The question asked
Parzival returns, asks what ails his uncle, and the wounded king is healed — by compassion, not purity.
It takes Parzival most of the poem to get back. In between he loses his reputation, is publicly cursed at Arthur's court by a messenger of the Grail, refuses for years to serve a God he believes has abandoned him, and eventually finds his way to a hermit, Trevrizent, who turns out to be his uncle and tells him what the Grail is, what Anfortas did, and what Parzival himself failed to do.
Anfortas, he learns, was wounded because he served a love the Grail had not appointed for him — the keeper of the holy thing brought down by ordinary desire. The wound cannot kill him, because the Grail sustains him, and cannot heal, because nothing in the world will close it. The household has spent years watching him suffer and waiting for someone to come and ask.
When Parzival finally returns to Munsalvaesche, the whole apparatus of the tradition — purity, penance, relics, virgin knights — is simply not used. He goes to his uncle and asks him what ails him.
Anfortas is healed at once, and so beautiful in his recovery that Wolfram says no one was ever fairer.
It is worth putting this beside what the French were writing at the same moment. In the Queste del Saint Graal the quest is an examination: no one ought to enter upon such a lofty service before being cleansed and purged of all villainy and mortal sins, and most of the Round Table fails it, and the man who succeeds is a virgin who never needed to learn anything.
Wolfram's Grail is reached by a man who failed once, lost his faith, and came back. What qualifies him is not that he is clean. It is that he finally noticed somebody was in pain.
Almost nothing, and that is the argument. Wolfram is the one author who lets the sacred be reached without emptying the world to get to it.
In the sources
- WolframGerman · c. 1170–1220
healed by being asked
No relic, no penance, no purity test. A man asks his uncle what is wrong, and the wound closes.
“Anfortas, the gentle monarch, who was courteous as he was bold”
Parzival, Parzival (Anfortas) · read in place - The Grail RomancesFrench romance · c. 1200–1230
healed by nobody, because nobody qualifies
The Queste's terms are set at the outset and never relaxed. Its hero is faultless from birth, so nothing is learned and nobody is forgiven.
“no one ought to enter upon such a lofty service before being cleansed and purged of all villainy and mortal sins. This Quest is not a quest for earthly things, but is to be the search for the deep secrets and confidences of Our Lord”
The Quest of the Holy Grail, Quest of the Holy Grail - MaloryEnglish · c. 1415–1471
anointed with the blood of the spear
Malory's Maimed King is healed by Galahad anointing him with blood from the spear — a sacramental cure, not a human one.
“Then there entered into the hall the Holy Grail covered with white samite, but there was none might see it, nor who bare it”
Le Morte d'Arthur, XIII.vii · read in place - The VulgateFrench romance · c. 1215–1235
the vessel above all things
The French cycle's Grail is the supreme sacred object, prized above the sword itself; it is not something a nephew can talk to.
“Ah, sword, you are the thing I prized most except for the Holy Vessel called the Grail”
Lancelot-Grail (the Vulgate Cycle), [539]
Wolfram heals the wounded king with a question anyone could have asked. The Queste heals nothing and instead removes from the world everyone who is not good enough. These were written within about a decade of each other.