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.
Appearances
Strengthening the holiness of the grail, he implied in his stories that, once retrieved by the pure knight Galahad, the grail would never be seen on earth again.
No knight was worthy of obtaining it.
But while the Arthurian legend grew, there were still people out there claiming they had laid hands on the real grail.
In the late 12th century, around the time Chrétien de Troyes was composing his poems, the Archbishop William of Tyre wrote that some soldiers from the First Crusade had found a brilliant hexagonal emerald bowl in a temple built by Herod the Great.
They had then sold it to clerics in Genoa for a great price.
With no apparent justification, people said the bowl had been used at the Last Supper and it somehow became elevated to the level of being the Holy Grail.
However, it lost some of its shine in the 19th century when Napoleon had it removed to Paris and somehow broke it, later returning it.
In the end, the bowl was not made of emerald.
It was just a really pretty green glass bowl, probably an Islamic artifact from the 9th or 10th century.
There are also proponents of an agate cup called the Valencia Chalice, which has been located in Spain since the 12th century.
Since at least the 14th century, this cup has been hailed by some as the Holy Grail.
Modern-day Catholic popes have used the chalice at Mass, attesting to its history and holiness.
Although it has never been attributed with any supernatural feats, scientists agree that the cup does seem to have been produced in a Palestine or Egyptian workshop between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE, which makes it a bit more believable than the green glass bowl that Napoleon's people shattered.
And of course, there were other efforts to prove the grail existed outside of the King Arthur tales.
For example, the Reverend Joseph Goering, a world-renowned medievalist of the 20th century, identified 12th century wall paintings in the Catalan Pyrenees that might have depicted a grail.
In these images, the Virgin Mary held a bowl that radiated tongues of fire.
They were painted prior to the time that Chrétien de Troyes wrote his Percival stories.
But of course, there is no way to prove Goering's theory.
It's just another path to follow through history.
In his book about the Grail, Justin Griffin devotes an entire chapter to other items that have been suggested as the true artifact.
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