From Fingal's Cave to Camelot by Douglas Gray (review)

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Reviewed by:

• From Fingal's Cave to Camelot by Douglas Gray
• Peter Whiteford

Gray, Douglas, From Fingal's Cave to Camelot, edited by Jane Bliss, Oxford, Independent Publishing Network, 2020; paperback; pp. 252; R.R.P. £22.00; ISBN 9781838537838.

Douglas Gray, the author of From Fingal's Cave to Camelot, died in 2017. A brief death notice on the website of the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, rightly described him as 'a giant of his field' who continued to publish 'deep into [End Page 318] retirement'—and as this recent book indicates, Gray has continued to 'publish' not only in retirement but posthumously as well. One other affectionate remark from the death notice is worth quoting here too: 'Douglas had not only read everything but had seemingly remembered everything he had read'. Those familiar with his rooms in Norham Gardens, Oxford, might also reflect that he seemingly remembered where he had put everything, however much the state of the rooms suggested otherwise! I quote that second remark because it seems appropriate to the book under review, which is the product not just of a giant of a scholar but of someone who gives every appearance of having read and remembered everything. Equally, one suspects that the vast array of learning on display here is not the product of a search engine (how Google doth make scholars of us all) but of a lifetime's generous reading, a capacious memory, and an indefatigable interest in his subject. And how typical of Douglas (and typically Chaucerian) to describe himself in the Prologue as 'a simple practitioner of the history of medieval English literature' (p. 3).

This work is anything but the product of a 'simple practitioner', as is immediately apparent. Ambitious in scope—in the best sense of that word—it is a wide-ranging and vastly learned exploration of its subject. The editor's preface speaks of intervening as little as possible in the extant text 'so as not to destroy the flow of Gray's argument' (p. ix), but in truth (and the quibble is only a minor one) this book does not really present an argument, and in some respects is the more attractive for not doing so.

What it does do is set out for us in a section appropriately headed 'The Quest'. At first glance, Gray seems to make a modest claim, offering a 'selective and simple' account of 'the strange afterlife of medieval literature': a small contribution to a larger investigation (p. 3). Two images recur throughout this section—of story and of the journey—and it is those ideas, rather than an argument as such, that sit behind the book and its largely chronological narrative of the 'rediscovery' of medieval literature by succeeding generations of readers, writers, scholars, and critics—the servants, as Gray notes a little later, of Mercury and of Philology. A largely chronological narrative, but in a characteristic touch, Gray sidles up to his topic via Felix Mendelssohn's visit to Fingal's Cave on the island of Staffa, and Joseph Banks's visit to the same place some fifty years earlier.

It marks a splendid starting point, for Banks is writing just a few years after James Macpherson published his 'translations'—Fingal in 1762 and The Collected Works of Ossian in 1765. The image of the careful scientist, Joseph Banks, responding with something approaching awe to a sublime natural marvel, and linking that natural phenomenon to the literary phenomenon engendered by Macpherson's much-disputed translations is somehow a wonderful emblem of the whole quest that Gray embarks on. Worth noting, too, from the Prologue, is the deliberate inclusiveness of the plural pronoun. While Gray may be the narrator or storyteller, we undertake the journey with him. We are all engaged in what is rapidly turned into 'our quest'. [End Page 319]

Something of the wide coverage of the topic might be noted (jestingly) through an inspection of the Index, which ranges from 'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres' to 'Zupitza, Julius'—a literal A–Z of Gray's subject. More seriously, though, the 'Index' does allow us to see some of the emphases of the quest, and...