Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
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Other modern historians discount this idea.
Whatever the case, it was future authors who began making a religious link, and it was a lasting one.
Around the year 1200, not long after de Troyes passed away, a man named Robert de Boron suggested Christian origins for the grail in his poem called Joseph d'Aremathie, or Joseph of Arimathea.
Borrowing from his predecessor's story, he featured Percival, who pursued the grail, but as a holy item.
In his story, Joseph acquired the chalice from the Last Supper.
Later, the Spirit of Christ visited him to explain the mysteries of the Blessed Cup.
Eventually, in the tale, Joseph gathered relatives and followers and traveled west, founding a dynasty of grail keepers.
In the story, Percival would ultimately become one of them.
It's important to note that while de Boron may have been the first European to popularize the idea of a Holy Grail, there are vague earlier references to such an item.
One comes from a source completely unrelated to the Arthurian legends.
There are some texts from the fifth century in which a Greek historian makes mention of such an object.
According to the scholar Olympiodorus, an empress named Helena had discovered Christ's tomb and it contained some relics.
One of those is called the Marian Chalice, which the empress believed to have once contained the blood of Christ.
While this is not a clear link to the Holy Grail of the later European authors, it could be part of the same legend.
Other sources point to a seventh-century pilgrim named Arkulf, who reported an item he saw displayed near Jerusalem that was purportedly a chalice from the Last Supper.
But these early mentions are so few and far between that they can hardly be considered a major influence in the saga of the Grail.
de Boron wasn't the only person inspired by the unfinished Percival poem by de Troyes
His effort was quickly followed up by a man named Wolfram von Eschenbach.
Claiming to have used the same mysterious source as de Troyes, von Eschenbach leaned into the holiness of the grail, suggesting it was not a cup, but rather a stone that protected neutral angels who had not taken sides in the biblical battle of Lucifer's rebellion.
In his Parzifal, or Percival, story, he spun a tale very similar to the original by de Troyes.
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