The Grail, and the quest that empties the world

There is no single Grail. There are at least five, they are not compatible, and the disagreement between them is the richest thing in the entire canon.

It begins with a poem that stops in the middle. Chrétien de Troyes, writing around 1180, has a boy watch a procession pass through a hall: a bleeding lance, and a graal carried by a maiden. He never says what it is. He dies before finishing. Everything the Grail becomes afterwards is somebody's answer to an unfinished sentence.

The Welsh Peredur shows what the scene looks like with no theology attached at all: two youths enter the hall … bearing a spear of mighty size, with three streams of blood flowing from the point to the ground. And when all the company saw this, they began wailing and lamenting. The hero says nothing, because he has been told a knight does not ask questions. That is the failure in its rawest form — not sin, not impurity, just a young man doing as he was told.

The Vulgate makes it holy. The vessel acquires a genealogy — the blood of Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, a voyage to Britain — and becomes the supreme object, prized above the sword itself. The Queste then draws the obvious conclusion and makes it a judge: 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. The quest becomes an examination. Most of the Round Table fails.

Perlesvaus arms it: a Grail bound up with beheadings and the violent overthrow of the Old Law.

And Wolfram, in Germany, at almost exactly the same moment, refuses all of it. His Grail is a stone. His Grail king, Anfortas — the gentle monarch, who was courteous as he was bold — is wounded for loving the wrong woman, and cannot be healed by purity, penance or a virgin. He is healed when somebody finally asks him, out of pity, what is wrong. It is the only Grail in the canon that a human being can do anything about.

Then there is Malory, who inherits the French Grail and does something none of his sources do: he counts the bill. The vessel enters Camelot in glory — there entered into the hall the Holy Grail covered with white samite, but there was none might see it, nor who bare it — the knights leap up and vow the quest, and in the same chapter Arthur is weeping. 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. The apparition and the death warrant of the order, at the same anchor, four paragraphs apart.