GRAIL, The Holy. The cup or bowl from which Christ drank at the Last Supper. The history of the grail as given in most romances is substantially as follows: After the Last Supper the cup came into the possession of Joseph of Arimathea, who caught in it some of the blood that flowed from the wounds of the crucified Saviour. Being miraculously con veyed to England to escape persecution, he car ried the
vessel with him. Throughout his life it furnished him with food and drink, and with spiritual sustenance as well; and at his death he charged his successor to guard it faithfully. It was handed down from genera tion to generation, the Fisher King being a de scendant of Joseph. This vessel is the grail. According to other versions, the grail chooses its own knights. It possesses miraculous prop erties, and at times is instinct with divine life. To discover its abiding-place and become one of its guardians is the ambition of good and valiant men, but only the pure in heart may find it. One form of the legend represents three of Arthur's knights, Galahad, Perceval and Bors, as being blessed with a sight of the holy relic. Galahad is said to have had it in his possession, who at his death transferred it to Perceval, and after the death of the latter the cup was taken up into heaven. Students of folklore connect Perceval of the Christian legend with the Siegfried of early German lit erature and Celtic mythology, but the account of a sacred spear and bowl, as given in the grail romances, appears to be mainly of Chris tian legendary origin, and to be based upon the lives of saints and certain apocryphal books of the New Testament, principally the Gospel of Nicodemus. It is probable that the Perceval story was familiar, in one or more of its many different forms, to the people of western Britain, before their conversion to Christianity. When the French romancers of the 12th cen tury began to develop the grail idea,— the idea of a sacramental symbol, dwelling among men but discoverable only by the brave and pure,— they wove into their narrations tales of chiv alry, mysterious adventures and legends of folk lore. Chrestien de Troyes, who was possibly the first writer from whom a grail romance has come down to us, was evidently intending to fuse certain elements of the grail and Per ceval legends. He began his work about 1189, but died without completing it. Chrestien's poem was taken up by several other French writers after his death. An introduction was fitted to it, in which a violent attempt was made to reconcile the Christian and heathen elements. Many thousands of lines were also added, by various hands, in the early years of the 13th century. Meanwhile, probably before the end of the 12th century, Robert de Borron had written, in Old French verse, a trilogy, 'Joseph,' 'Mer lin,'
of which the
and part of the
was he especially who gave to all the mate rial a Christian character. There are also later prose adaptations of his work. Great difficulty is occasioned by our ignorance of where to place the French prose romance, the (Queste del Saint Graal,) generally attributed to Walter Map, or Mapes, and another, the
During the next 250 years it was the mis sion of the legend of the holy grail to be the spiritualizing tributary of a broader stream of literature, the full current of Arthurian ro mance. It then remained in
until the 19th century. Modern English and Ger man poets, in reviving the story of the grail, have been moved by the same moral earnest ness as Wolfram von Eschenbach, and by the same desire to show the way to seekers after the spiritual life. The best known of the many modern embodiments of this legend are Ten nyson's 'Holy Grail' in the