Goddess, king, and Grail: Aspects of sovereignty within the early medieval heroic tradition of the British Isles

When studying the heroic tales and epics of medieval cultures, more questions about their origins and influences remain than answers. The search for sources for a single work, Beowulf, for example, can and has been examined within Germanic, Brittanic, Norse, and even Irish traditions. Scores of sources, parallels, and analogues have been found and analyzed, but so many possibilities may only serve to obfuscate the actual origins of the Beowulf poet's myriad influences. However, the search for analogous works can build a stronger sense of context for certain motifs and greater themes within a large number of similar texts. Thus, repetitive elements, especially of the mythological sort, can provide scholars with a glimpse of shared mythologies between otherwise very different cultures.;The problem is that so many of these memes are hidden by centuries of redactions and revisions by scribes who had no firsthand knowledge of the original composer's cultural identity. The few shared elements that survive the transition from oral to written literacy are among the strongest arguments for a shared Celtic mythology that existed before the Christians or Anglo-Saxons. The surprising frequency in which these memes appear in Irish, Anglo, Germanic, and Welsh texts would seem to indicate that some motifs more accurately reflect the earlier Celtic mythology than the more whitewashed elements found in later manuscripts. Two particular motifs appear regularly within the context of the great heroic tales of medieval Britain, Ireland, and Wales: the goddess of sovereignty and fertility, and the magical properties of a certain cauldron, sometimes known as the Grail.