8/2/2019 When we come to examine the literary tradition concerning the Grail we notice at the outset that the Grail legend i

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Christ Michael found The Holy Grail I will sell it for 3 billion US is generallyconsidered to be the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and the oneused by Joseph of Arimathea to catch his blood as he hung on the cross. This significance, however, was introduced into the Arthurian legends by Robert de Boron in his verse romance Joseph d'Arimathie (sometimes also called Le Roman de l'Estoire dou Graal), which was probably written in the last decade of the twelfthcentury or the first couple of years of the thirteenth. In earlier sources and in some later ones, the grail is something very different. The term "grail" comesfrom the Latin gradale, which meant a dish brought to the table during variousstages (Latin "gradus") or courses of a meal. In Chrtien and other early writers,such a plate is intended by the term "grail." Chrtien, for example, speaks of "un graal," a grail or platter and thus not a unique item. Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival presents the grail as a stone which provides sustenance and preventsanyone who beholds it from dying within the week. In medieval romance, the grailwas said to have been brought to Glastonbury in Britain by Joseph of Arimatheaand his followers. In the time of Arthur, the quest for the Grail was the highest spiritual pursuit. For Chrtien, author of Perceval and his continuators (four works take up the task of completing the work that Chrtien left unfinished, two ofwhich are anonymous, one is by Mannesier, and a fourth is by Gerbert de Montreuil), Perceval is the knight who must achieve the quest for the Grail. For otherFrench authors, as for Malory, Galahad is the chief Grail knight, though others(Perceval and Bors in the Morte d'Arthur) do achieve the quest. Tennyson is perhaps the author who has the greatest influence on the conception of the Grail quest for the modern English-speaking world through his Idylls and his short poem "

Sir Galahad". However, James Russell Lowell's "The Vision of Sir Launfal", one of the most popular of nineteenth-century American poems gave to generations a democratized notion of the Grail quest as something achievable by anyone who is truly charitable. The notion that the Grail story originated in fertility myths was popularized by Jessie Weston in her book From Ritual to Romance, which was used by T. S. Eliot in the writing of The Waste Land. Eliot's poem, in turn, influenced many of the important novelists of his and succeeding generations, including Hemingway and Fitzgerald.