Robert de Boron

Robert de Boron was a French poet active around the turn of the 13th century, writing in Old French. He is considered the author of two poems in octosyllabic verse that gave the Grail legend and the figure of Merlin a explicitly Christian shape, a change that shaped much of later Arthurian literature.

Little is known about his life beyond what he reveals in his own writing. He took his name from the village of Boron, near Montbéliard in what is now eastern France, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. In Joseph d'Arimathie he calls himself a clerk, and later a knight, and says he served a lord named Gautier de "Mont Belyal", whom the philologist Pierre Le Gentil linked to Gautier de Montbéliard, who left for the Fourth Crusade in 1202 and died in the Holy Land in 1212. The mention of Avalon suggests he wrote after 1191, when the monks of Glastonbury claimed to have found the graves of Arthur and Guinevere.

His poems were part of a planned sequence now called Robert de Boron's cycle. Only fragments of Merlin and Joseph survive, but prose versions made soon afterward circulated widely. In his account, Joseph of Arimathea caught Christ's blood in the Grail on the cross and carried it to Avalon, where it stayed hidden until Arthur and Percival arrived. His legacy is considerable: his Grail story was taken up by nearly every later writer of the Matter of Britain and helped form the Vulgate Cycle.