August 13, 2004

Grail legends.
  • Also: the spear.
  • Cue Monty Python jokes in three... two... one...
  • I think posting resources like this is a good thing, what with the renewed interest in things like Templars, the Grail, secret societies. What with everyone and their mom reading the Da Vinci Code, it's nice to give people resources so they don't just believe whatever Dan Brown tells them. I walked in a conversation between to co-workers, and the one who hadn't read the book was listening to a description of it from the one who had and said, "So, it's like Name of the Rose?" My head almost exploded.
  • Yeah, really. It's like Foucault's Pendulum; really don't these people know anything... [kidding. Kidding!]
  • beauty post PF. And what Grail thread would be complete without Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Da Vinci Code read like a tv movie-of-the-week based on that much more serious work.
  • I took a team taught lit class in college, and we read the La Morte (and Gawain and the Green Knight, and a couple of other Grail-y things). It was fun listening to the two professors argue on the origins of the word "Grail." Ultimately, they were able to agree that Graal = dish. Then the argument shifted to whether the dish was a Celtic "fish dish" used by wealthier families or the dish used in the last supper. As sophmores, we mostly just agreed that it was really fun to say "Graal."
  • Awesome link, PF. I did a Grail course in college, and I learned a ton about it. Fisher King rocks. See also The Wasteland.
  • I think saying 'fish dish' is fun. I don't get out enough, I guess.
  • A somewhat related thread.
  • Wot pretty limericks, Q'kid!
  • ilyadeux, I hate to admit it, but it was hearing this conversation that actually spurred me to finish reading Pendulum, which had been sitting on my shelf for two years.
  • That link lets you get halfway through the artcle, then requires you register in order to read the rest of it.
  • david lodge's small world is an amusing grail-allegorical novel set in university english departments.
  • da vinci code 'copy' case begins. michael baigent and richard leigh, authors of the holy blood and the holy grail, are suing random house. note that "leigh teabing" is a character (bad guy, i think) in dan brown's novel.
  • I recently read Bernard Cornwell's Grail series. Cracking good read which I recommend to all Monkeys. I guessed the ending a few chapters into the first book, but like the Grail Quest itself, it's the journey that really matters.
  • I thought 'Teabing' was an amazingly stupid name...