. People have a quasi-sacramental relationship with the world around them. I hope retelling these old stories will be part of recovering that old view.
How do you reconcile bringing in the Christian symbolism of the Grail, which emphasizes the body and blood of Christ, with some of the pagan symbols in the Arthurian legendarium?
I would say this is the entire point. This is why the story is worth telling.
The earliest elements of the legendarium we’ve got may go back to the 12th century, which is still about 600 years after a putative Arthur would have lived. But the story is set in Celtic Britain, which is about to be subject to the Anglo-Saxon invasions in the fifth or sixth centuries.
By that time Christianity had reached these isles. We hadn’t yet had the official mission from Rome in AD 597 that sent Augustine to Canterbury, but we’d certainly had Irish evangelists and bishops like St. Columba coming down, founding Iona. So Christianity has met with pre-Christian Celtic pagan Britain.
The amazing thing about these stories, even hundreds of years later as they’re told, is that we clearly see both elements. On the one hand, we have the Lady of the Lake and we have Merlin. The Lady of the Lake is clearly a local water goddess. And Merlin seems to be a quasi-druidical figure. Yet the stories have a Christian center, which is the Grail.
In fact, there is an extraordinary moment in Sir Thomas Malory’s later 15th-century retelling: When the miracle of the sword and the stone appears outside the Minster Church, it appears during the service on Christmas Day. And they have to stop everybody from running out of the church to look at the marvel. Then you have a conversation between Merlin and the Archbishop of Canterbury about what to do about this and how it will summon the new king.
So clearly the setting of the story is precisely the meeting of the new, all-transfiguring Christian religion as it comes and the memories of much earlier stories.
If you want a biblical paradigm for what I think is going on in the Arthurian stories, then I think you look to Acts 17 when Paul arrives in Athens. Over the course of the conversion of Britain, as we read in the Venerable Bede’s The History of the English Church and People, Christians used existing stories in the culture to connect to the theme of the gospel.
There are all kinds of stories in the Arthurian legendarium that resonate with Christian themes, much like the statue of the unknown god in Athens. The story of the Dolorous Blow is the most important because the king and the land are somehow wedded. If the king dies, the land dies; but if the king rises, the land rises. Christianity says the reason why God made a universe full of little deaths and resurrections is because from before the beginning of time, he saw the death and resurrection of his Son.
The reason why God made a universe full of little deaths and resurrections is because from before the beginning of time, he saw the death and resurrection of his Son.
Those are the sorts of stories that are resonant with the Great Biblical Story and that will only find their meaning in the Great Biblical Story. So at the core of the book that I’ve written, there’s a story which involves the Grail, which clearly remembers pre-Christian myth, but it’s been given a very distinctly Christian key or interpretation by the time we hear it.
The stories were told in the first place to baptize the pagan imagination and bring it fruitfully to Christ without losing any of the beauties, but also with a radical rethinking of the meaning of those early Christian stories. So I just figured it’s time for somebody to do that again for our own time.
When people search the internet in 50 years, what do you hope they’ll learn about Malcolm Guite?
Maybe my little spells in the library—the YouTube videos I started posting during the lockdown—will still be there, in which case it wouldn’t be so much what they want them to learn about me as to learn about others from me. So I hope they’ll see me reading Tolkien and Lewis and Keats and Shelley. And perhaps through me they might come to these much greater authors and poets.
Frankly, I’d rather be a wardrobe door than a mirror.
But if people remember me in any way, I hope they’d remember me as a priest and a poet—specifically as a Christian poet in a time when both Christianity and poetry were being pushed to the edges. I wanted to put them back in the center of things.
The Gospel Coalition