Quest for the Holy Grail

Regular readers of this column will know that I have embarked on my own Quest to find out who wrote The Quest for the Holy Grail.  I have have come up with three pieces of useful evidence which don't quite crack the case but get us closer to the answer and may help some of the other Grail-seekers out there.

The protector of the Book of Armagh was known as the Maor na Canoine or The Keeper of the Book. I mention in The Wonderful History of the Sword in the Stone that Saints Illtud and Cadoc are described as The Keepers of the Grail.  It follows then that I am correct in assuming that this means not the keepers of the cup but the keepers of the book which tells the story of Grail Quest.  The position in Ireland was hereditary so it also follows that they inherited the book rather than wrote it themselves taking the provenance back a generation so I am still reasonably convinced that the original Christian author was Dyfrig or one of his school.

A further piece of evidence to back up my claim that the book tells the story of a merger between the Christian and Druid churches in the mid fifth century comes from the Iolo manuscript which tells us that Illtud's foundation at Llantwit Major was divided into nine cells or colleges.  One of these was named after St David who must be a late arrival as he was a pupil of Illtud's school (their most illustrious so not surprising he had a college named after him).  However the other eight are quite illuminating.  Four are named after the four Christian Gospel writers - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but the other four have Welsh names - Arthur, Morgan, Eugain and Amwn.  These four I surmise are the four principal Druid authorities - the original writers of The Wonderful History of the Sword in the Stone which is in four parts.  The first part tells us the origins of The Sword of Truth and The Ship of Faith and the very early history of Britain.  The second tells us the story of Balin and Balan.  The third section is the familiar story of The Sword in the Stone and the last is the story The Quest for the Holy Grail.   The names Arthur and Morgan are of course also the names of Celtic deities but in this case, given the symmetry of the names, I think these are writers named after the gods rather than referring to the deities themselves.  Both names have always been very popular in Wales. 

The names indicate a fifty-fifty division between the two churches suggesting a merger rather than a takeover or wholesale conversion.

My final clue - not really evidence as it relies on a tradition rather than a document - is that there is a story that Merlin was born near Carmarthen in 480 AD.  This seems a remarkably precise and rather late date for the arrival of the Celtic God but it does fit the timeline for the production of the book or perhaps a copy of it.  The principal saint who lived near Carmarthen is St Teilo who was one of Dyfrig's scholars trained by him at Henllan which puts him in the frame.

There still remains the question of which Christian writer did the rewrite to produce the text we have now but it does give us a very good provenance for the book.  I think we can say with some confidence where it originated and name at least some of the people who had a hand in it.