Carbonek Castle was where Lancelot was denied the vision of the Holy Grail. The Grail was supposedly brought into England by Joseph of Arimathea, whose lineage kept the grail for many years. After it was lost, many of King Arthur's knights spent years questing for the Grail.

The overlord of Carbonek during Arthur's rule was Pelles. Also known as Corbenic, the word may be derived from coir benoit, "blessed body," meaning the body of Christ.

Carbonek is described as a palace of ice and winter, yet within the castle shines the warmth of a Yuletide fire and Chritmas songs and laughter:

In his halls and chambers out of sight;

Sometimes his tinkling waters slipt

Down through afrost-leaved forest-crypt,

Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees

Bending to ounterfeit a breeze;

Sometimes it was carved carved in sharp relief

With quaint arabesques of ice-fern leaf;

Sometimes it was simly smooth and clear

For the gladness of heaven to shine through, and here

He had caught the nodding bulrush-tops

And hung them thickly with diamond drops,

Which crystalled the beams of moon and sun,

And made a star or every one:

No mortal builder's most rare device

Could match this winter-palace of ice;

'T was as if every image that mirrored lay

In his depths serene through the summer day,

Each flitting shadow of earth and sky,

Lest the happy model should be lost,

Had been mimicked in fairy masonry

By the elfin builders of the frost.

Within the hall are song and laughter,

The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,

And sprouting is every corbel and rafter

With the lightsome green of ivy and holly;

Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide

Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;

The broad flame-pennons droop and flap

And belly and tug as a flag in the wind;

Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,

Hunted to deathin its galleries blind;

And swift little troops of silent sparks,

Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear,

Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks

Like herds of startled deer.

But the wind without was eager and sharp,

Of Sir Launfal's gray hair it makes a harp,

And rattles and wrings

The icy strings,

Singing, in dreary monotone,

A Christmas carol of its own,

Whose burden still, as he might guess,

Was -- "Shelterless, shelterless. shelterless!"

The voice of the seneschal flared like a torch

As he shouted he wanderer away from the porch,

And he sat in the gateway and saw all night

The great hall-fire, so cheery and bold,

Through the window-slits of the castle old,

Build out its piers of ruddy light

Against the drift of the cold.

-- excerpt from The Vision of Sir Launfal by James Russell Lowell

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