In the year 1816, Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, today the best-known collection of stories about King Arthur and the Round Table knights, was brought back into print for the first time in 182 years. This book, and Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, published three years later, proved instrumental in making the nineteenth century a century of medieval revival. In the decades that followed, poets and artists seeking cultural renewal employed the Middle Ages as a model. Keats, Tennyson, and Wordsworth owned copies of Malory, and each wrote poems on medievalist or Arthurian themes. Augustus Pugin adorned the Palace of Westminster with Gothic flourishes. William Morris translated sagas, designed textiles, and wrote fantasy novels upholding an imagined Middle Ages as an alternative to the horrors of Industrial Age life. Following his example, in the twentieth century C. S. Lewis, John Masefield, and J. R. R. Tolkien absorbed and reworked the tales of Camelot, to varying degrees, into their fiction.

“Merry Christmas and Merry England,” writes Michael Alexander in Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England, “revive popular nostalgia for lost medieval patterns of life.” Hovering over this extraordinary imaginative flowering is the image of the Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper that became the object of a famous quest undertaken by Arthur’s knights. Introduced in the twelfth-century poem Perceval, the Story of the Grail by Chretién de Troyes, where its significance is never explained, it rapidly acquired mystical and numinous properties. The Grail has shaped the religious and literary imagination of the West; indeed, it is among the most potent of Christian symbols, and to read about the Grail procession in de Troyes or Malory, even now, is to sense a primal wonder.

Malcolm Guite maintains a healthy sense of the numinous – of what a character late in his new book, Galahad and the Grail, calls “the world’s bright edge,” those sacred mysteries that defy tongue and pen. In Galahad, the first in a projected four-book series retelling the story of Logres in verse, he attempts to revive the Grail legend for a jaded and skeptical age. Unlike many contemporary authors, he has not sought to desacralize or deconstruct the old tales but to restore their ancient symbolic and religious edifice, like a contractor refurbishing a venerable and beloved house.

Those who worry that such an approach would be didactic can rest easy; Guite has written a remarkably assured and enjoyable book, one that hints at deeper realities while keeping knightly adventures firmly centered. The chief aim of the poet seems to be pleasure, the pleasure of writing poetry and the pleasure of reading it, and the book glories in the things that have made Camelot, down through the years, such an enchanted place: minstrels, ladies clad in silken green, “forests waste and wild,” goodly companies of knights, flagons and decanters, Whitsun and evensong, holy groves and white harts. All of this is conveyed in a breezy poetic style redolent of Spenser, Coleridge, and John Keats’ “The Eve of St. Agnes,” to which Guite adds a love of wild and growing things that recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins.

One of the book’s great joys is Guite’s deep attention to the inner lives of nonhuman things. There’s a lovely moment in “The Wasteland” chapter when the combined powers of Oak, Ash, and Thorn have begun to restore a blighted landscape and a stream is released “to cleanse and to renew.” Guite describes the moment when Dryads first encounter the replenishing waters:

Then the three Dryads dipped their roots,
as their feet seemed to be,
And drew from deep within the well
such drafts as made their green leaves swell,
and with what pleasure none can tell
who has not been a tree.

Like the Inklings of a previous generation, Guite sees trees and other natural things not as objects to be exploited but as persons possessing a kind of interiority. Near the end of the book he warns, in a prophetic register, of the folly of forgetting that woods and streams are friends to humankind. It is, of course, perilous to dismantle the natural world on which we depend for survival. But he goes further. That world, he suggests, is good in itself. The wild things must be allowed to flourish irrespective of their benefit to us. Like Tom Bombadil, with whom he shares a striking affinity, Guite sees the splendor inherent in sparrow and honeybee, goose and willow, catkin and kingfisher.

In what is likely to be the most discussed portion of the book, a tale of his own invention entitled “Galahad and the Naiad,” Guite returns to what has been a recurring theme in his work: the mechanization of humanity and the retreat of the natural world at the advance of human industry. Galahad, seeking any sign of the Grail, has come to a stream in the woods. As he stoops to drink, he hears a woman, the Spirit of the Stream – a naiad – mournfully singing. The water, she reveals, was poisoned by a necromancer who “fettered me in manacles” and “bridged my stream with steel.” Hoping to find the key that will free the naiad from her imprisonment, Galahad invades the fell necromancer’s castle and removes the helm covering his face. Rather to his surprise he finds

Beneath the mask of hardened steel
no human face remained,
just springs and bolts and cogs and wheels
all rusty, worn, and stained.

When the naiad notes that this was once a man, Galahad drives home the story’s moral. Forsaking her love and devoting his mind, Scrooge-like, to the acquisition of wealth, the necromancer lost his humanity. Fixating on metals and cogs, he acquired a mechanized heart:

And where he set his mind and heart
his soul flowed in their wake,
For sometimes we ourselves become
the idols that we make!

There is an echo here of Psalm 115:8: “Those who make [idols] become like them.” There is something, too, of C. S. Lewis, who deplored what he deemed the mechanical bent of the modern world and the loss of medieval modes of perception, where “every tree is a nymph and every planet a god.”

G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, exults in the richness of Christian symbols, in their infinite depths. It’s the glory of a lifetime to ponder, for example, the mystery of why church windows are pointed. The Arthurian tales harbor similar mysteries, as Guite is well aware. To his credit, he resists the unfortunate trend of making Arthur a minor Roman warlord, his court and kingdom stripped of their more supernatural elements (the Fisher King, the Wasteland, Merlin). Instead he ventures far in the other direction, piling weirdness upon weirdness. As in the best of the medieval stories, Guite’s book follows a sort of dream logic: we feel certain there must be an explanation for the mysterious appearance of a table in the woods laden with food, even if none is given. Damsels bearing silver dishes, an enchanted horn that brings adventure (and peril) to the one who blows it – all are powerfully evocative, suggestive of some deeper underlying mythos of which the reader is given only glimpses. Perhaps the closest analogue in contemporary literature is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, another book in which we witness occasional intrusions of an ancient and only half-explicable magic.

The author of that book, Susanna Clarke, has written a foreword to this one, in which she laments the retreat of the Arthurian legends from modern life and connects our loss of cultural memory with the destruction of the natural world: “The woods and meadows,” she writes, “… are a part of the same life which humans share,” adding, “A world without King Arthur is an impoverished, depleted world.” That sense of loss ripples through the pages of Galahad and the Grail, investing the narrative with a sense of urgency commensurate to our present moment. What would it mean for our children to grow up in a world where Lancelot, Nimue, Sir Balin, Sir Bors, Camelot, the Grail, the Green Knight, and the Dolorous Stroke are forgotten and unknown? That would be a tragedy on par with the hunting to extinction of whales and the logging of the last forests.

In an appendix, Guite suggests that these stories have the power to revive a dying world: “Modern Britain, for all its apparent shallowness and apostasy, still remembers, and can respond to the deep meanings and values of these old tales: the courtesy, the ritual, the sacramental vision.” Perhaps there’s a deeper meaning to the legend that Arthur is not dead but only sleeps, waiting to be wakened at the hour of Britain’s greatest peril. It’s the task of poets and artists in every age to awaken him, to revive the old tales for a people in danger of forgetting. In this book, Malcolm Guite leads the way.