So departed Sir Galahad, and Sir Percivale and Sir Bors with him. And so they rode three days, and came to a river, and found a ship ... and when on board, they found in the midst the table of silver and the Sancgreall covered with red samite.... Then Sir Galahad laid him down and slept ... and when he woke ... he saw the city of Sarras (ch. 103).... At the year’s end ... he saw before him the holy vessel, and a man kneeling upon his knees in the likeness of the bishop, which had about him a great fellowship of angels, as it had been Christ Himself ... and when he came to the sakering of the Mass, and had done, anon he called Sir Galahad, and said unto him, “Come forth ... and thou shalt see that which thou hast much desired to see” ... and he beheld spiritual things ... (ch. 104).—Sir T. Malory, History of Prince Arthur, iii. 35, 101, 104 (1470).
The earliest story of the Holy Graal was in verse (A.D. 1100), author unknown.
Chrétien de Troyes has a romance in eight-syllable verse on the same subject (1170).
Guiot’s tale of Titurel, founder of Graalburg, and Parzival, prince thereof, belongs to the twelfth century.
Wolfram von Eschenbach, a minnesinger, took Guiot’s tale as the foundation of his poem (thirteenth century).
In Titurel the Younger the subject is very fully treated.
Sir T. Malory (in pt. iii. of the History of Prince Arthur, translated in 1470 from the French) treats the subject in prose very fully.
R. S. Hawker has a poem on the Sangraal, but it was never completed.
Tennyson has an idyll called The Holy Grail (1858).
Boisserée published, in 1834, at Munich, a work On the Description of the Temple of the Holy Graal.