 The actual author is not proven but Hank Harrison was the first, in 1992, to suggest the author was Bishop Henri de Blois, the brother of King Stephen and the Abbot of Glastonbury.The strangeness of the text and some personal comments led Roger Sherman Loomis to call the author "deranged"; similarly the editor of a French Arthurian anthology including extracts from the work notes an obsession with decapitation.Loomis also notes an antisemitic air absent from most Arthurian literature of the period, as there are several scenes in which the author symbolically contrasts the people of the "Old Law" with the followers of Christ, usually predicting violent damnation for the unsaved.