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Retellings are useful, but they are somebody’s retelling. Everything summarised elsewhere on this site is anchored to a chapter you can open here and read for yourself — with the validated quotations highlighted exactly where they sit, and the edition’s own glossary of Middle English on hand when the vocabulary turns.
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Le Morte d'Arthur
The keystone. A knight-prisoner compiled the French and English streams into one tragic English book and counted the cost of every motif he inherited — the only voice that touches all seven throughlines.
503 chapters · 335,671 words
the Gawain poetSir Gawain and the Green Knight
The whole chivalric code put on trial in one knight, one year, and one concealed green girdle — the flaw no oath can legislate away.
66 chapters · 19,949 words
anonymous (Welsh)The Mabinogion — the Arthurian tales
The Celtic root: a war-band Arthur surrounded by impossible tasks, and a Peredur who sees the bleeding spear go by and says nothing.
50 chapters · 66,008 words
Chrétien de TroyesFour Arthurian Romances
The inventor of Arthurian romance — and, almost in passing, of the Lancelot–Guinevere love. His Grail poem, the Conte du Graal, is not here: no clean public-domain English translation exists.
99 chapters · 178,925 words
anonymous (Old French)The High History of the Holy Graal
The strangest and most violent of the Grail romances: a Grail bound up with bloodshed and the changing of the Law.
152 chapters · 154,335 words
Wolfram von EschenbachParzival
The humane counter-voice: a Grail that is a stone, and a wounded king cured not by purity or doctrine but by one question asked out of pity.
167 chapters · 192,079 words
WaceRoman de Brut
The chronicler who invented the Round Table — as a piece of engineering against precedence, so that no man could boast he was exalted above his fellow.
38 chapters · 53,469 words
LayamonLayamon's Brut
The first Arthur in English, and the first to send the wounded king to the elf-queen Argante in Avalon — with the promise that he would come again.
55 chapters · 69,938 words
NenniusHistoria Brittonum
The earliest list of Arthur's twelve battles — where legitimacy is not election or descent but simply victory.
12 chapters · 10,898 words
Alfred, Lord TennysonIdylls of the King
The Victorian reception: Camelot rises and rots, and the Grail quest is the thing that ruins the order. Included as reception, not as a medieval witness.
59 chapters · 83,678 words
Texts not yet set
These are public domain, acquired, and validated against — quotations from them already appear throughout the site. They simply have not been typeset for the reader yet.
- ChronicleThe History of the Kings of Britain — Geoffrey of Monmouth, tr. Sebastian Evans
What cannot be printed here
Two bodies of material are cited on this site but will never be readable on it, and the reason is worth stating plainly rather than hiding behind an absence.
- French romanceThe Quest of the Holy Grail
Searchable and quotable at short length; not published as a reading text.
- GermanTristan
Searchable and quotable at short length; not published as a reading text.
- EnglishSyr Gawayn and the Grene Kny3t
The Middle English is quoted here but not published as a reading text: this portal serves Weston's modern prose so the poem can actually be read, and keeps the original for quotation, since a translation cannot be quoted as the poet's words.
- EnglishSyr Gawayne — the Madden romances
Madden's 1839 type — long s read as f, heavy abbreviation — defeats the quotation gate outright. The Wedding of Dame Ragnelle is quoted here from a small hand-checked transcription of the riddle and its answer; the rest of the volume is searchable but not quotable, and that is a limitation rather than a choice.
- ChronicleSix Old English Chronicles
Kept as a search and validation source only, to avoid publishing a second, inferior text of Nennius and Geoffrey alongside the ones this portal already sets.
- EnglishThe English Mortes
Searchable in the research base; quote-pending. Named here rather than hidden.
- French romanceLancelot-Grail (the Vulgate Cycle)
The only modern translation of the cycle is in copyright, so the Vulgate can be quoted here but not read here. That is a real limitation, and it is stated rather than hidden.