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Percivale was raised by his mother in ignorance of arms and courtesy.
Percivale's natural prowess, however, led him to Arthur's court where
he immediately set off in pursuit of a knight who had offended Guinevere.
Percivale is the Grail knight or one of the Grail knights in numerous
medieval and modern stories of the Grail quest. Percivale first appears
in Chrétien de Troyes's unfinished Percivale or Conte del Graal
(c.1190). The incomplete story prompted a series of "continuations,"
in the third of
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| Sir Percivale, along
with Galahad and Bors are alowed to view the Holy Grail. |
which (c. 1230), by an author named Manessier,
Percivale achieves the Grail. (An analogue to Chrétien's tale is found
in the thirteenth-century Welsh romance Peredur.)
Chrétien's story was also the inspiration for one of the greatest
romances of the Middle Ages, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival
(c. 1200-1210). As in Chrétien's story, Wolfram's Parzival
is initially naive and foolish, having been sheltered from the dangers
of the chivalric world by his mother. In both versions Percivale/Parzival
is the guest of the wounded Fisher King (called Anfortas by Wolfram
but unnamed by Chrétien) at whose castle he witnesses the Grail procession
and fails to ask--because he has been advised of the impoliteness
of asking too many questions--the significance of what he sees and,
in Wolfram's romance, what causes Anfortas's pain. This failure is
calamitous because asking the question would have cured the king.
Other medieval versions of the story of Percivale can be found in
the French texts known as the Didot-Percivale and Perlesvaus (also
called The High Book of the Grail or Le Haut Livre du Graal). Percivale
is the central character in the fourteenth-century Middle English
romance Sir Percivale of Galles which is apparently based on
Chrétien's tale but which omits the Grail motif entirely. Percivale
is one of three Grail knights in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur,
the others being Galahad and Bors. Percivale functions as the narrator
of the dramatic monologue which comprises most of Tennyson's Idyll
"The Holy Grail." In this idyll, much of what Percivale tells
focuses on Galahad as the central Grail knight. Richard Wagner, drawing
his inspiration primarily from Wolfram von Eschenbach though greatly
simplifying Wolfram's plot, wrote the opera Parsifal in 1882.
As in the medieval stories, Parsifal is presented initially as a fool,
but is pure enough to heal the wounded Anfortas and to become himself
the keeper of the Grail. Among the twentieth century works to deal
with Percivale/Parsifal are the poem "Parsifal" by Arthur Symons,
several of Charles Williams's Arthurian poems, Robert Trevelyan's
The Birth of Parsival (1905) and The New Parsifal: An Operatic
Fable (1914), and the novels Percival and the Presence
of God (1978) by Jim Hunter, Parsifal (1988) by Peter Vansittart,
and Richard Monaco's tetralogy (containing Parsival [1977], The
Grail War [1979], The Final Quest [1980], and Blood
and Dreams [1985]). One of the most interesting Arthurian films
is Eric Rohmer's Percivale le Gallois (1978), a fairly faithful
rendition of Chrétien's Conte del Graal. The story of Percivale is
recast in a modern setting in the film The Fisher King (1990).
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