A Reading of Robert de Boron

In writing the chapter on “The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval” for Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages , Pierre Le Gentil shows that many questions remain unanswered for readers of the Metrical Joseph. Beyond the statements which we understand as the poet's—that at the time when he told the story of the graal he was with his lord Gautier de Montbéliard in peace, that no one had yet told the story, and that he intends to continue with stories of Alain, Petrus, Moyses, and Bron—we have been guided in our reading largely by conjecture. From the fragment of the Merlin which follows the Metrical Joseph in MS. fr. 20047 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, we can see that the poet places the two works within the concept of the struggle between Christ and Satan for the soul of man. Several of his sources have been pointed out; but beyond a few conclusions from the text itself, a reader wonders at the strange combination of Christian tradition and Celtic legend which Robert de Boron has effected in these two works. Discussions have been complicated by manuscripts of works related in various ways to the poems of MS. fr. 20047, and by the proliferation of stories of the Grail following Robert de Boron's Christianization of Celtic stories which had been circulating for about a hundred years before his time.