When most people today hear the word Grail, they picture a glittering chalice, the Holy Grail of Christian legend, often imagined as the cup of Christ at the Last Supper or the vessel that caught his blood at the Crucifixion. Yet in its earliest literary appearances the graal was nothing of the sort. Far from being a holy chalice, it was a large, ordinary serving dish - a domestic object brought at mealtime in the court of the mysterious Fisher King.
In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
This book asks: why these Black heroes? What did their blackness do within the worlds built through storytelling among Arabic-speaking Muslims in the Middle Ages? What possible futures did it conjure and delimit, what present orders did it explain, and what pasts did it help to index morally, geographically, and culturally?
For more than half a century J.R.R. Tolkien has gripped the public imagination with his tales of wizards, hobbits, orcs, and elves. But Tolkien took his inspiration from a far older body of literature, the epics, poems, lais and sagas of the Middle Ages.