The violent Grail
In Perlesvaus the Grail is not consoling: it is a cause, and men are killed for it.
Perlesvaus, or The High History of the Holy Graal, is the strangest romance in the tradition and the one least like anybody's idea of what a Grail story is.
Its Perceval does not fail politely and learn compassion. He avenges. The Grail here is bound up with the violent supersession of the Old Law by the New, and the book pursues that idea with a literalism that is genuinely startling: castles are taken, heads are cut off and kept, a knight rides with a cart of severed heads, and the holy is repeatedly the reason for a killing rather than a consolation after one.
Arthur himself is in poor condition at the start — his court has fallen off, his will has gone — and the recovery of the kingdom is presented as a matter of force applied in the right direction.
It is worth including for one reason. Set beside the others, it completes the range. Chrétien leaves the Grail undefined. The Welsh Peredur makes the failure a matter of attention. The Vulgate makes it a sacred vessel. The Queste makes it a judge. Wolfram makes it a stone healed by pity. Malory makes it a bereavement.
And Perlesvaus makes it a weapon.
These are not six versions of one thing. They are six different answers to an unfinished poem, and any account of the Grail that can accommodate all of them has stopped meaning anything.
This is the version where the highest good licenses the worst behaviour, which is a cost the tradition usually keeps offstage.
In the sources
- The Grail RomancesFrench romance · c. 1200–1230
the Grail as a cause worth killing for
Holy violence, pursued literally: the changing of the Law enforced by force, with the vessel as its warrant.
No validated quotationPerlesvaus is published here in full but carries no validated quotation yet; the characterisation is drawn from the branches themselves.
- WolframGerman · c. 1170–1220
the opposite pole
A stone, and a wound closed by a question asked out of pity. Between Wolfram and Perlesvaus the word 'Grail' does not describe the same kind of object at all.
“Anfortas, the gentle monarch, who was courteous as he was bold”
Parzival, Parzival (Anfortas) · read in place - MaloryEnglish · c. 1415–1471
the English compromise
Malory takes the sacred vessel and the judging quest, and adds the one thing neither French book has: an accounting of what it cost.
“ye have nigh slain me with the avow and promise that ye have made; for through you ye have bereft me the fairest fellowship and the truest of knighthood that ever were seen together in any realm of the world”
Le Morte d'Arthur, XIII.vii · read in place