At the height of the Middle Ages, if you were a poet or storyteller, then the chances were that you wrote about King Arthur and his court. It was just what you did. Medieval bards who wanted to tell adventure tales told about Arthurian knights on quests, slaying dragons and defeating recreant knights. The ones who preferred love stories told about Arthur's knights and their ladies. Some of the stories were masterpieces, and some were very bad, but they all took place in King Arthur's court.
Sometimes, even people who didn't want to tell stories at all latched onto the Arthurian world. At any rate, this seems to have happened in an anonymous French book called the Queste del Saint Graal—The Quest of the Holy Grail. The author of this book—most people think he was a thirteenth-century monk—wasn't really interested in Arthur or his knights. He just used them as scenery for his real purpose: to describe the spiritual quest for God. This the Queste does with allegories and symbolic dream interpretations by the cartload, a lot of inaccurate but imaginative history, and, distressingly often, with sermons. You can hardly read a page without encountering one of the holy hermits who lurk behind every other tree and getting yet another sermon proclaimed at you.
For his spiritual allegory, the author of the Queste wanted an irreproachable hero, but since all of Arthur's celebrated knights were known to have broken at least one of the Commandments (generally the same one), he had to invent his own: Galahad. This hero is such a vessel of virtue that we have to admire him, or at least ought to. It is hard to like the fellow, though. So when I took up the story of the Queste, I imported my own hero, an innocent fellow named Beaufils, from a cheerful, rambling Middle English romance called Lybeau Desconus, which means something like "the Fair Unknown."
In this book, then, I've woven together several different stories. The parts about Galahad and Bors all came from the Queste, although some of Bors's adventures were originally about other characters, and the episodes that focus on Beaufils, Ellyn, Lady Synadona, and the Necromancer are all from Lybeau. I even tossed in one extra story, a brief English romance about Sir Gawain called "The Carl of Carlisle." No particular reason; I just like the story.
Starting out with a monastic allegory has made this book a bit different from my earlier Arthurian retellings, but it has also given me a chance to show another side of my chosen time period. The Middle Ages was a profoundly, and sometimes oppressively, religious time. There really were hermits and monasteries and priests and little churches scattered about everywhere; there really were anchoresses (such as the wonderful Julian of Norwich) who shut themselves in tiny cells, finding joy in their solitude. In my earlier books, I've had heroes who were squires, ladies, pages, minstrels, knights, and fools, and to be fair to the medieval world, I really needed a religious hero too. And, while my holy man might not have passed muster at a real thirteenth-century monastery, the Queste itself encourages those who start this journey to make their own path.
That evening they considered how best they might proceed, and agreed to separate the following day and go their several ways, for it would redound to their shame if they rode in a band together ... Then they rode out from the castle and separated as they had decided amongst themselves, striking out into the forest one here, one there, wherever they saw it thickest and wherever path or track was absent.
Queste del Saint Graal
—Gerald Morris