Seven motifs, twelve hands
Hand this grid any motif and it will tell you what each voice made it carry. It is the chart the whole portal is built on, and its most useful feature is the holes.
37 of 84 cells filled, 25 of them carrying a validated quotation.
| Throughline | The Chroniclers | Geoffrey | The Mabinogion | Chrétien | Wolfram | Gottfried | The Vulgate | The Grail Romances | The Gawain Romances | The Mortes | Malory | Tennyson |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Source of rule | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | ||||||
| 2 The fellowship | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | ||||||
| 3 The Grail | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | ||||||
| 4 The betrayal | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | ||||||
| 5 The wound | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | |||||
| 6 The return | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | ||||
| 7 Foreknowledge | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version | no version |
Choose a cell to read that voice’s version of that motif.
Two different kinds of nothing
Most of this grid is empty, and that matters. An empty cell can mean two quite different things, and running them together would misrepresent both the authors and the evidence.
Sometimes a voice simply never touches a motif. Gottfried has nothing to say about the Grail; he was writing a different book. That is not a defect in the record — it is a fact about what he wrote, and it is worth seeing that only one author, Malory, reaches all seven.
Sometimes a voice has a great deal to say and the evidence cannot be published here. Chrétien invented the Grail, and the poem in which he did it has no clean public-domain English translation; the Vulgate is the hinge of the whole French tradition and its only modern translation is in copyright. Those cells are marked as versions without quotations, because the honest statement is we know what he says and cannot show you, not silence.