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Grail, has a wide range of lexical
forms: "graal, gréal, gradal, grasal, cratella, grau, grial,
gruau, gresal, grazal, grazaus, sangraal, gral, etc." It
enters art as a Christian symbol from a half a dozen church
wall paintings in Northern Spain. A mysterious serving vessel
whose contents keep the Fisher King alive, the grail shares a key
moment with an equally mysterious bleeding lance in Chrétien de
Troyes' Perceval.
This is said to be the grail's first literary manifestation. However,
the
first few lines of Rigaut de Barbezieux's canso:."Atressi
con Persavaus" point to a pre-existing tradition from which
Chrétien may well have taken
this part of his story. The figure of Joseph of Arimathea, briefly
mentioned in the
canonical gospels, is a main character in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus.
In the late 12th century, Robert de Boron gives him the role of
introducing the grail as a chalice-like relic into literature. I was
surprized to find next to nothing in Provençal, only
Hélinand of Froidmont's description of the grail in Chronicon for
Latin, and one parallel in Celtic literature: the Middle Welsh prose Romance of Peredur. We linked as many manuscript facsimiles containing medieval Gallo-Romance grail stories as we found. We have also included a number of links to critical editions, bibliographies, and the cerfully researched Lancelot-Graal Project at the University of Pittsburgh. This page is part of the Andy Holt Virtual Library's "Manuscripts of Medieval France with Vernacular Texts", a collection of over 800 links to manuscript facsimiles, including nearly all of the French medieval literarary canon. |