From Ritual to Romance

Rating:
Summary: Going to the Source
Review: Because Eliot's "Waste Land" is taught in virtually every British and American lit survey course, the name "Jessie Weston" and the title "From Ritual to Romance" have become familiar to perhaps millions of readers throughout the world. However, if readers hope to get beyond the "trivial pursuit" question of the source to which Eliot was indebted and to a genuine understanding of the "Fisher King" myth, they will need to read that source for themselves. Though not a quick and accessible read, the book repays the reader's patience. Not only does it help bring Eliot's poem to life but it illuminates the poetic tradition from Chaucer to Eliot and makes more meaningful the numerous adaptations of the myth in modern culture--from David Lodge's "Small World" to Robin Williams' "The Fisher King." Not for a sophomore survey course, but definitely for any upperlevel course on Eliot or Arthurian legend.

Rating:
Summary: Useless for understanding both anthropology and Eliot
Review: In this work of pop-anthropology from 1920, Jessie L. Weston puts forth the idea that the romance of King Arthur and the search for the Grail is no mere fairy tale, but rather a mythos that goes back to earliest man's fertility rites and the annual rebirth of the land after winter. Most nowaways would look to this book for anthropology or to help understand the poetry of T.S. Eliot. However, this tome of outdated early-20th century thought is useful for neither purpose.

In FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE Ms. Weston presents, like Julian Jaynes in his book THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND, a theory that once sounded revolutionary and a great solution but has since been superseded. Late in her life (she was 70 when she wrote this book), Ms. Weston become enamoured with the vegetation ceremony theories of Sir James Fraser, and indeed this book is based upon the ideas Fraser expounded in his multi-volume Victorian work "The Golden Bough." Nowadays Fraser is only mentioned in anthropology courses to give an idea of how the science started and nearly everyone understands now that his is not a valid view on early man (much like Freud, heavily discounted after his death, is presented to psychology students to only show them how pyschology started). If the base upon which FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE is built, i.e. Fraser's theories, is disproven, Weston's thesis comes tumbling down like a house of cards.

FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE probably reminds in print because T.S. Eliot, in the footnotes to his great poem "The Waste Land", claimed that the book was a key inspiration for that crucial event in 20th-century literature. However, since the discovery in 1967 of the original manuscripts of "The Waste Land", it has been generally understood that Eliot's footnotes are a red herring, that the poem's source was really his emotional turmoil and despair in 1920 and 1921, and that the footnotes were added only to make the poem large enough to be published in its own volume and to clarify some of the more obscure literary references. Thus, any fan of Eliot searching for illumination on "The Waste Land" in FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE would come away with less than if he had just read any of the extant biographies of Eliot (and his mentally-ill wife of that time, Vivien).

So, FROM RITUAL TO ROMANCE does not help one to understand either the anthropological source of the King Arthur mythos (which probably doesn't go back very far anyway, says modern archaeology), or Eliot's "The Waste Land". Should one want to understand that work of Eliot's better, I'd recommend getting a copy of the original manuscripts in THE WASTE LAND: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound.

Rating:
Summary: A great place to start....
Review: Jessie Weston's work on the Fisher King is a great starting point for the reader interested in the possible origins of the Fisher King myth. Weston has catalogued all of the many versions of the myth, the various important elements, and proposed origins. However, since there is no way to definitively prove the origins of the Fisher King myth, the reader should proceed with extreme caution when working with Weston's book. Since the Fisher King myth is highly derived and we have no manuscripts that mention the Fisher King before Chretien, Weston's hypotheses are highly speculative. Nevertheless, this book is a great "introduction" to the many aspects of the Fisher King myth. For the student of Arthurian literature, this book is a "must read."

Rating:
Summary: searching for the roots
Review: this book is a must for anybody interested in the tales and legends centred upon the Grial. It is also very pleasant to read. The author presented here the (then, that is 1920) revolutionary theory that most elements in the cycle of the Grial stories are actually the remnants of incredibly old fertility rituals that, somehow, survived in remote parts of the Roman empire. It is extremely interesting to see how the author reached this conclusion and how she was prepared to defend it against the campaigners for the christianity of the Grial. And on top of everything, she writes in a deliciously archaic English, sprinkled with French and Latin (mind the quotations. They are not translated)

Rating:
Summary: An interdisciplinary revelation
Review: This book, published in 1920, was a seminal influence on both T.S. Eliot in "The Wasteland" and Ernest Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises". Eighty years later, it's still easy to see why. Although the book is short-just over 200 pages-it is almost unbelievably wide-ranging. As she deconstructs the elements of the various versions of the tales of the Holy Grail, Ms. Weston takes the reader globetrotting and time-traveling, from Vedic India to turn of the century Africa and Japan, with stops in between in Europe and the Middle East from antiquity to her own time. She relates the Grail stories to archaic sacred kingship, fertility rituals and dances, the rites and myths of Adonis, Attis and Mithra, as well as Gnostic Christianity. If you're interested in the Grail, the history of western culture, the history of religious ideas, or the transmission of myth and ritual into literary forms, "From Ritual To Romance" is truly a revelation.

Rating:
Summary: An interdisciplinary revelation
Review: This book, published in 1920, was a seminal influence on both T.S. Eliot in "The Wasteland" and Ernest Hemingway in "The Sun Also Rises". Eighty years later, it's still easy to see why. Although the book is short-just over 200 pages-it is almost unbelievably wide-ranging. As she deconstructs the elements of the various versions of the tales of the Holy Grail, Ms. Weston takes the reader globetrotting and time-traveling, from Vedic India to turn of the century Africa and Japan, with stops in between in Europe and the Middle East from antiquity to her own time. She relates the Grail stories to archaic sacred kingship, fertility rituals and dances, the rites and myths of Adonis, Attis and Mithra, as well as Gnostic Christianity. If you're interested in the Grail, the history of western culture, the history of religious ideas, or the transmission of myth and ritual into literary forms, "From Ritual To Romance" is truly a revelation.