Author Description

The stories of Arthur and the Grail are products not only of their time and place – Britain and continental Europe in the Middle Ages – but also of the thousands of years of tradition that led up to them. Romance literature did not suddenly appear from nowhere. Medieval Arthurian romances incorporate elements of Christianity, Celtic and Germanic pagan tradition, the myths and legends of pre-Christian Rome, and ideas absorbed or derived from the Islamic world, ancient Greece, and the eastern fringes of Europe. The underlying concepts belong to the oldest levels of the Indo-European and other mythic and cosmological traditions.The four explorations collected here focus on ancient cosmology – archaic or traditional perceptions of how the world, nature and society are ordered – and how important cosmological themes have survived and are expressed in the Grail stories.