In
Weston’s
theory the Grail story was covert propaganda for a pagano-Christian heresy
surviving underground in Wales: The tale was carried over to the Continent
by a Welsh storyteller who perfectly understood his material, and who was
himself an initiate in that forbidden cult. R S Loomis eventually rejected
the idea, pointing out that there was no evidence for such a cult in the
mass of written testimony on heresy collected by the medieval church. But
is that the only place to look?
Another scholar has reached the same conclusion as Weston, quite independent
of her, and from an entirely different line of research. First published in
1948, perennially in print, Robert Graves' The White Goddess is a poet's study
of the nature of poetic inspiration. Its starting-point is a medieval Welsh
poem, The Battle of the Trees, from the Romance of Taliesin, translated by
Lady Charlotte Guest in the nineteenth century and included in her Mabinogion.
The poem, in Graves analysis, was actually a series of riddles; the riddles
spelt out a secret, and that secret was a heresy.
Graves names it the Arkite heresy, after the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus,
who was born in the temple of Alexander the Great at Arka. Severus considered
himself a reincarnation of the Greek conqueror and developed his own syncretic
cult which included the worship of Abraham, Orpheus, and Jesus Christ. In the
early centuries many gentile Christians did not see that conversion to the
new faith entailed the rejection of all other gods and all previous belief
systems. Indeed, some have argued that the first Christian Emperor, Constantine,
did not distinguish between Christ and Sol Invictus, but worshipped a composite
deity. Graves argues that the first Celtic converts were of the same mind-set.
They had “accepted Jesus Christ without compulsion and had reserved the
right to interpret Christianity in the light of their literary tradition, without
interference.”1 Thus
the native Christianity of Britain was a syncretic combination of Christian
and pre-Christian beliefs, Celtic gods became Christian
saints, and Christ was viewed as the latest incarnation of the Sacred King
who suffered and died for the good of the people. When Christian orthodoxy
gained the upper hand in the British Isles, this syncretic cult was rigourously
suppressed, but not obliterated. A faith which could no longer perpetuate itself
openly was passed on covertly, disguised in riddles. Just such a riddle was
encoded in The Battle of the Trees and, by the same poet, in the Hanes
Taliesin,
in which the miraculous child hero of the romance tells the wicked King Maelgwn
who he really is.
The original Taliesin was a Dark Age bard who wrote poems in praise of his
patrons, particularly Urien of Reged, and who was remembered as a master poet
by later generations. Graves suggests the medieval poet was claiming the name
just as an ambitious Greek poet might call himself Homer. The romance tells
how he acquired it. He began as Gwion Bach, a boy of no account, who was set
to stir the cauldron of a witch, Cerridwen, who was preparing a magical brew
for her own son. The brew was supposed to take a year and a day to prepare,
but just before that time was up the three magical drops which contain all
the wisdom of the world flew out of the cauldron and landed on the child’s
finger, which he naturally put into his mouth. Immediately he was aware of
all things, including his own danger. He fled from the enraged witch, shifting
his shape to that of hare, fish, bird, while she pursued relentlessly as greyhound,
otter, hawk. Finally he disguised himself as one grain amongst a heap of winnowed
wheat on a barn floor, where she, in the form of a black hen, picked him out
and swallowed him. Returning to her own shape she found she was pregnant with
him, and nine months later she gave birth. But the infant was so beautiful
she could not bring herself to kill him, so she sowed him into a leather bag
and threw him into the sea. It was the twenty-ninth day of April.
The bag fetched up in the weir of a nobleman named Gwyddno. Gwyddno had a son,
Elphin, who was unlucky in all things. In an effort to break the run of his
ill-luck, Elphin had been granted all the contents of the weir that May eve,
which usually amounted to a hundred pounds worth of fish. But when Elphin came
to the weir, all he found was the leather bag, and inside, the beautiful baby.
Opening it, he exclaimed "Oh, what a radiant brow", and thereafter
the child was called Taliesin, meaning radiant brow. Gwyddno was distraught
to discover Elphin had come up with nothing but another mouth to feed, but
the child sang a song of consolation, promising "on the day of trouble
I shall be of more service to you than three hundred salmon" - and so
it turned out.
When the child Taliesin was thirteen years old it happened that Elphin fell
foul of his cousin, the mighty King Maelgwn. His offence was to admit the truth,
that his wife was more beautiful than Maelgwn's, and his bard, Taliesin, more
knowledgeable than any of Maelgwn's bards, and for this he was flung into prison.
Having foiled a plot to disgrace Elphin's lady, Taliesin betook himself to
Maelgwn's court to free his patron. He arrived during a feast, when Maelgwn's
twenty-four bards were due to recite their lord's praises before the court.
Taliesin so bewitched the haughty bards that all they were able to do was to
play "blerwm blerwm" with their fingers on their lips, like children.
A blow to the head with a broomstick brought the chief bard, Heinin, to his
senses, and he was able to point to the culprit. The child was brought before
the king, who asked who he was and whence he came. The boy replied in riddling
poetry, boasting of his own prowess as a bard and ridiculing Maelgwn's bards
for their ignorance.
The romance is set back in the sixth century, but the insult, Graves avers,
was addressed to the poet’s contemporaries, the privileged caste of the
court bards of which he was not a member. It was he, and not they, who was
the rightful heir of Taliesin. Having drunk from the cauldron of Cerridwen,
the cauldron of poetic inspiration, he had knowledge which the court bards
did not possess.
There were two classes of bards in medieval Wales. The court bards held a legally
privileged position. Like the Irish master poets, they were heirs to an ancient
tradition, but in their case it had become ossified, a consequence of church
capture of their craft, a process which the Welsh law codes show was completed
by the tenth century. They were bound to a barren code which required a high
degree of technical skill but a severely restricted content. Originality was
disallowed. A court bard's duty was to praise God and his patron, in that order.
They were pledged to avoid 'untruth', that is "the dangerous exercise
of poetic imagination in myth or allegory".2 In effect, they were forbidden
to tell a story.
The Grail story has its origins among the bards of Wales - but not these bards.
It was the bards of the lower classes, those Graves terms ‘wandering
minstrels’, who originated Arthurian Romance. The division between the
two, Graves argues, is originally racial. The court bards belonged to the race
of the Cymri, immigrants from northern Britain who established themselves as
the ruling class of Wales in the fifth century. The minstrels, though despised
by the court bards and denied their legal privileges, were not necessarily
inferior poets, nor inferior scholars - the medieval Taliesin was an exceptionally
gifted and knowledgeable poet, as the content of his poetry proves. Graves
holds that the wandering minstrels were descended from the native Welsh master-poets
who refused, or were refused, court patronage after the Cymric conquest. Their
patrons were the common people of Wales. Free of interference from church or
state they preserved a poetic tradition with roots in the Stone Age. And they
did tell stories.
These story-telling minstrels began to be received in Welsh courts in the twelfth
century. Graves credits the change to Gruffudd ap Kynan, a ruler of Gwynedd
who was Irish on his mother’s side and at one time driven into exile
in Ireland. On his return he established a colony of Irish scholars in Gwynedd.
He made new laws for the government of bards and musicians, so it is likely
it was he who first granted the minstrels access to court.
The Romance of Taliesin and its accompanying verse was, then, written by a
minstrel poet, a bard of the lower orders, who was in a position to address
the court bards and tease them with their inability to solve his riddling poems.
His secret, concealed from them only by their ignorance, was a heresy. In The
Battle of the Trees, Graves holds, he announces his intention to revive this
Celtic Arkite heresy as a “pan-Celtic political weapon against the English.”3
The Battle of the Trees is recorded in the Welsh triads as one of the three
frivolous battles. But ‘trees’ means letters: What is referred
to, Graves argues, is an intellectual war, a conflict of ideas. The twelfth
century poet claims he is renewing an ancient conflict. The original battle
of the trees was fought between the gods Bran and Beli. Graves holds the myth
relates to a pre-Roman invasion of Britain by Belgic tribes and their capture
of the national necropolis; a religious revolution brought about by military
conquest. The twelfth century battle, the renewal of the conflict, was directed
against the intellectual supporters of the Anglo-Normans, the Roman Church.
The poet celebrated the revival of learning outside the monasteries in the
lines “The tops of the beech tree Have sprouted of late, And are changed
and renewed From their withered state”,4 satirised the monkish theologians
with “Room for a million angels On my knife-point, it appears. Then room
for how many worlds A-top of two blunt spears?”, and contrasted their
dry, doom-laden learning with his own in “But I prophesy no evil, My
cassock is wholly red. ‘He knows the Nine Hundred Tales’ - Of whom
but me is it said?”5
A record survives of the reaction of one of the court bards to the minstrels’ challenge.
In the early thirteenth century one Phylip Brydydd of Llanbardan Fawr protests
against 'vulgar rhymesters' being allowed to compete with him for the privilege
of being first to present his patron, Prince Rhys Ieuanc, with a song on Christmas
day. He complains that the speech of strangers (presumably Irish), the vices
of women and many a foolish tale has come to Gwynedd through the songs of false
bards whose grammar was bad and who had no honour. He refers to the appearance
of Elffin in the contentions of Maelgwn, and declares his own song is the ancient
song of Taliesin which "was itself new for nine times seven years".
It is not for mere men to remove the privilege of God, he asserts, and these
upstarts will surely get their come-uppance: "unless untruth shall overcome
truth, or the gift of God shall cease in the end, it is they who shall be disgraced
in the contention: He will remove from the vulgar bards their vain delight."6 He denounces one of these vulgar bards, a ‘perverter of poetic practice’,
specifically by name: Bleiddriw, that is, Bledri.
Of course, Graves support can lend no academic credence to Weston’s theory,
as Graves himself is not exactly a respected figure in the field of Celtic
scholarship, to put it mildly. Yet there was a time when his analysis of the
two Welsh poems would not have appeared outlandish. John Rhys in 1886 advanced
the opinion that the poetry of the book of Taliesin stemmed from a semi-pagan
school of bards, in dispute with the more Christian bards favoured by Maelgwn.
He held there was evidence that the dispute continued into the fourteenth century,
but that it could have been a thousand years old by then: "It may be supposed
to date from the time when the Brythons began to accept Christianity, and to
have combined itself possibly with the Pelagian controversy."7
But perhaps John Rhys is no longer a respectable authority, for who now would
speak of the conversion of the Brythons to Christianity?
Heretic Emperor: The Lost History of King Arthur
Copyright © V M Pickin 2008
1 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p143
2 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p18
3 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p146
4 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p38
5 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p44
6 Robert Graves, The White Goddess, p78-9
7 John Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, p547