Holy Grail. Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature

The concept of the Holy Grail is intimately associated with the world of courtly culture, chivalry, and
Christianity. While it may have its origins in Celtic
mythology, the earliest references to the Grail can be
found in medieval Latin sometime around 718
when the Grail was described as a kind of serving
dish. The word appears in medieval courtly literature first in the decasyllabic (10-syllable lines)
Roman d’Alexandre (1165–70) and in CHRÉTIEN DE
TROYES’s PERCEVAL, or the Conte du Graal (The story
of the Grail, ca. 1180). Here the young hero, Perceval, appears in the castle of his uncle, the wounded
Fisher King, but he does not understand the situation there and does not ask his uncle, whom he does
not even recognize as a relative, about his ailments
or about who is served with the Grail, because of instructions about proper behavior at court that he
had received prior to this encounter. Because Perceval fails to ask the crucial question, both the Grail
and the entire company of Grail knights has disappeared the next morning. This failure forces Perceval to embark on a long and arduous quest for the
true meaning of the Grail and of life. After a long
quest, Perceval meets a hermit (another relative)
who explains the Grail to him as the cup from
which Christ drank at the Last Supper—apparently
by this point he has acquired sufficient maturity and
ethical understanding to receive this knowledge. But
Chrétien’s text is incomplete. Perhaps it would have
ended with Perceval assuming the throne of the
Grail, as occurs in the third “continuation” of Chré-
tien’s text.
After Chrétien, many reworkings of the Grail
account appeared in the courts of both France and
of Germany. Almost the same sequence of events
as in Chrétien’s
Perceval occur in WOLFRAM VON ESCENBACH’s PARZIVAL (ca. 1205), although here the
criticism raised against Parzival has more to do
with the social decline in communication, courtly
mores, and the social contact among people. The
quest for the Grail thus represents a quest for the
healing of the rift between the misery of social reality and the ideals of knighthood. In France,
R
OBERT DE BORON (fl. 1180s–1190s) fully developed the Grail myth in his Joseph d’Arimathie, or
Roman de l’estoire dou Graal, connecting it for the
first time with Avalon at Glastonbury Abbey in
Somerset, where a grave marked as King Arthur’s
was purportedly discovered around 1190. The
Grail, often in conjunction with a bleeding lance
identified as the spear of Longinus, thus became an

icon of medieval utopia, intimately connected with
Christ’s passion and the notion of salvation from
human suffering. The association of the Grail with
the Last Supper is quite obvious, as is the association of the religious component with the secular
aspect of medieval knighthood.
In Robert’s text, the Grail, as a holy object, is the
center piece of the Grail community established by
Joseph of Arimathie and continued by a series of
ideal knights. The Grail provides happiness for
those who behold it and inspires them to accept the
task of spreading Christianity in the world. Many
other subsequent writers incorporated the Grail
motif in their works, such as the authors of the
Didot-Perceval (ca. 1195–1215), the First and the
Second Continuator of Chrétien’s
Conte du Graal,
the authors of the VULGATE CYCLE, the prose Perlesvaus (ca. 1191–1212), the prose Welsh PEREDUR,
the Old French prose Queste del Saint Graal (ca.
1215–30) with G
ALAHAD as its protagonist—which
was later translated into Middle High German as
the
Prosa-Lancelot—then Heinrich von dem Türlin
with his Middle High German composition in
verse,
Diu Crône (ca. 1220–40), and Claus Wisse and
Philipp Colin with their
Nüwe Parzefal (1331–36).
One of the most ambitious Grail romances might
have been Albrecht’s
Jüngere Titurel (ca. 1250–70),
consisting of 6,207 stanzas.
Irrespective of its actual shape and form, either
as an object or as an idea, the Grail symbolized the
highest goal of late-medieval knighthood and represented the perfect union of the secular with the
spiritual. Some historians have argued that the
chalice today preserved in the cathedral of Valencia, Spain, which originated from Mont Salvador
(1076–1399), might represent the original object
venerated by medieval knighthood. More important, though, the
Queste del Saint Graal and other
versions of the Grail myth represent the attempt by
representatives of the Cistercian order to integrate
worldly knighthood into a religious quest for God
and the defeat of evil.
Bibliography
Barber, Richard. The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
2004.
Groos, Arthur, and Norris J. Lacy, eds. and introduction.
Perceval/Parzival: A Casebook. Arthurian
Characters and Themes. New York: Routledge,
2002.
Lacy, Norris J. “The Evolution and Legacy of French
Prose Romance.” In
The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval Romance,
edited by Roberta L. Krueger,
167–182. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000.
Owen, D. D. R. “From Grail to Holy Grail,”
Romania
89 (1968): 31–53.
Albrecht Classen

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