Romance of the Grail

by Joseph Campbell.

This paperback volume in The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell gathers Joseph Campbell’s writings and lectures on the Grail Quest and the Arthurian legends of the European Middle Ages. Edited by Evans Lansing Smith, it includes Campbell’s previously unpublished master’s thesis on Arthurian myth, “A Study of the Dolorous Stroke.”

Campbell considers the enduring figures and episodes of the tradition—from Merlin, Gawain, and Guinevere to Arthur’s receiving of Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake—tracing the larger patterns and meanings held within these mythic narratives.