Robert de Boron

Robert de Boron (also spelled in the manuscripts "Bouron", "Beron") was a French poet of the late 12th and early 13th centuries who is most notable as the author of the poems Joseph d'Arimathe and Merlin. Though little is known about him outside of the poems he allegedly wrote, his works and their subsequent prose redactions impacted later incarnations of the Arthurian legend and its prose cycles, particularly due to his Christian backstory for the Holy Grail, originally an element of Chretien de Troyes's famously-unfinished Perceval.

Robert de Boron was the author of two surviving poems in octosyllabic verse, the Grail story Joseph d'Arimathe and Merlin. The latter work survives only in fragments and in later versions rendered in prose. The two poems are thought to have formed either a trilogy - with a verse Perceval forming the third part - or a tetralogy - with Perceval a Mort Artu (Death of Arthur). The "Didot Perceval", a retelling of the Percival story similar in style and content to Robert's other works, may be a prosification of the lost sections.

Robert de Boron merged the Holy Grail myth with a Christian dimension to produce a history of the grail. According to him, Joseph of Arimathea used the Grail (the Last Supper vessel) to catch the last drops of blood from Jesus's body as he hung on the cross. Joseph's family brought the Grail to the vaus d'Avaron, the valleys of Avaron in the west, which later poets changed to Avalon, identified with Glastonbury, where they guarded it until the rise of King Arthur and the coming of Perceval. Robert also introduced a "Rich Fisher" variation on the Fisher King. Robert de Boron is also credited with introducing Merlin as born of a devil and a virgin and destined to be a redeemed Antichrist.

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