“Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem”: Weston’s From Ritual to Romance

Abstract

Eliot opens his footnotes on The Waste Land by remarking: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested” (CP 70) by Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920). A scholarly book that is difficult to read because Weston assumes that she is writing to an audience familiar with a whole intellectual terrain, From Ritual to Romance argues the evolution suggested by its title—a narrative progression that links ancient fertility rituals to medieval Grail romances. According to Weston, legends about the Grail’s Christian significance (Christ drinking from it at his last supper, Joseph of Arimathea standing at the foot of the cross to catch drips of Christ’s blood in it) are not accounts of its origin but rather evidence of the way in which those early Christians blended their own narratives with the much older Eastern fertility cult narratives, where the cup was a symbol of female sexual energy.