Six Grails, side by side
The same word, six incompatible objects. Read down a column for one author’s coherent position; read across a row to see the tradition contradicting itself.
| PeredurWelsh | Chrétienc. 1180 | The Vulgatec. 1215–35 | The Questec. 1225 | Wolframc. 1205 | Malory1469 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A bleeding spear and a severed head — no vessel at all | A *graal* — deliberately undefined | The vessel of the Last Supper, which caught Christ's blood | A test in the shape of a relic | A stone, which feeds those before it | The Holy Grail, covered with white samite, borne by no one visible |
| Who may approach | Anyone in the hall | Not stated | The pure | Only the cleansed and confessed | Those the Grail names | Galahad, and at a distance Percival and Bors |
| What heals the wound | Asking what you have just seen | The question, unspecified | The sacred object itself | Nothing: it judges rather than heals | One question, asked out of pity | The blood of the spear, applied by Galahad |
| How you fail | By being polite | By not asking | By sin — above all by love | By being an ordinary good knight | By not noticing that somebody is suffering | By having lived |
| What it costs | A household left in its wound | Unknown: the poem stops | The best knight in the world, disqualified | The secular order, deliberately | Years of the questioner's own life and faith | The fellowship, and the king says so out loud |
| How it ends | Vengeance, and the truth explained | Unfinished | Carried to Britain by Joseph's line | The worthy removed from the world | The wound closed; the king relieved; a hero crowned and living | Taken up to heaven; never seen again |
Pity against purity
Look at the row marked what heals the wound. Wolfram: one question, asked out of pity. The Queste: nothing — it judges rather than heals.
These two books were written within about a decade of each other, by men working from the same unfinished French poem, and they disagree about the most basic thing it is possible to disagree about: whether the sacred is something that comes to meet a damaged person, or something a damaged person is disqualified from.
The row marked how you fail is worth the same attention, and it has a page of its own: the unasked question follows a single scene through four traditions and shows the fault being rewritten while the events stay identical.
There is no synthesis available. That is not a defect in the record. It is what the Matter of Britain is — five centuries of writers arguing, in narrative, about questions nobody has settled since.