When VHS used to be a thing we had a tape of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We’d recorded it from a television showing and I think the iconically cool Motorola Razr was being advertised in the breaks.
I must have watched it a few times because a scene is burnt on to my mind. Indy has arrived at the entrance to the chamber where the Grail is kept. He knows there are booby traps, bodies are strewn next to him, and he’s just seen someone lose their head. In his hands are the diary notes of his father.
‘The penitent man will pass.’ He reads, muttering under his breath. He take tentative steps forward. ‘The penitent man will pass. The penitent man. Penitent. Penitent.’ He is shaking. The tension is huge. Then, suddenly, ‘KNEEL!’ He leaps forward and does an acrobatic roll. Circular saws slice through the air he was just in. Harrison Ford lives to fight another day.
The Grail is the ultimate Quest-object. It was critically important to Arthurian literature since Chrétien de Troyes wrote about it in his unfinished romance Perceval.
The Grail is the cup that was used at the Last Supper. In later mythology, it was described as having been brought to England by Joseph of Arimathea (the man who gave Christ his tomb).
Medieval romance is a fascinating but tricky field because its authors are so often re-making the same stories. They often claim earlier works as sources but change critical details whilst simultaneously playing on pre-established expectations. It is not a million miles away from the universe of fan-fiction.
Let us start at the beginning, with Chrétien. Perceval is a knight who begins the story as completely innocent and uneducated. He isn’t stupid, he’s just totally blank. Chrétien didn’t finish the romance but it is a sort of coming-of-age piece in which he grows into one of the greatest knights at the Round Table.
When he meets the Grail he has already become a fairly accomplished fighter but he has yet to prove himself in other ways. He has been invited into the court of the Fisher King, a king who has a wound in his leg so bad that he can’t do anything but fish. It is a wound that never kills him but always bleed. At dinner he sees a strange possession.
Just then two other boys appeared, and in their hands they held candlesticks of the finest gold, inlaid with black enamel […] A girl who came in with the boys, fair and comely and beautifully adorned, was holding a grail, so brilliant a light appeared that the candles lost their brightness like the stars or the moon when the sun rises.
So, the Grail is a luminous cup. It is processed up and down the hall between each course. It is being used to serve someone but we don’t know who. Perceval was told by his guardian not to ask too many questions so remains silent. Chrétien makes it quite clear that this is a bad idea:
But he held his tongue more than he should have done, for as each dish was served he saw the grail pass before him, right before his eyes, and he did not know who it was served from it and he longed to know.
And he longed to know. But silence defeats him.
He resolved that he would wait and ask one of the boys of the court later. The meal finishes and his host goes to bed. When Perceval wakes up in the morning everyone has disappeared. He searches the castle in vain and eventually decides to leave to find a boy to ask who the grail was serving. Just as he crosses the drawbridge it is drawn up and his horse has to leap across it. He cannot re-enter.
He rides on and finds a girl who he tells what he has seen. She asks: “Did you ask them where they were going?” When he replies that he didn’t, she says he will be cursed. That if he had simply asked his question then the Fisher King would be healed and Perceval would have benefited greatly.
She then reveals she is his cousin and that his mother has died from the grief of their separation. His mother’s death was the sin which meant he failed to ask the critical question.
It is such a curious reason for his failure to ask the question. Maternal separation is almost the definition of birth. Could it be that he could not ask because he is human?
Perceval replies: “If what you’ve told me is true, tell me how you know.”
This is the sort of question he should have asked at the castle of the Fisher King. Perceval has learnt too late.
Perhaps because Chrétien’s romance was never finished, Perceval never re-encounters the Fisher King or the Grail. It is unclear whether he is even trying to look for it.
And yet, the tradition of the Grail was thus started. Many romances began to expand the legend surrounding it. It became the ultimate holy object and the objective of the highest quests of Arthur’s knights.
There is something about the Grail which is both familiar and unfamiliar. It is delightfully uncanny.
In its form, it matches that of the Eucharistic chalice, an object incredibly familiar to a medieval audience. Indeed, it was the original chalice. It is the Platonic ideal of ‘chalice’. But the whole thing about Plantonic ideals is that they can’t exist in the real world.
The Grail appears several times in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. There is a major Quest for it that I will come on to, but before that it appears to Percival quite mystically.
Percival and Sir Ector meet in a forest. As so often happens in these stories, they don’t stop to ask who the other person is and start fighting immediately. They are equally matched and fight for a long time, each injuring the other gravely. They call a halt to the duel and remove their helmets. They are dismayed to learn that they are both of the round table and say they will die of the wounds that the other has given them. Percival prays and we read:
Right so there came by the holy vessel, the Sangrail, with all manner of sweetness and savour; but they could not see readily who bore the vessel. But Sir Percival had a glimmering of the vessel and of the maiden that bore it, for he was a perfect maiden.
They are both totally restored by the Grail. More interesting, however, is Percival’s ‘glimmering’ semi-vision. What does it mean for him to see the Grail only partially? He is healed by something he can barely discern. It remains as this sort of hinting object at the side of the pages, just as elusive to its readers as it is to its characters.
We know only that it is a deus in machina that possesses extraordinary transformative powers.
At the centre of the Morte D’Arthur is the portion of the text called ‘The Quest for the Sangrail’. All of Arthur’s knights are at Camelot, about to begin a feast when the Grail appears:
Then anon they heard cracking and crying of thunder, that them thought the palace should all to-drive. So in the midst of the blast entered a sunbeam more clearer by seven times than ever they saw day […] Then entered into the hall the Holy Grail covered with white samite, none there was none that might see it, nor whom that bore it.
Now the Grail isn’t shimmering but terrifying. All the same, samite is a kind of fabric; it is hidden once again. And yet, somehow the knights know that beneath this piece of cloth lies the Grail. Then, Gawain declares his quest to find it. He will not return to court “till I have seen it more openly than it hath been showed here.” There becomes an urgency to seek.
After Gawain’s vow, the “most part” of the Round Table stand up and make similar vows. Arthur is incredibly upset and weeps bitterly. He knows how many of his knights will die and he knows that the Round Table will not be the same again.
Indeed, it is a huge turning point in the narrative. When the quest is over, several of the most prominent knights are dead and it is implied that many of the minor knights have died too. Just as importantly, when the remaining knights do return to Camelot the next episode documents how the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere is made public. The Round Table goes to war with itself and is undone. The quest for the Grail proves to be cataclysmically destructive.
Gawain, who initiated the quest, is one of the court’s most worldly knights. Although he is powerful and highly regarded he kills without thinking and isn’t especially devout. He is told that he will never succeed in the Grail quest.
Lancelot, one of the table’s strongest knights and in many ways Arthur’s deputy, arrives at a Castle and prays at a door. The door opens and he glimpses the Grail. A voice tells him not to enter the room. A figure of a priest celebrating the mass stumbles and Lancelot enters to help him. Just as he nears the altar he is knocked back and enters a coma for twenty five days. He is told his quest is over: “never shall ye see of the Sangrail more than ye have seen.”
There are only three knights who fully achieve the Quest of the Grail: Galahad, Percival, and Bors. They arrive at Corbenic where the meet the Maimed King, who is an analogue to the Fisher King. They all see the Grail in the castle. Galahad talks to the embodied figure of Christ and eventually heals the Maimed King who then dies.
The three knights must then take the Grail to Sarras which they do on a boat. They are imprisoned by the Saracen King of Sarras but are sustained by the Grail whilst in prison. When the King dies the following year, Galahad is appointed the new King by affirmation of the people. He stays for a while and then sees a vision of Christ and asks to be taken to heaven. He dies and is mourned by Percival and Bors. Percival becomes a hermit and dies the following year at which point Bors returns to Camelot to recount the story.
This Grail Quest is completely bizarre. What starts off as a chivalric quest to look more plainly at something outwardly powerful and beautiful collapses into itself. The quest-achievers have no sense of triumph in their victory: Galahad requests death and Perceval renounces the court for a life of seclusion.
Jeanette Winterson wrote a little bit about the Grail quest in her autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?:
Perceval spends twenty years wandering in the woods, looking for the thing that he found, that was given to him, that seemed so easy, that was not.
Perceval is one of the first in the Morte D’Arthur to see the Grail. Indeed, thanks to Chrétien, he is the first ever in Arthurian legend to do so. In order to find it again, however, in order to more than just see it from afar, in order to know it, his identity is rent and remade.
But what is the Grail? What is it that these knights were looking for?
It is the light. It is the restoration and the unification. It is the answer to the question that we do not know to ask. It is the condensation of these things into a cup
For me it is roughly equivalent to Causabon’s ‘Key to all Mythologies’ in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Causabon undertakes incredibly ambitious research which attempts to show ‘that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed’. Causabon want to find the theory which unlocks all meaning in the world and reveals its unity. It is, of course, the impossible dream. In fact, it is the dream which sours Causabon and makes him a repulsive character.
With the Grail, theory becomes actualised. The chalice represents the formation, perhaps the incarnation, of ultimate meaning.
The quest motif mirrors this sense of the actual and metaphysical. The knights are never shy in mentioning how often they must sleep outside. Their fights are dangerous and inevitable.
However, these hardships are just as equally spiritual. Very often this is outwardly explained. Galahad kills two enemy knights which, we are told, reveal his overcoming of the sins of pride and covetousness.
The quest exists simultaneously in the physical and spiritual realm. There is no way to disentangle the two. It is less reflection and more existential codependence.
By journeying through worlds both real and imaginary, the three knights who achieve the grail move outside of themselves. There quest is the transformation which achieves transformation. Through physical motion they are granted enlightenment.
How do we try to find something if it doesn’t exist in our world? Perhaps we give it form and go looking for it.
Tennyson rewrote the Grail Quest in his series The Idylls of the King. It is a shimmering poem that repaints Malory in vivid and surreal colour.
The return to Camelot is much more devastating and bleak than Malory. He adds a final reply from Arthur after the knights who survived the quest return to Camelot. These are (nearly) the closing lines of the poem:
Let visions of the night or of the day
Come, as they will; and many a time they come,
Until this earth he walks on seems not earth,
This light that strikes his eyeball is not light,
This air that smites his forehead is not air
But vision – yea, his very hand and foot –
In moments when he feels he cannot die,
And knows himself no vision to himself,
Nor the high God a vision, nor that One
Who rose again: ye have seen what ye have seen.
Perceval, who is narrating the poem, is given the final coda:
So spake the King: I knew not all he meant.
Bibliography:
Quotations from Perceval are taken from the Nigel Bryant Translation.
Quotations from Morte D’Arthur are taken from the Helen Cooper edition/translation.
Tennyson’s ‘The Holy Grail’ is here.