The wound that will not heal

One of the oldest ideas in the tradition is that the king and the land are the same thing, and you can tell how a kingdom is doing by looking at its sovereign's body.

Malory gives the motif its most brutal form. Balin, cornered and weaponless in King Pellam's castle, snatches a spear from a chamber wall and strikes him with it. The spear turns out to be the one that pierced Christ's side. The castle falls in on them; Balin rides out through a country that has become a desert; and Merlin tells him what he has done: for the dolorous stroke thou gavest unto King Pellam three countries are destroyed, and doubt not but the vengeance will fall on thee at the last. One blow, three kingdoms sterilised, and a debt attached to the man who struck it. He does not mean to do any of it. That is the point of Balin: he is not wicked, he is unlucky, and the damage is permanent anyway.

Wolfram makes the wound erotic and gives it a cure. Anfortas is maimed because he loved a woman the Grail had not appointed for him — the keeper of the holy thing brought down by ordinary desire — and he can neither die nor recover. What eventually heals him is not surgery, penance or a relic. It is a question asked out of pity. The wasteland in Wolfram is a failure of compassion, and it is fixed when the compassion arrives.

And Geoffrey applies the same logic to Arthur himself. The History ends with the king wounded deadly, borne away to Avalon, and Britain immediately begins its long collapse into Saxon hands. The body of the sovereign and the fate of the country are not analogous. They are the same story told at two scales.

It is worth being careful here. This looks like Frazer's dying god and reads like a piece of comparative anthropology, and a hundred years of enthusiastic writing has treated it that way. What the texts actually say is narrower and stranger: a specific king, wounded in a specific way, and a specific stretch of countryside that stops producing. The medieval version is a political theology about sacral kingship, not a myth of vegetation.