The Legend of the Grail (Arthurian Studies)

The quest for the Holy Grail is one of the most important elements in the story of King Arthur. Yet even among the many interested in the stories of the Round Table, very few have read at first hand the medieval masterpieces which, over a period of some forty years in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, constructed what might be called the legend of the Grail. The romances, full of bewildering contradictions and composed by a number of different writers in many different languages, overwhelm with the unwieldy nature of the material and their wealth of imaginative detail. This volume interweaves the principal motifs and narrative strands of all the original Grail romances and constructs a single, consistent and accessible version of the Grail story, tracing with clear precision the development of its mysterious and potent theme.