A Tale from a Medieval Mind
A Feature Review of
Galahad and the Grail
Malcolm Guite
Hardcover: Rabbit Room Press, 2026
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Reviewed by Tyler Selby
Over ten years ago, I heard Malcolm Guite lecture on Dante’s Paradiso in Salisbury Cathedral during a conference. I had only read Paradiso once and had struggled to understand what I was reading, let alone enjoy it—it seemed the most abstract and uninteresting section of the Divine Comedy. And yet, in his retelling of Dante’s final story in his lecture, Guite brought forward the beauty of Paradiso and through that beauty came clarity and understanding of what Dante was saying. It is the same with Galahad and the Grail: Malcom Guite has beautifully recrafted an old story.
In 1964, a year after his death, The Discarded Image by C.S. Lewis was published. It is a surprising centerpiece of Lewis’s work, bringing together his academic training as a Medievalist and his attempts in his novels to capture the medieval imaginative perspective. The Discarded Image lays out the foundational aspects of the medieval imagination—what formed it and how people viewed the cosmos and their place in it—with the admission that this particular imagination has passed. It was this imagination that Lewis sought to recreate in novels, not through explicit reference to a bygone age, but through creating the experience of another world—so that readers can enter the story and breathe the air of a different age, felt before it is understood. Jason Baxter, in his work The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, calls Lewis’s undertaking “rendering atmosphere.”
Malcolm Guite is also seeking to render atmosphere. He places his retelling of the stories of King Arthur in Galahad and the Grail into our secular age—indeed our own world and the world of the Grail are at risk of grinding against each other in their dissimilarity. Two of Guite’s aims are to revive the transcendent imagination as seen in the original stories of King Arthur and to return the stories to their Christian heritage. In Appendix A, Guite says,
“As a student at Cambridge I rediscovered these stories in their original sources and became aware of how so many modern versions of them seemed to marginalize or even erase the deep Christian impulse that had formed their original retelling, and as a poet I longed to restore that lost element in the hope that a new telling might baptize the imagination of the growing generation brought up in a secular world, trapped in the “immanent frame” and deprived of their inheritance in the gospel” (315-316).
Guite saturates his retelling with medieval Christian elements: the chivalric knight blending the code of courtesy with Christian duty, the origins of the grail tied to Joseph of Arimathea, the pinnacle of the story rising in a Eucharistic service, or the centrality of the Christian king and his importance for the healing of his land. And yet, it is the explicit revival of medieval Christianity as the “deep Christian impulse” in the story that might give modern readers pause. As an example, one element that stands out is that of the Christian king.
In Galahad and the Grail, Guite makes the story of the fisher king a key part of the tale. In it, the fisher king suffers a major wound and as a result, his kingdom becomes a wasteland. A Eucharistic celebration featuring the grail heals the king and thus heals his land. Along with the central character of Arthur as another Christian king, it is hard not to read this as not only a baptism of imagination, but also a baptism of theocratic monarchy. For myself, as a citizen of the United States, it is difficult to make room for such a cozy companionship between faith and institutional power. The current swirl of Christian nationalism makes it difficult to read this without getting a sour taste in our mouth. But Guite is not blind to this struggle. As Susanna Clarke says in the Foreword, “Malcolm Guite doesn’t trouble to water down his hermits, ladies, knights, and kings to meet the twenty-first century’s tastes. These men and women are entirely lacking in cynicism and take it for granted that the most splendid thing they can do is to try to live lives according to an impossible ideal, whether you call that ideal chivalry or an imitation of Christ” (xiv). But such a medieval Christian story may struggle to gain traction in today’s world.
Nonetheless, the story lives—not because of the main course, but because of the garnishes. The supporting elements surrounding the story, not the core of the story, clear away a little of the clutter of skepticism and make room for the pleasure of reading a story. And through that enjoyment, a deeper goodness sneaks through. Despite the obstacles between our own age and the Middle Ages, Guite succeeds in “rendering atmosphere” of the idealized chivalric world of the Grail. His story shines in its telling and the choices he has made to shape that atmosphere: the rhyme and rhythm, sway and lilt, drive the readers onward. The inclusion of the Naiads and Dryads give nods to Tolkien’s and Lewis’s serious kind of playfulness in their own story telling—blending together a Christian love of creation and a love of wildness. The story also contains wildness in some of its characters: the hermits Nacien and Dindrane weaving in and out of the story, the oddity of the hero and heroine of the story riding Solomon’s ship into the heavens (a curious similarity to Ëarendil’s journey into the heavens on a ship in Tolkien’s writing), and the surprising circularity of the story that doubles back on tales already told but from another’s perspective, bringing a sudden clarity in the second telling. But does Guite succeed in what he aims to do through this story? Does he bring us closer to a transcendent imagination in a secularized world?
Peter Berger has been another voice in the conversation about theories of secularization. His work, A Rumor of Angels, deals with that same topic but with a different tack. He highlights the “secularized consciousness” of contemporary times and how the transcendent has been reduced to “rumors”—something absent from the core institutions of life but still lingering among us—but signaling that the old atmosphere is not as burned away as we might assume. Indeed, in an age marked increasingly by skepticism and cynicism, we might dismiss Guite’s work as a relic of a niche academic obsession. But a willing reader might find pleasure in the reading, and thereby might find themselves infected by a different kind of atmosphere that kindles a hunger for the transcendent. All we need to start is with our own pleasure in reading.
Tyler Selby
Tyler Selby is the Director of Facilities at Englewood Community Development Corporation (which serves a largely marginalized population in the Near Eastside of Indianapolis). He is a graduate of Emmanuel Christian Seminary at Milligan College, enjoys cooking, growing tomatoes, and is working on a PMII mold inspection certification.
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