The Holy Grail

A Dish Before a Chalice

Earliest record
the 1180sChrétien de Troyes, Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal, c. 1181–1190
Said to date from
1st centuryasserted by Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie (c. 1200) and the romances after it, which place the vessel at the Last Supper and beneath the cross; Glastonbury's Joseph of Arimathea tradition carries the same first-century claim.

The claim is about 1,100 years older than the evidence.

Chrétien's Perceval (about 1181) introduces 'un graal', a serving dish holding one mass wafer; Robert de Boron first made it the Last Supper vessel around 1200.

Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal (1181); Robert de Boron, Joseph d'Arimathie (Le Roman de l'Estoire dou Graal) (1200); Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief (2004).

The vessel of Arthurian romance, a serving dish in its first text and later the cup of the Last Supper.

More context

The Grail appears nowhere in scripture. It enters literature in Chrétien de Troyes' unfinished Perceval, written for Philip of Flanders c. 1181–1190, where 'un graal' is a serving dish carried in procession, holding one mass wafer. Robert de Boron's Joseph d'Arimathie, about 1200, made it the Last Supper's dish and the vessel that caught Christ's blood; Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival made it a stone, lapsit exillis. The Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1225) gave the quest to Galahad; English versions follow from about 1350, and Malory's, finished 1469–70, is the one that endured. Wagner's Parsifal (1882) fixed the chalice in the popular eye. Reading sang real as a dynasty descended from Jesus is Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982). The pun is older. John Hardyng parsed Sangreal as sang real, royal blood, in the fifteenth century.

Light

Chrétien's Perceval fails by silence: he watches the grail pass and never asks whom it serves.

Shadow

Arthur foresees the Grail quest scattering his knights for good; the bloodline reading rests on Priory papers Plantard admitted forging in 1993.

Sources5 sources

Primary source

Scholarship

  • Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief, 2004The line from Chrétien's dish to Robert de Boron's relic, and the twentieth-century bloodline reading as reception rather than medieval material.

Where this claim originates

  • Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (US title: Holy Blood, Holy Grail), 1982The sangreal-as-dynasty reading, published here in 1982 and present in no medieval Grail text.