The Holy Grail has been variously identified as a
cup, dish, or a life-giving stone, but each story
about it has shown it to be mysterious and spiritual
in nature. According to legend, the Grail has magical
powers and can only be found by someone
who fulfills the highest ideals of Christianity and
CHIVALRY.Whatever it was or is, some scholars believe
the Grail originated from the sacred cauldron
of Celtic mythology (see MYTHOLOGY; CELTIC); others
say that legend became combined with apocryphal
Christian stories about Joseph of
Arimathea, the rich man who buried Christ in his
tomb, then took the Grail with him and supposedly
ended up in Britain. The early 20th-century
folklorist Jessie Weston sees the Grail and its mystic
powers of restoring potency and youth as a vestige
of pagan spring renewal ceremonies.
The great French poet CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES first
mentions the Holy Grail in his last unfinished
work, Perceval (1190). According to Chrétien,
Perceval, a young, inexperienced knight of King
Arthur’s court, witnesses a solemn procession in
which a beautiful maid carries a beautiful golden
platter with a single Mass wafer. This item sustains
the Fisher King, a wounded leader whose kingdom
has become barren. Only a pure and chivalrous
knight who can ask the right question about the
procession can eventually heal the Fisher King and
restore his kingdom to plenty.
Shortly after Chrétien de Troyes failed to finish
Perceval, Robert de Boron wrote Le Roman du
Graal (1200). His contribution to literature about
the Grail identifies it as the vessel used by Christ at
the Last Supper and by Joseph of Arimathea to
catch Jesus’ blood as He hung upon the cross. Significantly,
this characterization of the Grail not
only became the dominant one in legend and literature
but also spiritualized the quest motif. This
spiritual quest can be seen as well in Le Haut Livre
du Graal or Perlesvaus, written around the same
time as Boron’s work by the monks of Glastonbury.
Their text emphasized adventure and
chivalry (through the characters of Lancelot, Gauvain,
and Perceval) as a means by which the monks
could attract wealthy nobles to support an abbey
known for its Arthurian relics. This theme of spiritual
quest and chivalric adventure was continued
in a later collection of Arthurian stories, La Queste
del saint Graal (1225), in which Galahad, the son of
Arthur’s greatest knight, Lancelot, becomes the
only knight pure enough to find the Grail.
Chrétien’s unfinished poem also influenced one
of the greatest works of medieval literature, the
Parzival (1200) of WOLFRAM VON ESCHENBACH.Wolfram’s
version is more serious and allegorical than
Chrétien’s, as it portrays Parzival’s spiritual
growth. In his poem, the Grail is a stone that fell
from heaven during Lucifer’s fall. As in Chrétien’s
version, Parzifal fails to ask the right question
about the Grail that will lead to the Fisher King’s
healing, but Wolfram has Parzifal going through a
long process of spiritual purification and successfully
fulfilling his task.
Wolfram’s version became the most influential
in Germanic literature and inspired the 19thcentury
composer Richard Wagner’s great opera
Parsifal. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kings
(1869) was also inspired by the legend of the Holy
Grail, as were Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte
D’Arthur (ca. 1469), T. H.White’s Arthurian novels
The Once and Future King (1958) and The Sword in
the Stone (1937), Charles Williams’s novels Taliessin
through Logres (1938) and The Region of the
Summer Stars (1944), and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land (1922).
The motif of the Holy Grail quest gave a serious
moral and spiritual weight to the adventures of
King Arthur’s knights, which dominated the medieval
and early Renaissance imagination. It exists
to this day as a symbol of perfection, spirituality,
and Christianity in literature, art, and music.
English Versions of Works about the
Holy Grail
Chrétien de Troyes. Arthurian Romances. Translated
by William W. Kibler and Carleton W. Carroll.
New York: Penguin, 1991.
Wolfram von Eschenbach. Parzival. Translated by A.
T. Hatto. New York: Penguin, 1980.
Works about the Holy Grail
Kennedy, Elspeth. Lancelot and the Grail: A Study of
the Prose “Lancelot.” Oxford: Clarendon, 1986.
Lacy,Norris J. and Geoffrey Ashe with Debra N.Mancoff.
The Arthurian Handbook. New York: Garland,
1997.
Locke, Frederick W. The Quest for the Holy Grail: A
Literary Study of a Thirteenth-Century French Romance.
New York: AMS Press, 1967.
Maddox, Donald. The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien
de Troyes: Once and Future Fictions. Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Sacker, Hugh D. An Introduction to Wolfram’s “Parzival.”
Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University
Press, 1963.
Weston, Jessie L. The Quest of the Holy Grail. New
York: Barnes & Noble, 1964.