# Journal of American Folk-Lore/Volume 12/Issue 47/The Legend of the Holy Grail

THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY GRAIL.
VI.
TALES RELATED TO THE ENFANCES OF PERCEVAL.
Notice has now been taken of the stories directly connected with the legend of the Grail. Brief mention, however, may be made of certain narratives which have to do with the history of a simple youth brought up in the wilderness, and unacquainted with the manners of chivalry.
(a.) Li Biaus Desconnéus. (The Fair Unknown). A story very common in mediæval Europe, as in other quarters of the globe, recited the adventures of a son in search of a father, whom he meets without recognition, and with whom he fights a battle, either tragic or peaceful in issue. In the first continuator of Crestien's Perceval, such an experience is assigned to an illegitimate son of Gawain; when questioned, the youth can say no more than that he is ignorant of his name, having only been called in his home, where his father is hated, the nephew of his uncle. We learn that the boy has been stolen in youth, brought up by a fosterer, and taught by a teacher, who instructed him to value his arms. The incoherent tale shows him in the company of a wandering damsel, who is obliged to give him lessons in the use of lance and shield. In a joust he slays his opponent, but, being ignorant of death, wishes the latter to renew the encounter; he prefers to expose his body rather than his shield. It seems safe to set down these last-mentioned traits as belonging to the mass of floating jests concerning the fortunes of a simpleton. Other adventures of the hero have no resemblance to that of Perceval. The second continuator knew that the son of Gawain was called the Fair Unknown; Renaud de Beaujeu, an imitator of Crestien, made him the hero of a poem, and gave him the name of Guinglain. The English version of the tale has an introduction, in which the mother is made to keep her son from the knowledge of arms, and to call him nothing but Fair Son. This idea, as already remarked, appears in Wolfram, being with him a misinterpretation of Crestien, and I see no reason to suppose that a different mode of explanation should be adopted in the English production.
(b.) Carduino. With the poem of Renaud is connected an Italian poem of the fourteenth century, constituting a very free treatment of the theme. The mother of the hero, after the murder of her husband by knights high in favor at Arthur's court, retires to the wilderness. The boy, who is told that his mother and himself are the only human beings, finds two javelins in the wood, and obtains food and clothing by their use. He sees the knights of the king, ​and insists on leaving the wood; his mother gives him the arms of his father, and advises him to seek Arthur. Here he is unable to name his father, but is retrained by the king. Then follow adventures somewhat answering to Renaud's tale. In the end, Carduino avenges his father by killing his poisoners, who are none other than Gaheries and his brother Gawain. After receiving knighthood, the hero continues to use throwing-spears as his only weapon: such extravagant representation is quite out of the old manner, as is the character of traitor assigned to Gawain. I can therefore see no reason for supposing the tale to be anything else but a freely imaginative treatment of ideas obtained at second-hand from Renaud and Crestien.
(c.) Tyolet. A French poem contained in a collection of lais recites how Tyolet, the son of a widowed dame of the forest, has skill in calling beasts by whistling. While pursuing a white stag, the latter turns into an armed knight, from whom he inquires the uses of hauberk, sword, and so on. He asks what kind of an animal is a knight, and is told that it is a beast who eats others. Accordingly he resolves to become a knight-beast; his mother is at first troubled, but provides her son with his father's arms, and sends him to Arthur's court, where he rides rudely into the hall, and announces himself as a knight-beast; he says that his mother has sent him to learn courtesy, and is retained by the king. A lady appears, the daughter of the king of Logres, who offers her hand to the knight who can get the foot of the white stag guarded by seven lions. This adventure is accomplished by Tyolet, who weds the princess and becomes king.
The language and rhythm of this poem, in conformity with the plot, indicate it as relatively late. The writer supposes Logres (Loegria, Arthur's kingdom) to be some outlying district. He knows that Evain (i. e. Yvain) is the son of the fairy Morgain, as represented in the later Arthurian romance. The idea that a stag turns into a knight, and offers instruction to a youth, seems characteristic of later extravagance. I see no reason to regard the story as anything more than a romantic invention of the thirteenth century, in which the writer has imitated certain features of Crestien's poem.
The compositions mentioned do not exhaust the number of those in which the youth of the hero exhibits some analogy to that of Perceval. Thus Mériadeuc, a youth educated in solitude, is ignorant of his father's name, and has been called only le beau valet. Having learned from his mother of his father's death at the hand of Gawain, he seeks to avenge that injury. Through the mother a ​reconciliation takes place. Mériadeuc is a two-sworded hero; this possession of two swords, as well as the incidents noted, is obviously only borrowed from Crestien, of whom the writer of Chevalier as deus espées was an unblushing imitator.
So, in a version of the Chevalier au Cygne, we find the Swan-knight, when about to do battle, instructed by a wandering damsel, after the example of the son of Gawain in the continuator: as the older version of the poem does not contain these features, it is plain that their introduction is only another example of the manner in which a popular tale gave occasion for décalcomanie on the part of the average poet.
FOLK-TALES REPRESENTING THE HERO AS SIMPLETON.
It has been observed that the conception of a disinherited and outcast hero, who begins life as a rude and simple lad, is a common one in folk-tales. The connection between this theme and the story now under consideration is too general to be illuminative; it has been thought, however, that certain narratives present a nearer analogy.
(a.) Peronnik l'idiot. In his Le foyer breton, St. Souvestre included a tale of this sort. Peronnik is a boy dependent on charity, and regarded as wanting in intelligence. As the story says, he can eat when he is hungry, sleep when he is tired, and sing like a bird. A knight appears at his dwelling, and asks the way to Kerglas (the Green Castle), where are kept the Gold Basin, which supplies food, cures sickness, and awakes the dead, and the Diamond Lance, which is able to slay all whom it touches. According to the instructions given the knight by a hermit, in order to reach the castle it is necessary to traverse the Deceitful Wood, take an apple from a tree defended by a dwarf armed with a fairy spear, and obtain the Flower that Laughs, guarded by a lion; to pass the Lake of Dragons; do battle with a Black Man armed with an iron ball which never misses, and of itself returns to the hand; to encounter the temptations of the Vale of Pleasures, and receive directions from a lady attired in black, who will mount behind. The sorcerer, who is the lord of the Green Castle, happens to pass on his mare followed by a colt, carrying basin and lance. Peronnik learns the spell which summons the colt, and, under pretence of being a servant of the castle, is able to accomplish the adventure. The black lady turns out to be the Plague. The apple, fruit from the tree of Good and Evil, makes the enchanter susceptible of death, after which the Plague puts an end to his career. The Laughing Flower acts as a key to open the gates of the castle, which vanishes in an earthquake, and Peronnik escapes with basin and lance, which enable him to dispose of the enemies ​of the king of Brittany: he conquers Anjou, Poitou, and Normandy; goes to the Holy Land, and forces the emperor of the Saracens to give him his daughter in marriage.
The editor notes the resemblance of this narration to Arthurian romances; this likeness is obvious, though the tale has no near affinity to Crestien's. Unhappily, however, the history has little similarity to genuine Breton folk-tales, and it is scarcely to be doubted that in the account we have only a literary recast, answering to the inventions of Hersart de la Villemarqué.
(b.) Laoidh an Amadan Móir (Lay of the Great Fool). A Gaelic ballad, which differs from the preceding in being genuine and exactly reported, possesses all the mystic character of such verse. It is recited how an enigmatical personage known as the Great Fool, while engaged in an unexplained expedition to Lochlann (Scandinavia), becomes enveloped in a magic mist, meets a Gruagach (demonic being), and is induced to drink from a cup offered by the latter, with the result that the demon deprives him of both legs below the knee. In spite of this loss, he continues his journey with rapidity, and is able to overtake and capture a hound, white, with red ears (dogs of hell or fairyland are of such hue), belonging to another Gruagach, who demands return of the animal in exchange for hospitality, and conducts the youth to his castle, the Golden City, where the guest is left to guard the wife and treasure of the host, who goes hunting. The house is visited by a lover of the wife; the intruder is seized by the Fool, and forced to surrender the legs of the latter, which he has annexed. In the end, the Gruagach of the cup returns, and according to a common and no doubt ancient feature of Gaelic tales, we learn that the master of the house, in transformation, was also the enchanter and the interloper, his object in arranging these different appearances being to test the courage and worth of the hero.
It occurred to Campbell that the cup of this wild legend might have some relation to the Grail; but, for my part, I am unable to discover any similarity.
(c.) Story of the Great Fool. The lay was explained to Campbell by a tale professing to give the history of the Fool; but, as usual in such explanations, it is very doubtful whether the prose and the verse have in reality any connection. The Great Fool is represented as a posthumous son of a foe of the king. To preserve his life, his mother flies with her son to the wilderness, where the youth grows up in ignorance, distinguished by ferocity and strength. He runs down wild deer, and his mother makes him a dress of the hides; he barbarously kills his foster-brother for making him the subject of jests; he catches the king's horse, rides to the palace, kills the king's son, and obliges the king to recognize him as heir. He is afterwards sent to rescue a lady from a dragon.
​Mr. Nutt has pointed out that the story of the Irish and Scotch-Gaelic hero Fionn has similar traits. The latter is also a posthumous son whose life is in danger, is reached in the desert by Druidesses, exhibits extraordinary strength, and overtakes wild deer by speed of foot. He has no proper name of his own, receiving his appellation from the whiteness of his skin. I can see in these traits no resemblance to the story of Perceval, further than that some of the subordinate incidents, like the running down of the deer, floating adventures common to mediaeval folk-lore, do appear, not in the tale of Crestien, but in certain of its popularized forms.
Beyond these, it seems scarce worth while to cite folk-tales for the purpose of illustrating the story. According to the analysis previously given, the incidents of Crestien's plot do not belong to any single folk-tale, but represent separate elements, such as floated in solution in the folk-lore of all European countries, threaded together in purely literary fashion.
As respects the Grail, examples of healing and food-producing vessels might be cited in abundance from the popular belief of every age and country; but, as already observed, the dish of Crestien's tale has none of these properties; the analogy, such as it is, belongs solely to the later variants, which are nothing more than free interpretations of a theme made continually more and more mysterious.
Brief mention may be made of the two modern compositions which have made the Holy Grail a household word. Tennyson's idyl, "The Holy Grail," follows the outlines of the French prose romance, the Queste; as in the latter, the quest begins with the apparition at Camelot of the sacred vessel. A quest is vowed, in which, as in the French work, Galahad, Percivale, and Bors are the most honored participants; but whereas in the Queste these three remain together and journey to the Spiritual City, the English author makes Galahad depart alone. Percivale is subject to delusive visions, and ultimately returns to court to tell the story. It is explained that the duties of the king forbid his taking part in the search. The insight of the poet induced him to represent the Grail as the cup of the eucharist, a function which, as above shown, it had performed in the tale of Robert de Boron. In Tennyson's account, the moral and religious ideas connected with the Grail are not essentially changed from the mediaeval history.
On the other hand, the Parsifal of Wagner exhibits a complete reconstruction. The composer based his drama on the work of Wolfram of Eschenbach, whose proper names he uses; but while in Wolfram the story still consists of two independent narrations, Wagner wove the adventures into one whole. In Crestien, Arthur's queen has retired of her free choice into the desert, where, by ​the aid of an astrologer, she builds a manor; in Wolfram, the magician, who receives the name Clinschor, is represented as an evil-minded enchanter, whose spells have made the inmates of the castle his prisoners, but who has no connection with Parzival or with the Grail; Wagner, following the artistic impulse tending toward unity, already noted as characteristic of reconstructors, makes Klinsor the adversary of the knights of the Grail, while Kundry is described as his agent in the task of seduction, to whom Amfortas has fallen victim. Opportunity is taken to bring Parsifal to the enchanted castle of Klinsor, containing the flower-maidens, where he himself is subject to the temptations of Kundry, and by experience becomes able to sympathize with the tempted Amfortas. Wagner, like Tennyson, was led by his artist's instinct to identify the Grail with the chalice of the eucharist. For the psychologic meaning, he accepted suggestions taken from Christian and Buddhist story; he set forth the conception that the generous pity of a simple heart is the best remedy for human suffering. Beyond this general idea, it would be idle to seek in the drama for philosophic lessons; the action is to be taken, not as mystical symbolism, but as fancy which pleases to move in a faery world, and is emancipated from necessary adherence either to fact, probability, or tradition. Of the musical and poetic genius with which the theme is developed, there is here no need to speak.
We are now in a position to take a comprehensive view of the evolution. One of the most universal themes of folk-tales consists in presenting the fortunes of a simple youth, who from a despised and indigent position attains success and honor. In the middle of the twelfth century, when romantic histories were commonly referred to the heroic age of Britain, it was natural that a story of this nature should receive Arthurian setting. Current jests set forth the ridiculous mistakes of a lad suddenly introduced into the great world, with whose usages he is unacquainted; the repute of barbarism attaching to Wales led to the designation of this tyro as belonging to this race. Hence the hero of the Arthurian narration was called Perceval the Welshman, not as really belonging to the country, but only as unjustly identified with a Welsh rustic. The title indicates that the tale, which from the first dealt with the education of simplicity, must have been in the nature of literary invention, not of traditional currency. This history came to the knowledge of the most celebrated of French trouvères; that Crestien at an early time had marked it out for future treatment may be concluded from his mention, in previous works, of Perceval li galois as among the chief knights of the Round Table. What may have been the nature of this antecedent story it is impossible to conjec​ture; Crestien, an imaginative artist, so transformed the narratives he treated, that his beautiful and fanciful poems, animated by psychologic principles which form their constitutive elements, must be presumed to have borne little resemblance to the lost compositions which supplied their germs; while, in turn, these preceding productions were probably themselves artistic and literary, remote from the character of folk-tales out of the debris of which they were constructed. In respect to locality and nomenclature, such fictions are to be considered as purely the arbitrary addition of cultivated romancers, who elected to lay the scene in a conventional British antiquity.
It is with the work of Crestien that the known history of the tale begins; he may have obtained suggestions from the European variant of the history of the Buddha; in his hands, the part of the narrative dealing with Perceval describes the education of a simple youth in the three fields of arms, love, and ethics. For the first section, he set out from the popular jest; the ignorant youth, enamored of the radiance belonging to knights, seeks that dignity at the hands of Arthur; successively by his mother and teacher Perceval is instructed respecting the central duties of knighthood, namely, the service of ladies, charity, and piety. For the love story, the poet had only to utilize the familiar theme reciting the rescue of a besieged damsel. There remained the necessity of learning to be "of measure," of attaining self-control; for this, the trouvère had recourse to a literary material of which the roots go back to Hellenic literature of the best Athenian period, setting forth reticence in speech as chief of virtues. Whether, in this essay, the author reconstructed a situation given by his predecessors, or whether the portion of the poem dealing with the idea is of his own construction as respects the skeleton as well as the flesh, will always remain a matter of conjecture; in any case, the psychologic conception constitutes the determining influence, which has gathered about it, as filings arranging themselves around the pole of a magnet, the traditional elements, attracted as separate atoms.
In the course of his narration, the poet had occasion to mention a vessel used to hold the oblate, which, according to a favorite conception of the time, constituted the sole food of a personage devoted to religion. In this story, the graal had a place only accidental; but it so happened that, in consequence of the incompleteness of the romance, the author's intent was open to misinterpretation; the vessel was expounded as identical, first with the eucharistic cup, afterwards with the paschal dish. These explanations gave opportunity to romancers affecting a conventional piety, though in the main animated by literary motives, who undertook to produce fash​ionable fiction, and appealed to the religious sentiment, dissatisfied with poetry which exalted the splendors of the world; in their recasts, fancy was converted into myth, and chivalry resolved into asceticism. In the end, it proved necessary to exchange the original hero for a new actor who should present a type of the Redeemer; the erring but interesting Perceval was banished in favor of the sinless and colorless Galahad. The pietistic essay was successful; in place of warm and living humanity, the persons of the action became mythologic figures, vague, vast, and cold as reflections cast by a mirage. Thanks to the disappearance of intermediate steps, the process is not altogether discernible; all that remains is a much-edited result. Of this reconstructed fiction, some portion came to the knowledge of the most interesting of German mediæval poets, and by him was fused with the earlier narrative in such manner as to form a poem intentionally typical of human life. The composition of Wolfram was employed by Wagner, who, with abundance of the free imagination which has characterized every step of the evolution, produced a work distinctively modern in its spirit, though mediæval in its setting. The early history of the theme in Wales and England consists in the degradation of psychologic fiction to the popular tale.
As respects the general theory of human thought, the growth of the legend of the Holy Grail furnishes a lesson of caution in laying down general rules. The process is not always from gods to heroes, from a mythic to an heroic stage; the development is quite as often in the other direction. In the Arthurian cycle, as I have elsewhere observed, "literature preceded myth, humanity came before miracle."
W. W. Newell.
NOTES.
Biaus Desconnēus, Carduino, Tyolet. Necessary references will be found in the treatise of G. Paris, Romans en vers, etc. The English variant of Renaud's work is discussed by W. H. Schofield, Lybeaus Desconus, in (Harvard) Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, vol. v., 1895. As bearing on the general question whether romances of the Arthurian cycle are to be regarded primarily as of literary invention, or rather as of traditional currency, it is of interest to determine whether the English poem is a rehash of Renaud's Guinglain, or is borrowed from some independent and presumably earlier version of the same theme. To my mind, the relation of proper names determines the correctness of the former view; arrangement in parallel columns demonstrates the priority of the French. The English forms are either corruptions of those of Renaud (and that of names borrowed from Crestien: Gifflet li fius d'O, altered into Giffroun le fludous; Orguillos de la lande, given as Otes de lile) or else commonplace appellations substituted for names difficult to anglicize (hence the change of la lande into l'ile, of Gué perilleus into Pont perillous, reproduced as Point perilous). The author of Carduino omits proper names; the writer of Wigalois invents a new set. Renaud's names also were probably of his own invention.
Peronnik l'idiot. Related in the work of É. Souvestre, Le foyer breton, Paris, 1874, ii. 137 ff. The sophistication of the story is shown by a comparison with a similar but genuine folk-tale given in Le conteur breton of A. Froude and G. Millin, Brest, 1870, pp. 133–180. In the latter also the hero rescues a lady from an enchanter's castle by the aid of a soporific herb, which puts to sleep the lord of the mansion; but the atmosphere of the narrative answers to that of European tales dealing with the rescue of a heroine from the hands of a cannibal ogre, and is quite remote from the chivalric and artificial coloring of Souvestre's story.
Lay of the Great Fool. The reader will find an account of this and kindred productions in the book of Mr. Nutt.
Parsifal. The literature of Wagner's drama is noted by H. T. Finck, Wagner and his Works, New York, 1893. The treatise of E. Wechssler, Die sage vom Heiligen Gral, in ihrer entwicklung bis auf Richard Wagner's Parsifal, has come to my notice only through the review in Folk-Lore, ix. 1898, pp. 346 ff.; the position taken, as stated in the review, does not appear to me to require any modification of the theory offered in these articles.
Pellesvaus. The French prose romance, of which an account has been given under this name, is translated into English by S. Evans,—The High History of the Holy Graal, London, 1898. See review in Journal of American Folk-Lore, No. XLVI., 1899. A Welsh translation of the fourteenth century has been published, with English version, by R. Williams, "Y seint Greal," in vol. i. of his Selections from the Hengwrt MSS., London, 1876–1892. For the passage above cited, in regard to the translator's treatment of proper names, see p. 548 of the English version.