Encyclopedia of the Holy Grail by Jeffrey John Dixon (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Encyclopedia of the Holy Grail by Jeffrey John Dixon
• Phillip C. Boardman

jeffrey john dixon, Encyclopedia of the Holy Grail. McFarland Myth and Legend Encyclopedias. McFarland: Jefferson, NC. 2023. Pp. iii, 328. isbn: 978–1–4766–8794-0. $39.95.

Arthurian scholars have been blessed in recent years with the steady release of major translation projects. At the same time, new reference works have often hidden their variety behind some agreed generic categories: handbook, glossary, guide, dictionary, casebook, companion, and others, including encyclopedia. Dixon’s new reference work, examining the rich but complicated traditions behind the many versions of the best known of the Grail stories, offers substantial summary retellings of the stories themselves. To that end, in fact, Dixon states that the retellings throughout the entries in his encyclopedia work to reveal and enable the ‘Enchantment’ that attends the discovery of the workings of contemporary Grail scholarship (p. 1).

As with other successful reference works, Dixon’s makes its structure and materials quite clear: it is organized fully alphabetically and aims for contextual clarity rather than simple comprehensiveness. Dixon clearly wants his focus on retellings to encourage the reader’s engagement with the stories themselves, propelled by an energetic narrative style. To this end, Dixon reviews his endeavor through a summary essay that stands as a separate ‘Afterword’ entitled ‘Higher Mysteries: Grail Initiation as Twentieth Century Mythology.’ This essay is carefully linked to the larger Apparatus of the project and is a careful thirty-two-page exposition of the important period in the first third of the twentieth century when Arthurian scholars, fascinated by origin myths, occult symbolism, and initiation rituals, searched throughout the Grail narratives for clues connecting the occult elements.

Dixon responds to his Afterword with three short appendices, all three first laying out a chronology of fictions, people, and historical events that he places beneath [End Page 101] the earliest fabric of the Grail stories, beginning with the birth of Jesus. The second appendix describes, in order beginning with Diu Crône (The Crown), the importance and relationships of the developing early medieval Grail literature in the thirteenth century, a useful description and summary of some thirty versions of medieval works from both poetry and prose, including among many others Chrétien’s unfinished Perceval, several innovative continuations, and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur. The third appendix, ‘The Company of the Grail’ and subtitled ‘Some Twentieth Century Writers’ offers very brief introductions of a mere fifteen twentieth-century scholars who achieved reputations—and often notoriety—as they developed their theories about Grail origins and associated their scholarship with controversial ideas. Indeed, Dixon’s own books reveal a stage set for exploring the intellectual mysteries and occult practices (including Nazism and modernist Gnosticism) with a deep fascination for finding Arthurian concerns within our own world understanding: Gawain and the Grail Quest (2012); The Glory of Arthur: The Legendary King in Epic Poems (2014); Goddess and Grail: The Battle for King Arthur’s Promised Land (2017). But it must be admitted, as well, that in a time when the Arthurian materials have grown to include challenging texts, ideas, philosophical sophistication, films, comics, and alternative realities, the focus on the early decades of the twentieth century—the period of T.S. Eliot, Karl Jung, Otto Rahn, the Thule Society, Hitler, and Jessie Weston—may seem suddenly and artificially limited.

A special gift made part of Dixon’s Encyclopedia are notes containing extended passages quoted in original languages, with citations, to allow useful comparisons and notes for source studies. These notes provide a running commentary on the editor’s translations from original sources and texts, so that scholars and students of the texts can readily compare the more modern versions of the stories with comparable evidence from the original languages, often commenting on the original references. The Encyclopedia of the Holy Grail thus serves as a toolbox for discovering and tracing the development of the medieval and modern Grail traditions, showing clear evidence of language change and textual and cultural innovation. These original texts from popular French, German, and Middle English Arthurian sources, among others, reveal important connections that will become necessary reminders of the inner workings of...