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| Walter Map taking down a story of the adventures of the Knights of the Round Table on the quest of the Holy Grail at the dictation of King Arthur, from the Manchester Arthurian Romance, c.1300 |
The elements of the Vulgate Cycle, comprising The History of the Holy Grail, The Story of Merlin, Lancelot, The Quest of the Holy Grail and The
Death of King Arthur, are cleverly interlaced in a number of ways. The last
two are linked, or better, locked together, by the introduction of a putative
author, Walter Map. Here are the passages which outline this linking; first
from the end of The Quest of the Holy
Grail,
When they had dined King Arthur
summoned his clerks who were keeping a record of all the adventures undergone
by the knights of his household. When Bors had related to them the adventures
of the Holy Grail as witnessed by himself, they were written down and the
record kept in the library at Salisbury,
whence Master Walter Map extracted them in order to make his book of the Holy
Grail for love of his lord King Henry, who had the story translated from Latin
into French. And with that the tale falls silent and has no more to say about
the Adventures of the Holy Grail.
Next, from the beginning of The Death of King Arthur:
After Master Walter Map had put
down in writing as much as he thought sufficient about the Adventures of the Holy Grail, his lord King Henry II felt that what
he had done would not be satisfactory unless he told about the rest of the
lives of those he had previously mentioned and the deaths of those whose
prowess he had related in his book. So he began this last part; and when he had
put it together he called it The Death of
King Arthur, because the end of it relates how King Arthur was wounded at
the battle of Salisbury and left Girflet who had long been his companion, and
how no one ever again saw him alive. So Master Walter begins this last part
accordingly.
And finally from the end of The Death of King Arthur:
At this point Master Walter Map
will end the Story of Lancelot,
because he has brought everything to a proper conclusion according to the way
it happened; and he finishes his book here so completely that no one can
afterwards add anything to the story that is not complete falsehood.
This seems very convincing evidence that the author of these
two last works and perhaps of the cycle as a whole was Master Walter Map.
Unfortunately “Map died before the works attributed to him were written”.
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| The body of Elaine, the Maid of Astolat, arrives at Camelot |
BLOG QUESTION: Why would the group of anonymous Cistercian
monks responsible for constructing the Vulgate Cycle want to see the work
attributed to Walter Map?
From some very brief readings online, it would seem that Walter Map did not hold the Cistercians in very high regard. (www.newadvent.org). According to this source Map's writing was considered as profane literature with only one piece of work being genuinely attributed to him and that was only published after his death due to it's writing on some very high profile figures of the time. Without being sure of when the monks were attributing these works to Map, I would surmise that the purpose was either to make Map look bad in the eyes of the Church, try to prevent him from achieving position of the See of Hereford. Though despite this he is able to achieve Archdeacon of Oxford. It seems as though the monks are indicating that they don't want the work to be associated with them in any way, basically saying "we had no part in this" it must have been done by that Walter Map because his writing is full of nonsense and goes against Church teachings.
ReplyDeleteI believe the reason why the Cistercian monks attributed the work to Walter Map because the 5 stories partially go against the Christian beliefs and don't quite tie in with the story of Christ. The Holy grail part especially stems away from the traditional Christian story and thus I don't think the monk would want to be apart of that. The reason for attributing it to Walter was probably because he had written the 'mort Artu' and 'queste' and hence became an easy target of which the works could be attributed too regardless if it fitted in terms of his life.
ReplyDeleteOllie
I would argue that the monks wanted to distance themselves from the matireal so they attributed it to Map. As a figure who had held the Cistercians in a low regard, they had a target to place thier ungodly writing on.
ReplyDeleteI would think that by putting an actual historical figure throughout the stories, it connects them all to each other and gives them more weight and validity. As to why they did not attribute the stories to themselves? Probably because they, as part of the church, wanted to distance themselves away from the work as it did not follow the more christian type tales of Arthur as we usually see.
ReplyDeleteThe monks did not want to take credit for the story of Arthur and the quest for the holy grail, so they attributed it to Walter Map. This way they were only copying and existing work, not claiming it as their own and showing that the Church accepted the myth of Arthur.
ReplyDelete