THE KNIGHTS' MISSION: THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL

The Quest for the Holy Grail

Today, The Grandma has studied a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Chapter 50). The new chapter is about the quest for the Holy Grail, one of the most incredible and mystery legends. 

Meanwhile The Grandma was reading about this amazing story, she has received some sad news about The Queen of the Soul. Aretha Franklin has left us and with her goodbye we lost one of the most incredible singers of the history, an important figure for the American Black community and a great fighter for Civil Rights, Freedom and Respect. We will miss you, Aretha, although your legacy will be always with us.

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The Holy Grail is a vessel that serves as an important motif in Arthurian literature. Different traditions describe it as a cup, dish or stone with miraculous powers that provide happiness, eternal youth or sustenance in infinite abundance, often in the custody of the Fisher King. The term holy grail is often used to denote an elusive object or goal that is sought after for its great significance.

A grail, wondrous but not explicitly holy, first appears in Perceval, le Conte du Graal, an unfinished romance written by Chrétien de Troyes around 1190. Here, Chrétien's story attracted many continuators, translators and interpreters in the later 12th and early 13th centuries, including Wolfram von Eschenbach, who perceived the Grail as a stone. 

The Quest for the Holy Grail

In the late 12th century, Robert de Boron wrote in Joseph d'Arimathie that the Grail was Jesus's vessel from the Last Supper, which Joseph of Arimathea used to catch Christ's blood at the Crucifixion. Thereafter, the Holy Grail became interwoven with the legend of the Holy Chalice, the Last Supper cup, a theme continued in works such as the Vulgate Cycle, the Post-Vulgate Cycle, and Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

The word graal, as it is earliest spelled, comes from Old French graal or greal, cognate with Old Provençal grazal and Old Catalan gresal, meaning a cup or bowl of earth, wood, or metal, or other various types of vessels in different Occitan dialects. The most commonly accepted etymology derives it from Latin gradalis or gradale via an earlier form, cratalis, a derivative of crater or cratus, which was, in turn, borrowed from Greek krate, κρατήρ, a large wine-mixing vessel.

Alternative suggestions include a derivative of cratis, a name for a type of woven basket that came to refer to a dish, or a derivative of Latin gradus meaning by degree, by stages, applied to a dish brought to the table in different stages or services during a meal".

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In the 15th century, English writer John Hardyng invented a fanciful new etymology for Old French san-graal or san-gréal, meaning Holy Grail, by parsing it as sang real, meaning royal blood. This etymology was used by some later British writers such as Thomas Malory, and became prominent in the conspiracy theory developed in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, in which sang real refers to the Jesus bloodline.

The Grail is first featured in Perceval, le Conte du Graal, The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes, who claims he was working from a source book given to him by his patron, Count Philip of Flanders. In this incomplete poem, dated sometime between 1180 and 1191, the object has not yet acquired the implications of holiness it would have in later works.

Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail

While dining in the magical abode of the Fisher King, Perceval witnesses a wondrous procession in which youths carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another, passing before him at each course of the meal. First comes a young man carrying a bleeding lance, then two boys carrying candelabras. Finally, a beautiful young girl emerges bearing an elaborately decorated graal, or grail.

Chrétien refers to this object not as The Grail but as a grail, un graal, showing the word was used, in its earliest literary context, as a common noun. For Chrétien a grail was a wide, somewhat deep dish or bowl, interesting because it contained not a pike, salmon, or lamprey, as the audience may have expected for such a container, but a single Mass wafer which provided sustenance for the Fisher King's crippled father.  

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Perceval, who had been warned against talking too much, remains silent through all of this and wakes up the next morning alone. He later learns that if he had asked the appropriate questions about what he saw, he would have healed his maimed host, much to his honour. The story of the Wounded King's mystical fasting is not unique; several saints were said to have lived without food besides communion, for instance Saint Catherine of Genoa. This may imply that Chrétien intended the Mass wafer to be the significant part of the ritual, and the Grail to be a mere prop.

In the modern era, a number of places have become associated with the Holy Grail. One of the most prominent is Glastonbury in Somerset, England. Glastonbury was associated with King Arthur and his resting place of Avalon by the 12th century. 

Tapestry of the Quest for the Holy Grail

In the 13th century, a legend arose that Joseph of Arimathea was the founder of Glastonbury Abbey. Early accounts of Joseph at Glastonbury focus on his role as the evangelist of Britain rather than as the custodian of the Holy Grail, but from the 15th century, the Grail became a more prominent part of the legends surrounding Glastonbury. Interest in Glastonbury resurged in the late 19th century along, inspired by renewed interest in the Arthurian legend and contemporary spiritual movements centered on ancient sacred sites. 

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Montségur, a medieval castle in Occitania, has become identified as the Grail castle in modern Grail lore. In 1906, French writer Joséphin Péladan identified Montségur as Munsalväsche or Montsalvat, the Grail castle in Wolfram's Parzival. 

Montségur was a fortress of the Cathars, a heretical Christian community in Occitania from the 11th-14th centuries. This identification has inspired a wider legend asserting that the Cathars possessed the Holy Grail. Similarly, the 14th-century Rosslyn Chapel in Midlothian, Scotland, became attached to the Grail legend in the 20th century. This idea began in the 1950s, but took new prominence in the 1980s when a succession of conspiracy books identified it as a secret hiding place of the Grail.

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Just because you can't understand something, 

it doesn't mean it's wrong!

King Arthur