This blog is new and about Grail Place Name Genealogy along with personal names conveyed in Grail legends and literature. Since retirement, I've had two interests: the Holy Grail legends and genealogy. Some time ago I noticed something that interested me. I found that in most (if not in all) places where the literature about the Holy Grail was written I had Brown family ancestors or folks from allied families living at the approximate time the Grail literature was written. My primary ancestral lines are McMillan/MacMillan, Coulter, Taylor, and Brown. They were all, at one time or another, involved socially in the regions where the legends of the Grail were first committed to writing.
I'm not suggesting that my family ancestors had any thing to do with the Grail literature itself. Only that they lived where Chrétien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Boron, and other writers of this literature lived when writing their accounts of the Grail quest. For instance, in Parzival Wolfram spoke of wir Beier ("we Bavarians") and the dialect of his works is East Franconian. Clan Brown has had members migrate from Scotland to almost every place on earth. In Bavaria they were known as Brauns and many of them lived in Bavaria. This is even true today. I have a sister who lived just a few miles from Steven Spielberg in 1989 when he wrote with George Lucas Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It is conceivable that some Browns and allied families (Bruhl, Taylor, Coulter, Fox, Legg, Gray, Pomeroy, and more) actually knew and interacted socially with the legendary writers. This blog will be about that.
I don't place credence in a lot of theories about the Holy Grail like the one that suggests it is the bloodline of Christ. Some have attempted to connect the Grail to conspiracy theories and esoteric traditions. Those are not the purpose of this blog.
The Grail has recently been treated in some modern works of non-fiction that generally endeavor to interpret its meaning in symbolical ways. This method was undertaken by psychologists Emma Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, who applied analytical psychology to interpret the Grail as a series of symbols in their book The Grail Legend. This type of interpretation had previously been utilized, though in less detail, by Carl Jung, and was later taught by Joseph Campbell. As valuable as some of their ideas are, that is is not what this blog is about either though there may indeed be validity in their point of view. It's only aim and purpose is to discuss the Grail through history as a heritage that existed orally aand historically where these legends were written. And like you and I do today, the authors had a genealogy connected with them which was also true of their contemporaries. Secondly, my purpose is to look, study, and reflect on the genealogy of my own family and allied families to see if there are connections with the genealogies of the Grail authors and their contemporaries. Being a Brown, there are a lot of families connected with mine. Again I repeat, the purpose is one of genealogical (with the word "logic" in that compound word emphasized) heritage derived from the classical and medieval worlds at specific localities and places in so far as these are possible to connect.
I welcome any information that readers of it may make and will gladly give credit for information in the blog.
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