Percival

Percival is the Grail's original hero, and his story is the same in every language: a boy is raised in ignorance of knighthood, becomes a knight anyway, and then fails at the one moment that counts.

In the Welsh Peredur the failure is bare. Two youths carry a bleeding spear through the hall, with three streams of blood flowing from the point to the ground, the whole company begins wailing, and Peredur says nothing — because he has been told that a knight does not ask questions. He is being polite. It ruins everything.

In Chrétien the same silence occurs before the grail and the lance, and the poem breaks off before we learn what asking would have done.

In Wolfram the failure is given its full moral weight and then forgiven. Parzival's silence at Munsalvaesche costs him years of wandering and his faith; when he finally returns and asks Anfortas what ails him, the king is healed. Wolfram's whole argument is that the question is one of compassion, and that a man who failed it once can be allowed to come back.

Then the French cycle demoted him. Once Galahad exists, Percival cannot be the one who achieves the Grail, so he becomes one of the three who ride with him — with a sister who matters more to the plot than he does.