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Chrétien De TroyesPerceval, the Story of the Grail
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1181A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Lines 3421-4817Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Lines 3421-3690 Summary
After the grail episode, Chrétien introduces a series of scenes which bring the opening narratives of Perceval’s adventure to a partial conclusion, leading ultimately to a transition to Gawain’s section of the poem.
Chrétien begins this transition by providing some answers regarding the meaning of Perceval’s stay at the Fisher King’s castle and the question of his mother’s fate. Perceval rides through the adjoining forest, thinking that he might find some of the residents of the Fisher King’s castle, but instead finds a young woman weeping over a dead knight. On her asking where he has come from, he explains that he was a guest at a nearby castle, and she identifies it as the mysterious palace of the wounded Fisher King, in whose care reside the mystical relics of the bleeding lance and the grail. The woman is dumbfounded when Perceval reports that he didn’t ask any questions about the relics.
She demands Perceval’s name (which to this point in the story he has not yet told aloud), and on hearing it, she cries out that they know each other’s families. She is his cousin, and she immediately attributes the family’s woes to Perceval’s failure in regard to the grail:
Unlucky Perceval, it’s such
a dreadful pity you did not
ask all these questions on the spot!
To ask one question would procure
the king’s recovery and his cure (3582-86).
This is the text’s first explanation of the idea of the “healing question,” though the mystery remains as to what the answer to the question might be, and why it would have resulted in healing. Perceval’s cousin simply recounts that the Fisher King’s recovery would have brought untold blessings, but instead they are left with the tragedy of unfulfilled possibilities.
The sense of tragedy is not just confined to the Fisher King’s situation, however: His cousin also relates that Perceval’s mother is dead, having died of grief when he left. Before parting, she also gives him some advice as to how the special sword he has been given could be mended should it break.
Lines 3691-4602 Summary
Having received the answer to what happened to his mother, Perceval sets off again, this time encountering a woman with a haggard riding-horse. She wears tattered clothes and shows signs of suffering and abuse. Perceval greets her, but she rebukes him and urges him to flee before her companion, the Proud Knight of the Moor, returns. As they are talking, the knight appears and confronts Perceval angrily.
As the knight explains why he forces the woman to remain in such a degraded condition, it dawns on Perceval that this is the young woman he met in the tent just outside his own home territory, as his adventures were beginning. The Proud Knight, assuming that the woman was unfaithful, has been punishing her with an enforced penance. Perceval sets the matter straight and the two undertake a duel, with Perceval emerging victorious, although he breaks the special sword given to him by the Fisher King. As with the losers in his other duels, Perceval sends them to King Arthur’s court with messages for the king, for Kay, and for the woman Kay slapped.
As he continues on, Perceval sees a wounded goose fall down and leave several spots of blood on the snow. Entranced by the sight of red on a field of white, he is reminded of Blancheflor’s complexion. While he muses there, he is spotted by several squires attached to King Arthur’s retinue, which is in the process of moving to another location. The knight Sagremore goes to confront Perceval (whom no one yet recognizes) and ends up losing a duel to him, returning to Kay’s disdainful jeers. In response, Arthur sends out Kay himself in an effort to bring in the strange knight. Kay confronts Perceval and also loses to him, returning with a broken arm.
Finally, Arthur’s nephew Gawain volunteers to go, but instead of immediately rising to the challenge of a fight, he speaks with Perceval, leading to discoveries for both. Perceval learns that the knight he has just beaten was Kay, and thus considers his pledge to the young woman whom Kay assaulted to be fulfilled. For his part, Gawain realizes that this is the young knight of whom the court has been hearing repeated reports, and for whom King Arthur has begun searching:
When Sir Gawain grasped what he meant
he started with astonishment
‘God save me, sir, I must declare
our king has sought you everywhere’ (4477-80).
Perceval follows Gawain back to King Arthur’s court, where he is welcomed with great acclaim.
Lines 4603-4817 Summary
With Perceval’s arrival at King Arthur’s court, the story makes its transition toward Gawain’s adventures while still indicating the direction of Perceval’s future labors. As the king’s retinue is making its way back to one of the royal residences, they are met by a woman (identified in Arthurian lore with the name “Ugly Maiden”), who speaks with the authority of a prophetess. She greets all the lords and knights there, but bears a stark rebuke for Perceval, accusing him once again of failing to ask the questions at the Fisher King’s castle which could have brought about that king’s healing:
You saw the time and place were right
for asking, yet were taciturn
You had a perfect chance to learn
but kept still in an evil hour (4666-69).
She predicts that as a result of Perceval’s failure and the Fisher King’s continued infirmity, the people of the land will suffer greatly.
With that message delivered, she addresses the king and lays out a series of challenges that would befit the labors of knights who are seeking honor and adventure, including a quest to Montesclaire to save a besieged maiden. Several knights respond to the challenges, including Gawain, who pledges to go to Montesclaire (a narrative thread left unfulfilled in the poem’s unfinished form). Perceval, apparently undismayed by the dark fatalism of the woman’s message to him, nonetheless wants to make it right, and resolves to go and learn the answers about the grail that he failed to ascertain the first time.
Before the knights can embark on their new quests, however, another visitor appears in King Arthur’s hall: the knight Guinganbresil, who accuses Gawain of treason for killing Guinganbresil’s master, the King of Escavalon, without issuing a challenge. Gawain believes the charge untrue, and agrees to go with Guinganbresil to see the matter resolved: “I will accept his challenge and / defend my honor anywhere / he chooses, whether here or there” (4786-88).
Lines 3421-4817 Analysis
This section of the poem accomplishes an important function for the overall literary structure. It provides at least a partial resolution to Perceval’s quests while seamlessly shifting to Gawain’s quests. Chrétien does this by bringing the two characters together in the same series of scenes rather than simply jumping abruptly from Perceval to Gawain, and then introducing the idea of what the next adventures will be for each of them.
Perceval’s stories are brought to a partial resolution by answering the question of what was happening at the mysterious Fisher King’s castle—although significant mysteries remain—and revealing what happened to his mother, then completing the narratives of both the woman from the tent and Perceval’s feud with Sir Kay. The woman from the tent and the Proud Knight who accompanied her had gone unmentioned since their exit early in the poem, so Chrétien provides a welcome surprise for his readers by bringing them back and resolving their story.
The narrative arc of Perceval and Kay’s feud, had, by contrast, featured regularly throughout the foregoing episodes, so Chrétien’s readers would have expected it to come down to a faceoff between the two knights at some point. There is a clever irony in the way Chrétien accomplishes this, however, by making their duel happen in such a way that neither one realizes that the person they’re fighting is the one against whom they had borne such lasting grudges. It is only after the fact, when Gawain talks with Perceval, that Perceval realizes that it was Kay that he defeated. The feud with Kay is a challenge on which Perceval laid repeated emphasis throughout his adventures, yet it ends up passing without him even being aware of it.
The story returns in this sequence to The Significance of Questing, first by offering an overview of Perceval’s completed quests. Perceval’s narrative sequence is now largely complete, having led him from King Arthur’s court and then back to it again. Perceval’s goals during his quests were to find King Arthur’s court and then to seek information of his mother’s fate, both of which are now completed. Perceval’s success as a knight is ambiguous at this point: On the one hand, he has successfully beaten every challenger he has faced, never once suffering defeat. On the other hand, however, his record is marked by tragedy and failure—the death of his mother and the continued infirmity of the Fisher King, both of which are said to be his fault. With the arrival of the so-called “ugly maiden” who brings prophecies and new challenges to the king’s court, a third quest is presented before Perceval: to seek the answer of the grail once again.
The woman also presents a variety of other quests for the gathered knights, which are accepted but remain unfulfilled in the unfinished form of Chrétien’s text (like Gawain’s pledge to go to Montesclaire). The centrality of questing is revealed in this scene, as each quest is presented as a challenge to win the highest acclaim possible for a knight. The scene also enables the final shift from Perceval to Gawain, as Gawain not only accepts a quest but is given a direct challenge of his own: the charge of treason brought by Guinganbresil. It is that charge that will take first priority in Gawain’s coming quest, thus laying out the agenda for the episodes to come.
The theme of Knowledge as the Key to Healing and Growth is also present in these scenes, and particularly in the two rebukes that Perceval receives for his failure to ask the healing question at the Fisher King’s castle. The first rebuke comes from his cousin and the second from the so-called “ugly maiden,” both of whom stress the potential benefits that would have accrued had Perceval gained knowledge of the grail’s significance by asking the healing question. Asking the question and gaining the knowledge of the answer is said to be the key to the Fisher King’s healing and the restoration of blessing for his entire realm.
This thematic focus on knowledge is also discernible in the initial meeting between King Arthur’s retinue and Perceval as he stands entranced in the snow. The first two knights sent out to confront Perceval stumble into defeat partly because they do not take the time to find out who he is; Gawain, however, seeks that knowledge and is able to achieve the goal of bringing Perceval in.
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