Possibly the best thing that finally caving in to acquiring a smartphone in the year 2015 has enabled me to do to date is downloading this book off Project Gutenberg and reading it on the subway. After all it is a big influence on two of my early influences, namely The Waste Land and The Winter Prince, so it is great to finally read it and put a few more pieces together. And it's applying The Golden Bough to the Grail Romance, so how could it not be delightful? I feel a bit bad giving it only three stars, but she goes off the deep end enough that the empiricist in me can't quite stomach more. At least it's not as bad as The White Goddess, which I had to give up on out of outraged rationality. But that's not to say that this isn't a fascinating read. The connections she draws between the symbols of different myths and rituals are, if not always totally convincing, suggestive; her attempt to pinpoint a specific historical origin rather less so, but all engrossing. I am particularly fond of the idea of the suits of the Tarot being the same as the symbols in the Grail legend. And it makes a nice counterpoint to rereading Ms. Wein's whole sequence. Not that I don't love her newer books, but I hold out a desperate hope that their success will spur some publisher to take a chance on The Sword Dance so I can read it. Alas, not yet.

Anyway it is probably time to go on an Arthurian reading bender. Malory awaits.

At this point in time, impossible to review. Read to understand its influence over the succeeding decades.

In this work of pop-anthropology from 1920, Jessie L. Weston puts forth the idea that the romance of King Arthur and the search for the Grail is no mere fairy tale, but rather a mythos that goes back to earliest man's fertility rites and the annual rebirth of the land after winter. Most nowaways would look to this book for anthropology or to help understand the poetry of T.S. Eliot. However, this tome of outdated early-20th century thought is useful for neither purpose.

In FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE Ms. Weston presents, like Julian Jaynes in his book THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, a theory that once sounded revolutionary and a great solution but has since been superseded. Late in her life (she was 70 when she wrote this book), Ms. Weston become enamoured with the vegetation ceremony theories of Sir James Fraser, and indeed this book is based upon the ideas Fraser expounded in his multi-volume Victorian work "The Golden Bough." Nowadays Fraser is only mentioned in anthropology courses to give an idea of how the science started and nearly everyone understands now that his is not a valid view on early man (much like Freud, heavily discounted after his death, is presented to psychology students to only show them how psychology started). If the base upon which FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE is built, i.e. Fraser's theories, is disproven, Weston's thesis comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE probably reminds in print because T.S. Eliot, in the footnotes to his great poem "The Waste Land", claimed that the book was a key inspiration for that crucial event in 20th-century literature. However, since the discovery in 1967 of the original manuscripts of "The Waste Land", it has been generally understood that Eliot's footnotes are a red herring, that the poem's source was really his emotional turmoil and despair in 1920 and 1921, and that the footnotes were added only to make the poem large enough to be published in its own volume and to clarify some of the more obscure literary references. Thus, any fan of Eliot searching for illumination on "The Waste Land" in FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE would come away with less than if he had just read any of the extant biographies of Eliot (and his mentally-ill wife of that time, Vivien).

So, FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE does not help one to understand either the anthropological source of the King Arthur mythos (which probably doesn't go back very far anyway, says modern archaeology), or Eliot's "The Waste Land". Should one want to understand that work of Eliot's better, I'd recommend getting a copy of the original manuscripts in THE WASTE LAND: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

Kind of terrible to read, if you aren't a scholar. It's really cute how there's large blocks of untranslated ancient languages.

Kind of terrible to read, if you aren't a scholar. It's really cute how there's large blocks of untranslated ancient languages.

Following on my Waste Land reading, I thought I’d give this relatively short book a go. It’s directly mentioned in Eliot’s half-serious, half-mocking footnotes:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book.

The book makes claim that the King Arthur legends in fact are, in a suggestion worthy of a Dan Brown novel, a coded representation of marginalised pagan rituals. It’s not a claim I really feel knowledgeable enough to rule out, but I didn’t feel that Weston’s argument is strong enough to make the broader claim hold water.

A lesser claim, not quite made by Weston herself, but closer to Jung’s later claims of collective unconscious, is that almost all legends and religious stories reflect some deep requirements of human beings. To quote Wittgenstein in his remarks on The Golden Bough: "we act in this way and then feel satisfied”, or to tweak slightly, we find the form of these stories satisfying, and thus we pass them on.

Religions are about more than the stories they tell (large elements of ritual, community and group identification etc are also important), but in this conceptualisation, various stories are shared in groups and those that are the most popular continually get passed from generation to generation, some written down earlier in their existence than others. Only those that speak to multiple generations have come down through the centuries.

Multiple generations retell these stories in the form that speaks best to their peers. In this chain, The Waste Land itself is a modernist retelling of elements of the Arthurian legends, but in a form where the narrative is almost entirely removed (mainly by Pound), leaving a series of loose voices and images.

Weston’s book is, therefore, an interesting part of this chain. Eliot clearly knew the Arthurian legends before reading Weston, but he also chose to give her prime position in the footnotes, presumably because her book prompted his creativity. To a contemporary reader, it’s hard to give it more credit than this. It’s not an electrifying read, and its central argument, like that of Weston’s hero, Frazer, seems to have started from the conclusions and worked back to the premises with limited and often implausible evidence.

Originally posted on Impossible Soul

I enjoyed this exploration of medieval literature and its effects on cultural evolution.