Popular Culture and Grail Scholarship

“The Grail story is a good story. Granted. But it's a dangerous story. It could get out of hand,” says the editor of a newspaper in Naomi Mitchison's To the Chapel Perilous (56). The Holy Grail legend has indeed gotten out of hand if one adds up the number both of medieval Grail texts and of adaptations written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same can be said of the Arthurian material as a whole, which is continually being rewritten at an incredible rate. The legend shows no signs of being exhausted, as new Grail texts are always being written. The legend's popularity continues in novels, poetry and now film. The last named medium is now the most powerful way of getting the legend out to the public, and the screen has indirectly exposed a wide audience to the main trends in Arthurian scholarship and nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformations of the Grail; indeed the Arthurian legends as a whole have been a popular subject of film, and this is made evident by the scholarship of Kevin J. Harty. Film reveals the popular views of the Grail, and so popular is the Grail it must be a “good story.”

A close look at some of these films reveals the way that trends in Arthurian scholarship reach the public audience, whether or not that audience is aware of the presence of scholarly trends in the films.