King Arthur St
Joseph of Arimathea The Holy Grail Avalon Glastonbury
Robert de Boron, wrote in
about 1200 to 1210 AD an account of St
Joseph of Arimathea called Joseph
d'Arimathie.
It is here that the Grail is the cup or
chalice of the
Last Supper and a vessel containing Christ's blood. Joseph of Arimathea catches Christ's very Blood in the Grail.
Robert de Boron makes the Grail the focus of
the Arthurian legends. By writing in an historical style, and by
employing a wide range of Biblical, Apocryphal and other
Christian texts as references, de Boron account of Arthur exudes
confidence and authority.
Robert de Boron (also
spelled in the manuscripts "Bouron", "Beron") was a French poet
of the late 12th and early 13th centuries, originally from the
village of Boron, in the present arrondissement of Montbéliard.
He was the author of two surviving
poems in octosyllabic verse, Joseph d'Arimathe and
Merlin; Merlin survives
only in fragments and in later versions rendered in prose. The
two are thought to have been part of a trilogy (or tetralogy)
which also contained a verse Perceval, and possibly a Mort
Artu or Death of Arthur. The "Didot
Perceval", a retelling of the Percival story similar in style
and content to Robert's other works, may be a prosification of
the lost sections.
Robert de Boron is the first author to give the Holy Grail myth an
explicitly Christian dimension. According to him, Joseph of
Arimathea used the Grail (the Last Supper vessel) to catch the
last drops of blood
from
Jesus's body as he hanged on the cross.
Joseph's family brought the Grail
to Avalon, which is identified
with Glastonbury, where
they guarded it until the rise of
King Arthur and the coming of Perceval.
What is known of his life come from brief mentions in his poems.
At one point in Joseph d'Arimathe, he applies to
himself the title of meisters (medieval French for "clerk");
later he uses the title messires (medieval French for "knight").
At the end of the same poem, he
mentions being in the service of Gautier of "Mont Belyal";
Pierre
Le Gentil identifies this noble with one Gautier de Montbéliard
(the Lord of Montfaucon), who left in 1202 to take part in the
Fourth Crusade, and died in the Holy Land in 1212.
Le
Gentil also argues that the mention of Avalon shows that he
wrote Joseph d'Arimathe after 1191, when the monks
at Glastonbury Abbey
claimed to have discovered the coffins of King Arthur and Guinevere.
His family is unknown, though the
second author of the Prose Tristan claimed to be Robert's
nephew, calling himself "Helie de Boron".
De Boron's version of the Grail
myth was adopted by almost all of the later writers of the
Matter of Britain.
from
Jesus's body as he hanged on the cross.
