Hypothetical Development of the Legend.—The Grail is originally a portion of the gear of old Celtic divinities, more especially of the god of the underworld, whose name among the Cymry was Bran. Numerous Celtic sagas, as well as existing Celtic folk-tales, tell of a hero who journeys to the land of shades and brings back talismans, prominent amongst them the inexhaustible vessel of plenty and rejuvenation. At an early period this tale got mixed up with a Peredur saga, in which the hero, to avenge a kinsman, had to seek for a magic lance and sword. The result of the fusion may be traced in the forms which underlie the Mabinogi of Peredur, the Conte du Graal, and the metrical Sir Perceval. Peredur thus came in contact with Bran, lord of the under-world, who was identified with Bran the Blessed, whom later Welsh tradition made the hero of a conversion of Britain story. This Bran is the Brons of the Joseph of Arimathea legend, and by this means the old Celtic heathen vessel of increase and youth came into connection with the follower of Christ, who was at an early date a favourite legendary figure on British soil, the Evangelium Nicodemi which relates his legend having been widely known there at a time when continental literature is altogether silent regarding it. The Christianisation of the Celtic saga had probably begun before Chrestien, though only to a very slight extent. It was fully carried out by men who wrote after, and in opposition to him, and who wished to make the story a vehicle for moral and religious teaching. Robert de Borron alone worked out the conception in a fairly consistent way; in the other theological romance-writers—e.g. the authors of the Queste, of the Grand St Graal, and Gerbert—the Graal is at least as much heathen as Christian. In these romances the tendency is rather moral than dogmatic: they are in the main glorifications of asceticism, and in especial of physical chastity. This latter idea, almost foreign to the earlier works of the cycle, is most fully worked out in the Queste, a new hero, Galahad, being especially created to typify the virtue of virginity. The Queste was one of the romances used by Malory in his Morte Darthur; hence the Galahad story has had a great and abiding influence upon English literature through Tennyson and others. Wolfram von Eschenbach, like Robert de Borron and the author of the Queste, received the story from Chrestien, and, like them, was dissatisfied with the latter's treatment of it. He, however, has worked out a religious and ethical ideal of a far nobler and truer kind than that found in the Queste. His conception is based, not upon chastity, but upon charity, and the Grail becomes with him a symbol, not of ascetic longing and its unearthly reward, but of human striving and human love in their noblest manifestation.
Evidence in support of the foregoing contentions, together with full summaries of the romances themselves, and bibliography and analysis of the investigations of previous students, will be found in the writer's Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, with especial Reference to the Hypothesis of its Celtic Origin (1888). Compare also M. Gaston Paris's Histoire Littéraire de la France, vol. xxx. (1888); and for alleged Buddhist influence upon the Grail legend, the writer's article in the Archaeological Review, June 1889. See also ROMANCES, MAP (WALTER), TENNYSON.