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cience requires that we change our view of the world when evidence is presented contrary to our long-standing opinions. If this were not so, we would all be Lamarckians, nobody would have listened to Darwin, and the Giraffe's neck would be considerably shorter. Some historians labor under no such rules. Pseudo historians especially use logic, only when it fits their hypothesis and generally do not test against controls as required by scientific method or modern juris prudence.
The situation in current Arthurian criticism is similar to the climate in the Shakespearean world. New evidence floods in, old ideas become entrenched and scholars persist in stagnate opinions. Archaeology, which calls itself a science, seems to operate more in the historical vein than the scientific. Even with the Internet at hand, the flooding-in of opinions, with or without peer review, stifles the consensus process. Those with a stake in certain interpretations are loath to abandon old constructs.
As we enter the 21st century things are quite messy in medieval literary history. The assumption that ChrĂ©tien suddenly jumped to life and generated ten thousand lines of original poetry, especially poetry giving precise details about monastic and military life around Glastonbury Abbeyâa place he never sawâis absurd. Even so, scholars continue to ignore the idea of a lost precursor. Nor can they entertain the even more thrilling possibility that one of the books we have, âis,â the lost book. In other words, the Perlesvaus, in all probability, is the lost book hiding in plain sight.
Early Francophiles, striving to establish Chrétien as the major source of the Grail story, name him as the most likely originator, but were his works entirely original? Chrétien was truly brilliant but, in his own words, he tells us that he had a book, before him. Chrétien, it bears repeating, thought of himself as a liege servant to a royal couple who happed to be the niece (by marriage) and nephew of Abbot Blois.
When ChrĂ©tien received his illustrious commission Marie, Eleanorâs daughter, was widowed by Henry Blois (the Liberal) who died on crusade, and was being courted by Phillip of Flanders who wound up with many esoteric books in his possession.
When reading the Perlesvaux, branch-by-branch, one seems to be witnessing the rituals and ceremonies of an impenetrable secret society.
In the Elucidation, a three page introductory narrative appended to ChrĂ©tienâs Perceval, (BN mss# 12576s) the authorship of the original Grail book is ascribed, not to ChrĂ©tien, but to Master Blihos, who happens to be the narrator of this short introduction. Here the name is almost shouting for revelation. It is a simple anagram for Blois.
This anagram gives us two solid clues. First, we remove the letter H, from
Â
BLIHOS
Â
Which is silent anyway, and we see:
Â
BLIOS
Â
The next step is simply to reverse the two vowels (O & I) thus:
Â
BLOIS H
Â
Moving the H to the front yields:
Â
H BLOIS
Â
Now, as we read the Elucidation, we are probably hearing Henry Blois narrate his own book. We also see the authorâs great sense of humor emerging, but let us move on to an even more amazing aspect of the rebus.
The rules of logic and parsimony tell us we should never simply remove or reverse letters and toss them aside without explanation. What shall we do with the O and the I, why reverse them, as they appear in their original order in the nonsense word BLIHOS?
After telling us that the story is secret and mentioning the word, secret three times in the first paragraph, he adds that, âMaster Blihos lie not.â
In other words, Master Blois is telling us a secret that we must keep absolute and he is not lying to us. He is telling us the truth on many levels, a truth so well disguised, that it must be thought of as dangerous.
The master then warns that he is revealing:
ââŠthe secret no man should
tell.â
Here again he is swearing us to secrecy. Why? If no man or woman should reveal it, why is it being revealed at this gathering? It seems obvious that the revelation had to be made at exactly that time, and to that group, or be lost forever, perhaps at the hands of censors.
For a full understanding, the reader will need to read the document, which appears herein as Appendix A, and on the Internet in several places.
I have taken the liberty of reinterpreting the text for modern sensibilities. My version, for general purposes, is just as intact and entire as that of Evans. I include it to allow the reader to see the full extent of this amazing preamble in the context of what we have only recently discovered about Stonehenge, the Neolithic mounds, the megaliths and the Holy Wells, the were worshipped before the advent of Christianity.
The core of the Elucidation is a cautionary tale and a prediction of grave outcomes if moral order is not restored. This much is Christian, but morality, in this case, is not exclusively Christian. We are also observing a Platonic morality at work. The narrator is also arguing from a Hermetic and Gnostic framework. The morality of which he speaks is a crying out for a balancing of nature, one that can be achieved not by self-loathing or sleeping in hair shirts, but rather by measured reason.
In addition to Aristotelian logic, known to the Benedictines since the ninth century, the Elucidation is about the fairy mounds and the women who inhabit them. The author of the Elucidation calls them wells, but in this context the term wells is not strictly defined as places of fountains or water outlets. Emma Jung tells us that the term âwellsâ was often used to refer to the megalithic mounds, such as Glastonbury Tor, Silbury Hill, Kercado in Bretagne and Newgrange in Ireland. It is not strictly about castles and chapels. In this sense, the Perlesvaus, and the Elucidation are not as Vaticanized, as Jesse Weston, and others assume. In fact, the authors style, in both documents, represents a radical departure from tradition.[1]
Its probable that the Elucidation represents  an oral address to a court ruled by women or at least one that practices courtesy toward women. We know this because in the first line the speaker uses the term, âworshipfullyâ which is a term of great supplication to a sovereign, he also uses the term, âNoble Commencement,â literally, a royal graduation or perhaps a wedding or Christening.
The narrator next recites the code of the mound fairies, describing them as preternatural vestal virgins, who, when asked politely and with respect, shall leave no man unserved by their golden cups. This is, without question, a metaphorical sexual reference.
Next, in the typical mood flux or fugue seen so clearly in the Perlesvaux, the narrative moves into a cautionary motif. King Amangons was evil and craven hearted and was the first to break the custom of courtesy to the fairy guardians of the mounds/wells. Instead of paying homage to the Grail maidens, he raped his serving girl and âtook her maidenhead.â He then forced her to serve under him everyday, thus setting a bad example so that others of his subjects did the same for a long time.
A Shakespearean stage aside occurs when the narrator tells us the King was well deserved to come to mishap for his actions. In consequence the Fairy Mound, which could easily be Glastonbury Tor, would no longer provide victual meats and drink, and the land was turned to a wasteland. This is a common theme in later Arthurian literature, but here we discover what created the wasteland. This is an almost modern ecological forecast. If we rape rob, pollute and pillage the land will die.
According to Master Blihos, it is the evil and heartless deeds that men do to Mother Earth, and to women as guardians of her largesse, that transforms the paradise into a desert.
Moreover, since the King set a bad example, his knights did the same and no mounds gave forth food of any kind at any time, this implies food and succor as well as romance.
These evil deeds created a land so barren that no man can locate the Rich Fisherman, which, in this context can only be the munificence of future hope.
The peer knights of the Table Round then take an oath to force a lethal revenge upon all of those responsible for the death of the mounds and the maids living within them. They also vow to return the garden of paradise to a normal state.
To achieve this restorative goal they locate the damsels hiding in the forest in poverty. Then they protect them and fight the enemy who first carried them off for abuse. Many a battle ensues and King Arthur himself laments that he has lost many a good knight in the battle, but has also gained many.
Now the storyteller, Master Blihos, adds a last name and calls himself Blihos Bliheris. He then casts himself as one of the bad people, the first to be defeated by the prowess of Messier Gawain. As a result, instead of killing him, Gawain offers Blihos redemption if he will come to King Arthurâs court and yield himself up. In other words, he goes on a quest to find his true nature and pledges to leave his cynicism behind.
Upon entering the court as a stranger, he found that he could tell stories agreeable to the King and court. In other words, he found his natural talent. Thus he told stories in such a good way that nobody could ever tire of his words. Thereafter the damsels and the knights sought him out and he was saved.
The story ends on an existential note. Blihos, now taking the tone of a Bard, teaches his audience that the evil is done and cannot be mended, much like original sin, but that all of the knights and damsels are born of the great mother of the wells and that they are plighted, so to speak, to wander the forests at large through the county to seek out and find the god given court from whence shall come the joy whereby the land shall again be made bright.
I think we are witnessing Blois himself telling a tale of repentance and restoration, but he is also providing a prophecy of hope, one that looks far into the future, perhaps even to our present day. His prophecy, as laid out within the Perlesvaus, seems to be one of birth, denouement, and rebirth. The resurrection of the human spirit and a restating of the old âuniversal faith,â one that sees hope in the eyes of the Great Mother.
He goes on to tell us that he himself is a sinner who has been given a chance to find his true nature, which is to sing and speak as a Troubadour. In this, he is challenged to please others and bring about the required healing of the world through his stories. For a full text, see Appendix A.
But what of O and I? Why does the narrator leave us to ponder these two letters?
I suggest they are not individual letters, but rather a name, one familiar to anyone schooled in Greek drama.
 In Greek myth, Io was the daughter of Inachus, an ancient river, and fertility god of Argos. She was very beautiful and was repeatedly raped by Zeus (King Amangons). Hera, his wife, transformed Io into a white cow, equivalent to the BO Ainne story in Irish myth. The Irish River Boyne, with its many mounds and stones, derives its name from this same white cow Goddess; representing the Milky Way on Earth.
Hera then gave the transformed cow to Argus, the guardian with a hundred eyes. When Hermes, who himself arose from a pile of stones, rescued Io, he killed Argus, whose eyes became the tail of the peacock, a bird associated with Hera. It should now be obvious that this is a kind of inside TrouvĂšre joke because Blois possibly had several peacocks running around his palace in Winchester along with other exotic animals.
Moreover, the eyes of Argus are also the stars of the constellation Argo Navis, the ship, that sails the milky way and here again, the good Abbot is telling us where to look, viz a vi, âLook to the sky for the ultimate clues.â Argo Navis is mentioned toward the end of the Perlesvaus as a templar ship with a red cross on the sail, the ship that deposits Percival on the shores of Glastonbury where he sees twelve hermits guarding the landscape. [2]
But, beyond Bloisâ fascination with Greek myth and Hermetism, why is Ovid important here? As it happens the story of Io is found in Prometheus Bound, a play by Ovid in collaboration with Aeschylus. More directly, Blois was an admirer of Ovid and may have been an authority and translator of his works. Thus, our little anagram takes on one more necessary clue to reveal Henry Blois as the author of the Perlesvaus.
This puzzle game does not prove Blois wrote the Perlesvaux, but there is still more proof. We must ask why he or someone who knew him appended his one-act morality play to a work by Chrétien, unless the Abbot wanted to acknowledge the fact that Chrétien had the Perlesvaus on his desk as he wrote his version of the Percival.
To answer this question we have to take a closer look at Chrétien. Here we have a Troubadour who died in a mysterious and untimely fashion, but his continuers tell us nothing of his departure. The only clues left to us are a few comments he made regarding his inheritance of a prior manuscript written by a master Blehis, obviously a reference to the Blihois of the Elucidation anagram.
At two points in his redaction of the Gawain story ChrĂ©tienâs continuer, Wauchier refers to the mystery author as, âBliheris,â a slight variation on Blihois. On the second occasion he states categorically that this Bliheris was of Welsh birth, implying that he could read and write in Welsh, and that he came from France or spent time in Gallic France I.e., origin, nĂ© et ingĂ©nues en Galles. How did Wauchier known this if not by notes now missing and/or word-of-mouth? He was wrong, Blois was not Welsh by birth, but he was fluent in Welsh and that would be enough for Wauchier to assume he was a native.
Wauchier also tells us that the original author told his Gawain tale, at least once, to a certain Comte de Poitiers, because the Count loved it above all others. This implies that it was not the only tale, âBliheris,â had in his repertoire, and indeed the Perlesvaus can be thought of as an anthology of tales. In other words, Bliheris was a storyteller, like Henry Blois.
Specifically as to chronology, Blois was too ill to travel in 1170, so this performance of the Elucidation, must have occurred before that date, perhaps when he was on his way to Cluny or at Poitiers in the mid-1150s when Eleanor and her daughters were holding their fabulous courts of love.
The Elucidation seems to have been written as a performance piece, and yet it also stands as a kind of précis, prologue or appendix to the main performance. It also seems to act as a key to the understanding of the Perlesvaus, without which the work would be clouded.
In any case, the draft version of the book (in Latin) would probably have been done before the death of William of Malmsbury with the final version rendered either in exile by Blois, or perhaps after his return from exile in 1158. This places the drafting and polishing of the book in the period between 1140 and 1168, a span, ranging from a date before the death of Malmsbury, who claims he read the work of Blois, to the date a few years before the passing of Bishop Blois.
By embracing certain practical issues, we can narrow that span down to a period between 1140 and 1165, since Blois as an elder statesman, was probably a bit busy the last five years of his life. This gives us a median date of 1152-1153 or just before the death of Stephen Blois.
What was going on in that year in the lives of the brothers Blois? First, the young Henry Plantagenet also known as Henry of Anjou, sailed for England. He believed he was the rightful heir to England through his mother Matilda. However, he had no more success than his mother in taking the English throne at that time.
In early 1153 the principles, hoping to quell rioting and anarchy, drew up the, âTreaty of Wallingford.â This document made provision for the English crown to pass to Matilda's son, Henry of Anjou (Henry II). Stephen's legitimate children, Eustace and William would be passed over.
Bishop Blois drew up a detailed version, with addenda, in November 1153. This variation allowed Stephen to remain King of England for life. These documents made clear that Stephen had adopted Henry Plantagenet as his heir. Stephen's second son, William, was to inherit Stephen's baronial lands without discord, in England or France. This proved temporarily beneficial to the Norman cause in France. Nothing was said of the natural son Gervase, but we can assume the Plantagenet faction was concerned about the rise of yet another Thebaudian to the throne.
Predictably, Stephen Blois died of a possible poisoning the
next yearâsigning the treaty was tantamount to signing his own death warrant. [3]
The Elucidation and the Perlesvaus may contain more coded phrases and ciphers, as many Templar documents did at that time. These would only be decipherable by looking at the original French, Occitan, or Latin texts, but since, this author is not fluent in any of those languages and since we are, as of now, able to work only with the Nitze or the Evans translation, we must wait.
By the way Evans produced his translation in 1889 and onward. Nitze presented his PhD. thesis in 1899 (published in 1902). Thus, both works, now accepted, as holy writ may be seriously outdated.
It seems a simple enough task to scan the text and use modern high-powered computers to cross reference the material word for word. It also seems cogent to subject these books to chemical and radiocarbon tests, as has been done in the case of the Shakespeare folio, the Shroud of Turin, and many other relics of the Middle Ages. In the meantime we must hope that future generations, using advanced techniques, will take up the search.
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