An Enlightening History of the Holy Grail 

To find the origins of the Grail, we have to go back at least as far as France in the late 12th century CE, where Chretien de Troyes penned an incomplete poem called “Perceval, the Story of the Grail” in Old French. “Perceval” also introduces the figure of the Grail’s keeper, the wounded yet seemingly immortal Fisher King, who waits for the completion of a heroic knight’s quest to heal him.

In “Perceval,” the eponymous knight sees the Grail while dining at the Fisher King’s castle as a procession of youths pass him carrying strange items, including a bleeding lance. Among these oddities is an object which the poem simply calls “a grail” (“un graal”), which bears a single Communion wafer. The Communion wafer appears to be the only thing the Fisher King eats, yet it also seems to be crucial to his immortality.

In this poem, the grail is described not as a cup at all, but as a wide dish or bowl, the kind which might have been used to serve pike or salmon. While this marks the first known appearance of the Grail in a written work, Chretien de Troyes himself said that he had based the uncompleted poem on sources given to him by his patron, Philip of Alsace, who was then count of Flanders, which suggests that there may have been prior accounts of the Grail that may no longer exist.

Not long after Chretien de Troyes wrote his “Perceval,” another French poet was contributing the other major element to the story of the Holy Grail. This was Robert de Boron, who, between 1191 and 1202, wrote “Joseph of Arimathea,” in which he describes the titular figure collecting Christ’s cup after the Last Supper and using it to collect his blood. 

Joseph subsequently travels to Britain, where he establishes a dynasty of Grail keepers that becomes linked to the knights of the Round Table, both in this poem and a subsequent one entitled “Merlin,” which establishes Merlin as a Grail prophet.

This is the first known instance linking the Grail that was the subject of the Arthurian quest with the cup of Christ at the Last Supper, which subsequently held his blood. However, it was not the first account of such a cup.

Indeed, accounts of the Last Supper chalice date back at least as far as the 7th century, yet before the various Grail romances, it was seldom treated with the same reverence as other relics of Jesus, such as the True Cross or the Spear of Longinus.

Both Robert de Boron’s and Chretien de Troyes’s accounts of the Grail had numerous inheritors who attempted to continue the story of the Holy Grail, but they also weren’t alone in telling it. 

In the early part of the 13th century, a German poem called “Parzival” by Wolfram von Eschenbach describes the Grail not as a cup or dish at all, but as a stone, possibly synonymous with the philosopher’s stone, where those angels who took neither side during Lucifer’s rebellion have taken up residence. 

Perhaps the earliest example of the tradition is that the Grail can be pretty much whatever an author needs it to be to fit the story they wish to tell.

One of the many mysteries surrounding the Holy Grail is the question of just what the word means. While the Grail is most often depicted as a cup, and while Chretien de Troyes used the word as though it were a common noun at the time he was writing, the etymology of the term remains unclear. 

This has led to some…creative theories about the origins of the word, including one popularized by medieval British writers such as Thomas Malory. First put forth by John Hardyng in the 15th century, this alternative etymology suggests that the Old French “san-graal” or “Holy Grail,” should instead be “sang real” or “royal blood.”

From this, various writers developed a conspiracy theory perhaps most familiarly formulated in the 1982 book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, written by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. This book suggested that Jesus had actually married Mary Magdalene and fathered one or more children. 

In this iteration of the Grail legend, the Holy Grail refers to both Mary Magdalene’s womb and the bloodline that came about because of her union with Jesus Christ. It was this conspiracy theory that became the basis for Dan Brown’s smash hit 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code.

In the centuries that have passed since Chretien de Troyes wrote his “Perceval,” the Grail myth has undergone a seemingly infinite number of permutations. While most contain a few familiar motifs—the Grail as quest object, links to Christ, the Fisher King—the Holy Grail has changed shape to fit the needs of countless storytellers. 

Alfred Hitchcock may have popularized the term MacGuffin (originally coined by screenwriter Angus McPhail) in 1935 to describe “the thing that the spies are after, but the audience doesn’t care”—that is, the object that drives the plot—but in many ways, the Grail served as one of the original MacGuffins, a thing that was more symbol than actual device, after which knights quested, but which they rarely captured…

So ubiquitous is the Grail as a symbol of a seemingly insurmountable quest that the phrase itself has come to mean just that. A person who is looking for the piece that will complete their collection, the one they think they will never find, might well describe it as their “Holy Grail.”

Maybe that’s what the Holy Grail has always been—whatever we needed it to be.