Perceval, the Story of the Grail

And the boy, who didn’t know his name, guessed and said it was Perceval the Welshman – not knowing whether it was true or not. But it was true, though he didn’t know it.¹

Perceval ou le Conte du Graal is the last work of the major Arthurian writer Chrétien, following the somewhat unlikely knight² as he adventures to…

…well, nobody knows. Because Chrétien died with the work unfinished. There certainly was a mysterious castle with some religious undertones, and an enigmatic scene involving a grail³ - but what the author was intending to do with this setup was lost to time.

This may have been the best thing possible for the story’s legacy. While all of Chrétien’s Arthurian stories had thriving legacies and laid the groundwork for the legend today, Perceval really seems to have taken a life of its own as every writer worth their salt seemed to rise to the opportunity to write a continuation or rewrite of the story, explaining their own vision for how the mysteries would resolve.

One of the threads these continuations introduced was the Sangraal, or Holy Grail - eventually consolidating on the idea that the cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper⁴ being present in… well, vaguely a land near Arthur’s.

Despite being the origin point for this significant side-aspect of Arthurian legend, the actual Perceval and its main continuations is largely about absolutely any other adventure (and mostly Gawaine).

It’s perhaps the best place to start to just get a feel for the random adventures of knights in these kinds of medieval stories. Perceval and Gawaine just keep wandering around and getting more and more entangled in new bizarre castles and damsels in distress and dangerous knights, and must stumble their way through each one in turn⁵ with the extremely rare intervention of the main plotlines.

Footnotes

1. This is a remarkably common occurrence in the legends. ↩

2. As well as long deviations to focus on everyone’s favorite boy, Sir Gawaine. ↩

3. Not originally that focused on, and not clearly meant to be a chalice or cup, much less what the Holy Grail would become. ↩

4. Often given the convenient extra boost of holiness of also collecting his blood from the cross, and then arriving to Britain by means of the saint Joseph of Arimathea. ↩

5. And, especially if they are Gawaine, sleep with a lot of women. ↩