More fully within the Arthur story was the development of Chretien’s Lancelot into a massive prose epic. French and Breton, never British, in setting as well as in courtly and chivalrous themes, this story joined the Grail and the Mort Artu, the final tragedy, as the major elements of the Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail, in which the separate hero stories, now massively expanded, were by about 1225 consolidated into a great Arthurian saga that embraces the French feudal efflorescence of single-hero romances in the new medium of secular demotic prose narrative, an Arthurian parallel to the originary narratives of the new European nations, and a validating gift of the new administrative clerical class to their lordly secular employers.
First in this massive Vulgate collection comes the History of the Holy Grail, reworking Robert’s Grail prequel; then his Merlin was both expanded and made more secular. No Grail prophet now, Merlin helps Arthur develop and defend his kingdom until he himself disappears through the power of Vivian, both an image of the new authority of the courtly lady, like Chretien’s own countess, and also a sign of the lord-pleasing idea of the inherent vulnerability of knowledge on its own. Then follows a massive set of Lancelot’s honorific adventures in war and love; next the Quest of the Holy Grail shows through Galahad’s perfection how chivalry makes sinners of the knights, especially Lancelot; and finally the Mort Artu reveals how the tragedy is linked to the sins that have been exposed in the heavily moralized Christian Grail story.
There is no one authoritative version of the Vulgate, just a mass of manuscripts with overlapping texts. Some scholars argue there was a full revised “Post-Vulgate,” but in fact this has no textual entity other than a version of the Merlin notable for its darker tone, in keeping with the Queste—and probably just a rewriting in the light of that saintly intervention. Here Balin and Balan figure fraternal violence, Merlin is a sex-pest whom Vivian disposes of fiercely, all ends bleakly, and the Arthurian tragedy to come is regarded with some complacency. Though rare in manuscripts, this version is well-known in the English tradition, simply because Malory chose it as the source for his opening sequence, but the concept of a complete “Post-Vulgate” is a modern scholarly invention, remarkably unchallenged. It relies on nothing more than the revised Merlin and two stray Spanish and Portuguese texts that develop the role of Merlin as a from-the-grave prophet after his entombment by Vivian.
The Vulgate’s massively influential combination of single-hero romance and Arthurian saga was much transmitted and translated, often in reduced and locally varied form. An example is the English Arthur and Merlin, a poem of about 1300 that cuts back the France-focused action of the Vulgate and simplifies the British history to suit an English viewpoint: Arthur eventually fights not the Saxons, the actual and in this nation-building context embarrassingly British-hostile ancestors of the English, but very remarkably—and still in Britain—the Saracens.
World History
