Grail, The Holy

Grail, The Holy, in Arthurian legend, a symbol of perfection sought by the knights of the Round Table. In the latest development of the legend it is identified as the cup of the Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood of the crucified Christ and which, in some versions, he brought to north Wales at the end of his lengthy wanderings. The legend is most familiar in English in the version of Malory, which is mostly an abridgement of the stories contained in three of the romances of the early 13th-cent. French prose ‘Vulgate’ cycle. The ten principal versions of the legend were written between 1180 and 1230. As well as Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval or Conte del Graal and the Vulgate versions, there is a third major version in that period, the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach (c.1205) which was the inspiration for Wagner's Parsifal. Von Eschenbach's and Chrétien's story, in which Perceval is the successful quester, may be regarded as related to the original and more ‘authentic’ Grail myth which was joined by accretions and euhemerization of a Christian kind until, by Malory's time, it was very far removed from its archetype.

In Malory's Tale of the Sankgreal, Launcelot fathers Galahad on Elaine, the daughter of the Grail King Pelles. On the feast of Pentecost Galahad is brought to the Round Table and seated at the Siege Perilous; the Grail appears, accompanied by lightning, but the knights cannot see it. Led by Gawain they set off in search of it. Launcelot fails in the Quest, despite several glimpses, because of the sin of his amour with Guinevere; Gawain gives up the quest. Three knights distinguished by great purity, Galahad, Bors, and Perceval, come to the castle of Corbenic where they have a vision of Christ and receive the Eucharist from him; they take the Grail from him and carry it to Sarras. Galahad dies in ecstasy; Perceval becomes a monk and dies two months later; Bors returns to Logrus and reports their adventures in Camelot, in particular telling Launcelot of the eminence of his son Galahad.

The origins and motivation of the Grail have been explained in three principal ways: (1) as a Christian legend from the first, which altered only in detail through its history; (2) as a pagan fertility ritual, ‘the horn of plenty’, related to the devastation of the land of King Pellam and its redemption; (3) as a Celtic story, already mythological in its origins in Irish, transmitted through Welsh (see Mabinogion) and Breton to the French romance tradition and gradually christianized.