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116 scholars poured scorn on those critics who sought the Grail in earlier Celtic literature, * 1 terming them ‘Keltomanen’. The Keltomanen, or the Celticists, were initially led in England by Alfred Nutt, an early mentor o f Jessie Weston and publisher of many of her works. Nutt’s primary contribution to Arthurian studies was his Studies on the Legend o f the Holy
the formation of later romances. Unlike Foerster, Golther and Bruce, Nutt seems to have felt little attraction towards the French Grail romances in themselves. Rather, his interests were in the roots and beginnings of the legend - origins which he felt were overwhelmingly Celtic. Although he was not the first scholar to speculate on such a relationship,14 he was the first to construct an extended thesis on how the French romances were produced as a result of their authors’ misunderstanding of their Celtic materials. He can be seen to have steered contemporary scholarship to a Darwinian understanding of romance production: in Nutt’s thesis evolution, rather than individual literary invention, was the Grail story’s primary force. For Nutt a common oral tradition stretched across the whole Celtic fringe of Western Europe. This tradition could be discerned through medieval Irish and Welsh texts which had been translated and published in the nineteenth century.15 Particularly important were the translations from the Irish by the German scholar Kuno Meyer and those from the Welsh by Charlotte Guest. Indeed, in his role as publisher Nutt was closely involved with the dissemination of both scholars’ work.16 Nutt found analogues of the Grail in the numerous cauldrons of plenty and of rebirth contained in Meyer and Guest’s translations of Irish and Welsh myths - such as those' in the Tuatha * They also distanced themselves from a second group of Christian-Grail scholars. Led by A.E. Waite and heavily involved with occult rituals, these scholars pursued the study of the Grail texts in search of mystical experience and esoteric knowledge. Bruce described Waite’s theories in The Evolution o f
117 de Danann legend and the story of Bran in the Second Branch of the Mabinogion - while later Celticists, such as A.C.L. Brown, Roger Sherman Loomis and Dorothy Kempe, searched for ever-more exotic parallels.17 According to Nutt, these symbols and narratives were then conveyed to Anglo-Norman audiences by bilingual poets who subsequently exported it to France and the rest of Europe, where it was increasingly subject to Christian ideology. Celtic rather than French, Pagan rather than Christian: Nutt’s views on the origins of the Grail were contentious and were refuted by the Christian-origin 1 8
theorists. Bruce flatly denied them. The great German medievalist, Heinrich Zimmer, warned Celticists who possessed no knowledge of Welsh, Irish or Breton from dabbling in the early literature (most of the Celticists worked exclusively from translations).19 And Elise Bensel wrote that the ‘zeal’ with which Nutt and the other Celticists desired to prove their theories meant that ‘they sometimes jump at
conclusions not sufficiently borne out by the facts’. There was also, of course, a strong element of national pride in stating that the origins of the Grail were fundamentally British in origin - even if that concept of Britishness was an anachronism. For now Nutt and his fellow English critics (along with a few Welsh scholars, such as John Rhys) were able to reject most of the claims of their continental, chiefly German, contemporaries. It was towards the Celtic-origin theory that Weston was initially drawn, partly because of her friendship with Nutt and partly because of her early studies with Gaston Paris, who had independently arrived at a similar opinion of the Grail’s origins.21 Yet Weston did not merely continue the work of Nutt and Paris; she formed a new theory of the origins of the Grail romances. She declared that the German 118 scholars were ‘radically unsound’ in their Christian bias, but she also thought that the roots of the Grail story went back much further than Celticists had previously thought.22 Weston believed that while the romancers of the twelfth century had altered the pagan elements of their Celtic sources, the Celtic materials were themselves records of much earlier, pre-Celtic ritual, the meaning of which the Welsh and Irish bards never actually understood. The Grail legends, she wrote in From Ritual to
under conditions of strict secrecy’ in occult practices. Weston believed that the competing Christian- / Celtic-origin theories were in fundamental disagreement with each other due to the fact that ‘the Grail legend consists of a congeries of widely differing elements - elements which at first sight appear hopelessly incongruous’.24 She identified the ‘main features’ of the Grail legend as: ‘the Waste Land, the Fisher King, the Hidden Castle with its solemn Feast, and mysterious Feeding Vessel, the Bleeding Lance and Cup’. Weston claimed that to find all of these features (all of which are not present in any single Grail romance, nor in the Celtic prototypes which Nutt, and others, had identified) she was required to look beyond the Christian and the Celtic sources and into the field of comparative anthropology. Each of the ‘main features’, she held, could be found in the nature rites as adumbrated in J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890-1915). The Grail legend, she believed, was a remnant of a Mystery cult centred on a ‘dying god’ figure, similar to that of Adonis or Tammuz. In such a cult, as Frazer wrote, the people believed that the king’s life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the prosperity of the whole country, that if he fell ill or grew senile the cattle would sicken and cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease. Hence, in their opinion, the only way of averting these calamities is to put the king to death while he is still hale and hearty, in order
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