Review of Galahad and the Grail by Malcolm Guite, illustrated by Stephen Crotts, foreword by Susanna Clarke (Canterbury Press, 2026, ISBN 978-1-78622-712-6, 358pp)
This impressive ballad-style retelling of the Grail legend forms the first part of a projected four volumes of what Guite calls ‘An Arthuriad’. In forty pages of appendices Guite details his approach, and his sources, ranging from the earliest Welsh chronicles, twelfth century French re-tellings, through the speculative fiction of The Inklings, to Martin Shaw’s Snowy Tower, published in 2014. What is original about Guite’s version, then?
Guite is unapologetic about his intention: to restore the Christian message at the heart of the story, as a doctrinal device. He critiques the secular (de-)mythologizing of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, and in so doing, consciously diverges from previous poetic versions of the Arthurian legends, such as Tennyson. He aims to follow the lead he feels was given by T S Eliot’s lead in finding ‘not some theory of origin, but rather some of its rich and implicit meanings.’ That the healing brought by the Grail is for both the natural world and its human inhabitants is a powerful message for today’s fractured and despoiled world, which can seem so full of many Wastelands beyond that traversed by the knights in this legend. This multivalent approach is expressed also in the black and white prints by Stephen Crotts, who Guite credits as being ‘as much an author of this work as I am.’
Guite stresses the need to complement the rationality of scientific and enlightenment approaches to understanding the world with a ‘recovery of imagination as a truth-bearing faculty’ (which resonates with insights from other writers as diverse as Margaret Atwood). So he gives us here a fast-paced story, written in the form of a ballad, with strongly rhythmic lines (we can hear those horses galloping!) and many end rhymes – a traditional means of moving a narrative along, especially in works designed to be read out loud and listened to. I read much of it by candle-light, which I commend as a strategy.
To structure such a long work takes skill; each of the three ‘books’ here are broken into ‘staves’ which guide us through the coming of Galahad, the adventures he undertakes with fellow knights, culminating in the ‘achievement’ of the grail and the moving revelation of the Holy Grail as a sacrament that transcends the physical image of a glowing cup, a source of healing for ‘My people and My land’ that can be shared every Sabbath Day. In his final appendix, Guite acknowledges the influence of Charles Williams and Dom Gregory Dix on his thinking about this aspect of the legend; its Christian teaching is, after all, for Guite, the main purpose of his efforts. But this is no dry, earnest chunk of dogma; Guite has long been both priest and poet, and his creative skill is evident on every page. As he reminds us, ‘Poetry is meant to give pleasure.’ You are in for a treat.
Hannah Stone
