Warning: Opinionating in progress
I think books like this are dangerous. They are the historical version of fake news and they are predatory, presenting themselves as research, but full of fake scholarship, and preying on gullible readers who want to believe.
If you read this as a fictional story about a man who sets out on an impossible quest and travels vast distances across time and space in search of his answer, it’s a breathless and sometimes entertaining version of a medieval quest story.
It would also work as a relentless parody of the type of pseudo-historical investigation which seem so popular.
But it is impossible to take seriously as an investigation into the ‘truth’ behind the Grail story. There was no single grail story. There is no single ‘truth’ to find.
The underlying assumption is that no medieval writer ever invented anything. Any story, or more importantly, episode or character in a story ripped out of context, must have its origin in a prehistoric source which is always sacred or ritualistic or both. And these sources can be traced by the simple process of finding things that look similar.
The method throughout is associative. Parodied long ago as: X rides a chariot, the Sun God rides a chariot, therefore X must be a Sun God. The author charges ever onwards, collecting disparate pieces of ‘evidence’. Things that look similar to him are treated as though they are identical and related despite the vast geographical and temporal distances separating them.
It’s a dizzying process. The effect of the breathless onward rush may not be calculated, but it would take a reader with abnormal amounts of dedication and time to critically follow the argument, let alone check to see what has distorted or misrepresented.
But it’s in the details that the argument unravels and where the methodology is exposed.
3 examples
Throughout, stories are selectively read, their contents blurred and any remote similarity treated as more important than substantial differences.
‘Much as Branwen, Blodeuwedd and Blathnat betray their husbands, Rome is betrayed by a maiden named Tarpeia who is in love with a Gallic warrior’(p.59).
The only links here are the fact the characters are female, and the verb Betray,
Blodeuwedd commits adultery with a passing stranger and after three nights together the lovers decide to murder her husband. Everyone would agree she betrays her husband.
Branwen, the sister of Bran, King of Britain, is married to Matholwch, the King of Ireland. For no fault of hers, after a year of marriage, he drives her from his chambers and consigns her to work in the kitchen, where every day, the butcher, after cutting up meat, strikes her a blow on the ear. Branwen trains a small bird to take a message to her brother telling him of her plight
There is an obsolete meaning of ‘betray’ ‘To give up to or expose to punishment’ which could be used to describe Branwen’s actions, but the motives and actions of the two women have nothing in common and betrayal seems the wrong word in the context of the story. In what way is either of these examples similar to someone 'betraying' a city beyond a wrenched use of the verb?
Sources:
There is little attempt to explain how stories and motifs might have been transmitted across time and geographical distances.
It’s long been noted that the poem Gawain and the Green Knight tells a story that is similar to several others. Grigsby plumps for the Irish Bircrui’s Feast as its source. But the difference between stating the obvious: that these stories are similar, is blurred into the statement that the Irish story is the source of the English one, ‘What’s more, the Gawain poet gives away his source when in one line he describes the Green Knight, instead of bearing his axe, as clutching his club where he stands (a club being Bachlach’s usual weapon)’ p.33. However, the two stories also have striking differences as well. In Grigsby’s world, these cannot be due to the English writer’s intentions or imagination, they must have another source, so the Gawain poet has ‘gleaned [the plotline] from another Irish tale.’
No attempt is made to explain how the anonymous author of the Gawain poem could have accessed a copy of the Irish story, or read it. Saying he might have done so is not the same as proving he did or even could.
History.
‘History’ is an irrelevance that can be ignored when it’s inconvenient.
Geoffrey of Monmouth tells the story of Vortigern and the war between the Saxons and Britons. ‘I couldn’t help but read between the lines and see this whole drama as nothing less than a memory of the war between Twin and Man, with the Britons playing the role of the defeated aboriginals and the Saxons that of the Arya, (with their totemic horse)…’ And so it goes on… ‘Nothing less than a memory of..’ You can ‘read between the lines’ and make something into anything you like. But there were Britons and Saxons who fought for dominance in Britain, and Geoffrey and his readers knew this. How is an historical conflict a memory of a story?
I suspect there are two reasons why this kind of argument is popular. The first is a very human interest in the distant, prehistoric past. In his essay ‘The Anthropological Approach’, C.S.Lewis described the feeling that Gawain and the Green Knight or the Grail stories evoke, a sense of muted wonder and the thought that something more is happening here than is stated, leading to a natural desire to explore them.
The other attraction lies in the fact that everyone can join in. As a reader you’re not being asked to deal with an argument that requires any kind of knowledge or expertise on your behalf. You’re certainly not expected to have read the Grail stories, even in the readily available modern translations. All the work has been done for you. You don’t need to struggle with scholarly discussions of Indo-European languages, or know anything about Medieval History or Literature, or the histories of prehistoric Britain. Grigbsy will tell you all you need to know.
When he confidently writes ‘In the Welsh language the sound ‘m’ is often mutated to ‘v’ so the names Avebury and Amesbury …are clearly related’ you can file it away as something to dazzle your like-minded friends. Whether or not he’s right about v and m when they are preceded by a vowel seems less important than the fact that both place names are derived from Old English, not Welsh and their welsh pronunciation would be irrelevant.
If you only had the energy and stamina you too could discover the truth behind the Grail, the identity of Arthur, the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant or the true meaning of any story you chose. Spot ‘similarities’, sprinkle your work with a bit of Joseph Campbell and/or Carl Jung and you could write a book like this. Though if you had studied at Bangor university some readers might wonder why you’re quoting Robert Graves’ version of ‘The Battle of the Trees’.
If you want to believe Grigsby’s argument, nothing I’ve written here will stop you. Facts, the rules of evidence, the meaning of the words on the page, are all irrelevant. As the publisher knows, people will believe what they want to and they can feed them any amount of sludge if they present it as ‘researched’.
According to his website Mr. Grigsby has also written a book about ‘The true meaning of Beowulf’.
