Conte du Graal (ca. 1180), as is the implication that a grail was a rare and costly dish that
would nevertheless be known in wealthy households in northern France.
In the Conte du Graal, Chrétien seems to play familiarity with grails in general against
a particular Grail’s extraordinary qualities. Four facts distinguish the special Grail that
Perceval first sees at the Fisher King’s castle. (1) It is valuable beyond measure, made of
gold and studded with rare gems. (2) Along with candelabra and a cutting platter, it
appears in a procession (not an unusual event at a banquet), but the procession is headed
by a squire carrying an amazing Bleeding Lance. (3) It is not used to serve the diners in
the main hall but follows the procession into a room beyond. Meat is served from the
platter; the Grail passes by at each course but does not stop at the table. (4) It is
accompanied by a bright light apparently emanating from within. Later, Perceval learns
about the extraordinary food the Grail contains that makes it a “holy thing” (and that
might explain the light): neither pike, lamprey, nor salmon, which one might expect to be
served in an ordinary grail, but a consecrated Mass wafer, the only sustenance taken for
years by a king, Perceval’s grandfather, who lives in the inner room.
The Grail is simultaneously an ordinary and a mysterious object. Mystery arises, in
fact, because it behaves or is treated in unexpected ways. One of its functions is to
provoke inquiry about what makes it mysterious. Perceval ought to ask questions about
where the Grail goes and whom it serves, not about its material nature. It is “holy”
because of what it conveys, rather than for what it is; the purpose of the questions is thus
to draw attention beyond itself toward what lies hidden from view.
Just as Chrétien’s Grail is meant to be the object of questions, so he makes of it as well
the object of a quest. The Grail Castle and its inhabitants disappear the morning after
Perceval’s failure; later, reminded of the consequences of his failure, he resolves to
search until he finds it again and can ask the right questions in order to heal the wounded
Fisher King and restore the Grail kingdom.
In the wake of Chrétien’s unfinished Conte du Graal, a series of verse continuations
arose, which extend Chrétien’s story for over 40,000 lines before giving it a form of
closure. The theme of the Grail extends through these romances and into several prose
reworkings of the legend as well. A decade or so after Chrétien, Robert de Boron (fl.
1190–1210) is the first to turn this Grail (so named, according to Robert, because it
brings pleasure [<agreer]) into an object that is holy in its own right, the Holy Grail. His
writing concretizes associations of the Grail with religious experience that Chrétien
leaves poetically implicit. Robert does so by creating a “sacred history” for the Grail and
reinforcing its place in Arthurian history by accounting for its presence in Britain. The
prose Didot-Perceval, written under the influence of the Second Continuation as well as
Chrétien, is a romance of ambition and failure, for which a Grail quest is an act of
atonement; this prose work is the earliest romance to include a successful conclusion to
the hero’s quest.
The First Continuator, drawing on Chrétien’s implication of a quest by Gawain for the
Bleeding Lance, elevates the secondary hero to the status of Grail quester; in the endings
provided by Manessier and Gerbert de Montreuil, however, the final triumph is reserved
for Perceval alone.
Continuing the process of christianization, the First and Second Continuations identify
the Bleeding Lance, ignored by Robert, with the spear of Longinus, thus linking both
objects definitively to the Mass. However, the Grail’s extraordinary character continues
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