History and Provenance

The Grail enters written literature in the romance Perceval, or the Story of the Grail, composed by the French poet Chretien de Troyes around 1190 and left unfinished at his death. There the graal is simply a resplendent serving dish carried in a strange procession, its full significance withheld. The decisive transformation came shortly after with Robert de Boron, whose Joseph d'Arimathie recast the object as the cup of the Last Supper, entrusted to Joseph of Arimathea, used to gather Christ's blood, and brought westward to Britain, founding a lineage of Grail keepers.

The thirteenth-century prose cycles, especially the Lancelot-Grail, made the quest a Christian allegory culminating in the pure knight Galahad. Later centuries attached the name to particular vessels, and modern popular culture, from Wagner to films, has kept the legend vividly alive while adding no historical substance to it.