Perceval, or, The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes

His host, the Grail King, has suffered for years from mysterious wounds, and has been sustained only by daily consumption of the Host.

Perceval sees it while a dinner guest at a great castle. The grail is not the Holy Grail of legend, but rather, here, close to the source of the tradition, it is a kind of serving dish (“a plate wide and somewhat deep,” says a source contemporary with Chretien). Central to them is, of course, Perceval’s encounter with the grail, which serves as a kind of axis around which the poem turns. He learns quickly, and his prowess soon earns him entry to Arthur’s court.įrom there, a great number of adventures follow. Among the most humorous scenes in all of Chrétien’s poems are those in which Perceval, with the simplicity of a child, questions a knight about his fascinating vocation. Eventually, of course, her efforts failed, and Perceval took to knighthood like a fish to water. His father, who had been killed in combat and whom Perceval never knew, was a renowned knight, and Perceval’s mother, in sorrow over her husband’s death, kept vigilant guard over her son to prevent his knowing anything about knights and combat. The first part of the poem charts Perceval’s course from a naive, rural simpleton to a great knight of Arthur’s circle. Once again, it is a pity that he did not live to see the project through. It is true that there are certain parallels between the adventures of Perceval and Gawain which do something to bridge the gap between the two parts, but I imagine that Chrétien had planned something more obvious to tie things up nicely. Presumably Chrétien would have brought the two storylines together at some point, providing a more satisfying artistic unity to the work. For several thousand lines the story jumps back and forth between the two knights, but the last third of the (truncated) poem is devoted entirely to Gawain, the titular knight having been apparently forgotten. The story initially follows Perceval but switches, at roughly the half-way mark, to follow the adventures of Gawain. The incomplete poem is structurally awkward. It is a work which, despite moments of endearing humour, sustains a more solemn and mysterious tone than was typical in his earlier works. Even the truncated version we have, which shows no signs of nearing completion, is, at over 9200 lines, about 30% longer than his other poems. Like Lancelotit was left unfinished at his death, which is a great pity, for it was undoubtedly his most ambitious work. Perceval was the fifth and last of Chrétien’s great Arthurian romances. Translated from the Old French by Burton Raffel

Perceval, or, The Story of the Grail by Chrétien de Troyes