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I have long been accused of having a problem with obscure and irrelevant snippets of information---that I collect it (or more accurately them) almost incessantly and really obsessively; and then happily and needlessly regurgitate it (or more accurately them) in a horribly unstoppable way, just like a large, insistent and broody bird with an over-masticated bolus of worm-squashings and some poor, unwilling chicks.
Of course this pitiable syndrome is not awful in every way, even for my hearers, I mean even the most prosaic and quotidian-minded of persons must occasionally wonder just who was the most boring poet in the whole history of the World (it was Orrm: who wrote the Orrmulum its most boring poem, in Middle English one of its languages); or perhaps it's the date of the Synod of Whitby (664 AD); or of the Diet of Worms (in 1521); or whether those worms were over-masticated too (definitely, just ask Martin Luther ...or his brother ).
And as for me, apart from the sheer fun of the thing, even impractical knowledge is sometimes useful, even in a practical way. For example because of my arcana-gnosticism I am, to my certain knowledge, the only person in the entire continental United States (apart from a couple of people still hiding out in the Ozarks from the Vietnam Draft) who didn't waste any time, or for that matter (and much more importantly) money, on that surprisingly popular book about Leonardo da Vinci's home remedies.
You know the book I mean, The da Vinci Cold, the one that purports to prove that the Mona Lisa has that famous and fatuous smile because she had a really bad head cold when old Len painted her and was so full of pseudephedrine that she was totally, absolutely spaced! Or (and this'll make you laugh), that she was actually old Len himself--and so I suppose that that isn't a smile that has fascinated the generations since, but a long white beard. Oh! And I should at this point, ...um.. point... out to you that I've avoided wasting time on the damn thing to such an extent that I've managed to do absolutely no research on it for this essay (though I have accidentally overheard people talking in a way that suggests that in this I am merely following the example of the Cold's author, or that I would have been following it had I actually read the thing and had any idea at all what that example was!)
However little I know about the book, with my background in the field of obscure and irrelevant snippets of information I do know far more about things essential to it, like the history of the term Holy Grail and its linguistic relatives--old grandpa Graal who started the family and dad San Greal and his illegitimate twin brother Sang Real, than most people; or (as I've heard tell) than the author of this book.
For a start forget all that rubbish about the Grail being some secret about Jesus and marriage and babies1: even in the remote possibility that it's true (and that's a subject far too obscure even for me) it has nothing to do with the Grail.
The Grail first appears in literature in the late 12C in Chrétien de Troyes' Conte del Graal as the eponymous 'graal' and is there apparently a wide, deep dish that wasn't (at the time) holding a large fish though it seems to have been rather expected that it should have been: and, like so much else in Arthurian Lit, it may well come from Celtic legend---the Celts being big on bowls of plenty---that being what the Grail probably originally was.
By the time it got to the likes of Robert de Boron in the early 13C it had become associated with the Last Supper and it soon shrank and lost its potential fish-capacity and became a chalice (or at least sometimes) and holy; and so the Sainte Graal or San Greal, or even Sangreal as one word, and that's when things went a bit awry, you see apart from the Ormulum (which capped its boredom with a good dose of orthography) until recently spelling was not considered one of the Useful Arts-- there were, as far as I know, no Mediæval spelling bees, and so by the time we get to, say, Henry Lovelich in the mid-15C he can viciously commit false tmesis and chop Sangreal into Sang Real or 'royal blood' and the rest is definitely not history nor, really, much of a mystery.
Cheerio for now
from
Richard Howland-Bolton
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Notes:
1 Jesus
"... some secret about Jesus and marriage and babies" An idea I'm sure the writer easily could have pinched from that song 'Jesus: the Missing Years' by John Prine, or if he didn't directly then the authors of that earlier book with not dissimilar diegetism: Holy Blood, Holy Grail: Wholly Fictitious must have.
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