"Friday night's dream on Saturday told
Is sure to come true, no matter how old."
University College, Aberystwyth.
Glastonbury and the Holy Grail.
I have read Miss Berkeley's notes on Glastonbury with great interest. I agree with her that the locality was most probably an early centre of Nature worship, but that it can be identified as the "High Place," the Grail Castle of the romances, I very much doubt.
It is worth noting that the only one of the romances that can be directly connected with Glastonbury, i.e. the Perlesvaus, appears to be interested in the Abbey as the burial place of Arthur and Guenevere, not as the home of the Grail. In fact, there is reason to believe that the romance was composed with the direct intention of exploiting the supposed discovery of the tomb in 1191. (Cf. Dr. Nitze's "Notes on the Chronology of the Grail Romances," Modern Philology, 1919-20, and my article, “The Perlesvaus and the prose Lancelot,” Romania, Dec. 1920.) It is by no means clear where the author located the Grail Castle; it is certainly not in Avalon, and the final home of the Grail is in a sea-girt island.
Before these cults became banned by the advance of orthodox Christianity, there must certainly have been more than one place of celebration, and the topography of Grail Castle, Perilous Chapel, etc., may well vary as the result of surviving traditions of different localities; but when our romances were composed I imagine that the tradition of one secret sanctuary where the banished ritual still survived was dominant. Where that sanctuary was located it is hard to say. The Grail Castle seems to be generally connected with living water, sea, as in the Bleheris-Gawain version, and the Queste, or river, as in Chrétien, ‘Didot’ Perceval, and Perlesvaus, not with a lake, or marshes.
