In this article, we’re looking at one of the most well-known motifs in Arthurian legends: the Holy Grail. I have a love-hate relationship with the Grail, mostly because of the emphasis placed on it when compared to other aspects of the legends. As a literary device, it’s fantastic. When held against other parts of the legends? Well, I prefer my heroes not overshadowed by a single item of magical power.
So, just what it the “Holy Grail”? Depending on who you ask, the Grail is either a dish, a cup, or a stone of miraculous healing properties. It gives you either eternal youth or sustenance and you can find it in the custody of the Fisher King in the aptly named Grail Castle. Probably, any elusive object or goal of importance can be a “holy grail”.
Specifically, we’re investigating when this legendary item entered the Arthurian tales, and why it gained the importance it did. We’re digging deep into the depths of the stories to uncover why an ordinary object became such a famous relic with the stories we’ve all heard about.
By the end of the episode, I hope to have increased your awareness of what the Holy Grail is. And why so many Hollywood movies rely on it as a prize for their fantasy heroes to uncover.
Let’s get started.
When the Grail Enters Arthurian Legend
The problem with anything pre-dating standardised spellings is that you find a lot of words really mean the same thing. With the “Grail”, we’re looking at three variants. It’s known as “Saint Graal” in French, “Graal Santel” in Breton, and “Greal Sanctaidd” in Welsh (gray-ahl sahn-tye-th).
If we look at when and where a Holy Grail first appears in the Arthurian legends, we’ll find it was Chrétien de Troyes who first came up with the idea of the Grail. He says he was using sources from Flanders, but he was fond of making things up.
In his unfinished story, dated sometime around 1190, Perceval, The Story of The Grail, Chrétien doesn’t make the object holy. Instead, there’s procession of fantastical items including an elaborately decorated graal. For Chrétien, this was a serving dish containing a single communion wafer.
The “graal” really becomes holy in Robert de Boron’s verse poem Joseph d’Arimathie. He published his poem between 1191 and 1202. In this version, Joseph of Arimathea acquires the chalice of the Last Supper to collect Christ’s blood upon his removal from the cross. During his imprisonment, Christ visits Joseph and explains the mysteries of the cup. Upon his release, Joseph gathers his in-laws and followers and travels west.
Then we come to the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Most famously adapted into Thomas Malory’s fifteenth century Le Mort d’Arthur, this story introduces Galahad as the world’s greatest knight and only knight capable of achieving the Grail. Galahad is the virgin illegitimate son of Lancelot. Elaine raped Lancelot, and Lancelot wasn’t aware Galahad existed. In The Quest of the Holy Grail, various Knights of the Round Table go on the quest. Percival and Bors the Younger eventually join Galahad and find the Grail, they witness his ascension to Heaven.
The Relics of the Grail
Since we’re most familiar with the idea of the Grail being a holy relic, let’s examine the way it became such.
It was Robert de Boron, in his 1190 poem Joseph d’Arimathie, who first introduced the idea of the Grail as the vessel used to catch the blood at the Crucifixion. Since then, we can’t separate the ideas of a mythical cup and Christianity. In fact, after publication, many artifacts appeared proposing to be the Holy Chalice. Two survive today.
One is a green glass dish in the Genoa Cathedral. The story tells us the relic is from the Last Supper. The dish has two origin stories for how Crusaders brought it to Genoa, and only became linked to the Last Supper in the late 13th century.
The other relic is an agate dish with a mounting for a chalice, possibly dating from Greco-Roman times. It wasn’t originally linked to the Grail at all. By the 14th century, the story evolved to Saint Peter, bringing it to Rome and entrusting it to Saint Lawrence. The Grail connection started in the 15th century with the sale of the relic to Valencia Cathedral.
The 17th century saw a surge in items identified as the Holy Grail and didn’t slow down. The 20th century introduced the Nanteos Cup (a medieval wooden bowl found near Rhydyfelin, Wales), the Antioch chalice (a 6th-century silver-gilt object that became attached to the Grail legend in the 1930s), and the Chalice of Doña Urraca (a cup made between 200 BC and 100 AD, kept in León’s basilica of Saint Isidore).
All of this requires definitive proof in the historicity of Joseph of Arimathea. We also need a definition of a grail within the context of Arthurian legends everyone can agree on.
The Holy Grail as a Trope in Mythology
We can’t talk about the Holy Grail without talking about certain pieces of media. If anyone asks about it, they’ll want to know about Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
The portrayal of a quest in search of an item isn’t unique to the Arthurian legends. It’s remained popular today as a trope known as a “McGuffin.” A trope is a recurring convention in fiction. TV Tropes (a moderately obscure encyclopaedia website) defines a McGuffin as:
An object that, while not relevant to the main narrative, is frequently pursued throughout it.
The point is, the object drives the plot but doesn’t have any further purpose. Take the quest for the Golden Fleece, for example. Jason and the Argonauts are searching for the Fleece as an overarching explanation for all the adventures they get up to along the way. In The Last Crusade, the point isn’t the Grail itself, but getting it before the Nazis. Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge has Jack Sparrow’s crew racing against a ghost ship to find a trident that can control the seas.
Within Arthurian myths themselves, a quest to find any sort of grail appears only a few times. More recently, the Grail is featured everywhere as a cup from Monty Python to Donald Duck. Earlier stories featuring the Grail have the grail as a bowl or a serving tray, though some works have it as a stone.
For the Holy Grail, we don’t feature it because it does anything. We include it in works because it’s the Holy Grail.
Conspiracy Theories about the Holy Grail
This holy chalice has become a popular theme in culture, folklore studies, pseudohistorical writings, fiction, and conspiracy theories. There’s no evidence to suggest neither the Nazis or the Knights Templar had anything to do with the Grail, or that Mary Magdalene was involved at all. This doesn’t stop people from putting out theories about it though.
One of the most famous conspiracy theories combined all of the above together in 1982. It influenced The Da Vinci Code and many members of the public who read Dan Brown’s book.
In a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln put forward the idea that the Holy Grail is not a physical object, but a symbol of the bloodline of Jesus. This theory relies on the etymological reading of san greal (holy grail) as sang real (royal blood). This interpretation dates to the 15th century. They proposed that Jesus was mortal and lived a mortal life with Mary Magdalene in France, their descendants became the Merovingian dynasty. While the Catholic Church work to destroy the dynasty, the secret society of the Priory of Sion and their associates (Knights Templars among them) protect them.
Of course, scholars dismiss this theory as pseudohistorical. Pierre Plantard created the Priory of Sion in the mid-1950s in a failed attempt to create a prestigious neo-chivalric order. Even he was surprised when his claims appeared fused with the Jesus bloodline theory about the Grail.
Still, people believe what they want to believe.
Conclusion
So now we know more about the Holy Grail than we did before. We can separate fact from fiction and determine just what makes the Holy Grail so tempting when it comes to inventing our own history.
The only question left to ask would be, should we continue to treat the Holy Grail as some impossible to attain prize? Or should we start to consider it as a legend in and of itself? The Grail might have embedded itself in British legend, but does that mean we have to rely on such a thing as a benchmark for attainability?
We place so much emphasis on a single item, particularly one which wasn’t originally intended as a metaphor for Christian faith. It can’t come as a surprise that over time we’ve turned an ordinary household object into a messianic herald.
The only thing we can do is recognise which contexts we use the Grail in, notice how we’re using it. In the age of instant answers and lack of fact-checking, we could be spreading misinformation without being aware of it.
The Holy Grail is just one example of the way we’ve taken one story and twisted beyond the recognition of the original authors. We use it to suit our own purposes and don’t care what happens after.
Will we recognise the original story if it’s not dressed up in the centuries of additions and retellings following the agendas of the day?
Resources and Links
- “Le Morte d’Arthur” by Thomas Malory, rendered by Keith Baines (2010). A tough read due to how many independent factors, but Malory is the creator of many myths we’re familiar with.
