| The Grail was considered a bowl or dish when first
described by Chrétien de Troyes. Other authors had their
own ideas; Robert de Boron portrayed it as the vessel of
the Last Supper, and Peredur had no Grail per se,
presenting the hero instead with a platter containing
his kinsman's bloody, severed head. In Parzival, Wolfram
von Eschenbach, citing the authority of a certain
(probably fictional) Kyot the Provençal, claimed the
Grail was a stone that fell from Heaven (called lapsit
exillis), and had been the sanctuary of the Neutral
Angels who took neither side during Lucifer's rebellion.
The authors of the Vulgate Cycle used the Grail as a
symbol of divine grace. Galahad, illegitimate son of
Lancelot and Elaine, the world's greatest knight and the
Grail Bearer at the castle of Corbenic, is destined to
achieve the Grail, his spiritual purity making him a
greater warrior than even his illustrious father.
Galahad and the interpretation of the Grail involving
him were picked up in the 15th century by Sir Thomas
Malory in Le Morte d'Arthur, and remain popular today.
Various notions of the Holy Grail are currently
widespread in Western society (especially British,
French and American), popularized through numerous
medieval and modern works (see below) and linked with
the predominantly Anglo-French (but also with some
German influence) cycle of stories about King Arthur and
his knights. Because of this wide distribution,
Americans and West Europeans sometimes assume that the
Grail idea is universally well known.
The stories of the
Grail are totally absent from the folklore of those
countries that were and are Eastern Orthodox (whether
Arabs, Slavs, Romanians, or Greeks). This is true of all
Arthurian myths, which were not well known east of
Germany until the present-day Hollywood retellings.
Nor
has the Grail been as popular a subject in some
predominantly Catholic areas, such as Spain and Latin
America, as it has been elsewhere. The notions of the
Grail, its importance, and prominence, are a set of
ideas that are essentially local and particular, being
linked with Catholic or formerly Catholic locales,
Celtic mythology and Anglo-French medieval storytelling.
The contemporary wide distribution of these ideas is due
to the huge influence of the pop culture of countries
where the Grail Myth was prominent in the Middle Ages. |
