Chretien de Troyes and Perceval's Completed Quest

Solving a mystery in a 12th Century French Poem

In this article I wish to discuss the late 12th century (c. 1170-90) French poem – Perceval – by Chretien de Troyes. All my quotes will be from Nigel Byrant’s prose translation published by Cambridge (2015) that has all the continuations included.

The Problem

To catch everyone up who isn’t as fascinated by Medieval literature like I am, Chretien de Troyes’ poem Perceval is a piece of French Arthurian literature that, for the purposes of this essay, focuses on story of a young and naive Welsh boy named Perceval who has been recently knighted by King Arthur. While out questing and adventuring he eventually stumbles upon the Fisher King, an old wounded king who offers hospitality to the young knight for the evening. While they are feasting in the Fisher King’s castle, a procession suddenly begins. In it there’s a boy holding a lance that continuously bleeds from its tip, a girl holding a glowing grail, and several others holding candelabra walking from one side of the room to exit at the other. Perceval, having recently been told to not ask excessive questions, remains silent. After falling asleep in the castle, he awakes to find it empty with no signs of life other than the fact the drawbridge raises after he leaves. Shortly after Perceval is twice criticized by other characters whom we’ve never met before for failing to ask about the grail and about the bleeding lance.

This is the first written account we have of the grail motif that has thoroughly permeated Western literature, but my investigation has to do with the often overlooked bleeding lance, and not the grail. There’s a seemingly small detail that from reading extensively into the secondary literature, and doing research for another related project, I haven’t found anyone talk about. It has to do with a vow Perceval makes after being reprimanded twice for his silence during the grail procession, emphasis added. 

 “[Perceval] said that as long as he lived he wouldn’t sleep in the same place for two nights together, nor hear word of any perilous test but he would undertake it, nor hear of any knight greater than others but he would go and fight him, until he knew who was served from the grail and had found the bleeding lance and learnt the certain truth about why it bled; he would never give up, come what may.”

After saying this, Chretien’s poem then focuses on the adventures of Sir Gawain, a fellow knight in King Arthur’s court, before we again meet Perceval after 5 years have passed where we learn he’s spent this entire time “without setting foot in a church or worshipping God or His cross.” It’s here Perceval bumps into a group of penitents who inform him that it is unlawful for a man to bear arms on Good Friday, which they must explain due to his ignorance, and implore him to go confess to a nearby hermit. After hearing his confession, the hermit asks him to stay and fast with him “for the next two days” which he agrees to. The last thing we learn about Perceval from this poem is that he partakes of communion in the “most worthy fashion.” The story then switches again to Sir Gawain’s adventures, never to return back to Perceval, although the narrator had promised as much, “You’ll have heard a good deal about Sir Gawain before I tell of [Perceval] again.” Eventually the poem will leave off abruptly mid scene leaving several plot points unresolved.

The interesting thing about the Good Friday scene is that Perceval seems to have fulfilled his vow. He vowed never two lodge anywhere for two nights in a row, but he spends two nights with the hermit which suggests that he fulfilled his quest. An objection could be raised that he didn’t actually slumber for two nights with the Hermit given that most likely he would’ve attended a Midnight Easter service and could have hypothetically left afterwards to lodge elsewhere, but this seems dubious. Earlier when the penitents implore him to confess his sins to the hermit they mentioned he lives in the “deep, dense wood”, so Perceval would’ve have to had left the Church in the middle of the night to wander in a dense pitch black forest which, while not technically impossible, is highly improbable for a medieval setting.

Another possible objection is that this is reading too much into the text and Chretien simply made an oversight when writing. I am likewise unconvinced. Chretien de Troyes is probably the greatest writer of his era, and his (re?)telling of the grail story had tsunami like consequences on not only literature immediately after its publication, but to this very day. It’s thanks to Chretien that the grail story is so etched into the fiber of the western world with, two name just two examples we have movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Likewise, the slew of post-Chretien Arthurian stories that center or feature the Holy Grail are thanks to him. I don’t know any second rate authors who are having their stories retold 900 years later. Additionally, we have four different continuations of this unfinished poem that were written shortly after this story was written which is to say nothing of Robert de Boron’s famous prequel Joseph of Arimathea that creates an elaborate back story about how the grail is the cup of the last supper and the bleeding lance is the spear of St. Longinus that pierced Jesus on the cross. These once-in-a-century poets aren’t the type to overlook little details, and I’m not one to second guess the work of such a master craftsman. Out of deep love for Perceval, I’m going to respect that nothing was merely haphazardly thrown into this work.

But the question still remains. How exactly does Perceval fulfill his vow?

An Outline of the Argument

The first leg of the vow is his quest to learn “who was served from the grail”. The answer here is rather explicit in the text. When talking with the hermit he straightforwardly informs Perceval that the man who is served by the grail is the hermit’s brother, who, to add to the confusion, also happens to be the Fisher King’s father: “Don’t imagine he’s given pike or lamprey or salmon”, the hermit says, “he’s served with a single host which is borne to him in that grail: it comforts and sustains his life, such a holy thing is the grail.” Perceval now knows whom the grail serves, and we can move on to the much more difficult task of how Perceval finds “the bleeding lance and learn[s] the certain truth about why it bled.”

My argument for how Perceval fulfills the second half of his vow is going to have to be a much more involved argument that requires us to undo some Papal memory holing of liturgical diversity in medieval Western Europe. Due to the complexity I feel the need to give the reader a brief road map of my argument before I begin. The lance of St. Longinus that stabbed our Lord on the Cross is, even though the poem does not say so explicitly, the bleeding lance which the poem speaks of for a variety of reasons. Next, I will show that Chretien liturgically situates the bleeding lance, by delving into medieval liturgics, and show how it’s relation with the ceremonial knife/spear/lance that’s used in the mass/liturgy to prepare the host which is connected with the lance of St. Longinus and the piercing of Christ’s side. Lastly I will tie these ideas together to show how Perceval finds and learns of the lance through Good Friday and partaking of communion which completes his quest, as indicated by him resting in one place for two consecutive nights.

The Bleeding Lance and the Lance of St. Longinus

Looking at Chretien’s poem by itself, nowhere are we ever told that the bleeding lance is the lance of St. Longinus, however, for the medieval readers of the text, this seemed to them immediately obvious. As already stated, Robert De Boron’s back story says the bleeding lance is the lance St. Longinus and this idea is taken up in both the first continuation of the poem and the third continuation, also known as the Mansierre continuation.

From the first continuation:

I promise you, sir, it is our healing and our salvation; for truly, it is the very lance with which the son of God Omnipotent was struck in the side on the day when He was stretched out on the cross. 

And from the third continuation:

“It is, I promise you, the holy lance of which the scriptures tell us, with which Longinus struck Jesus Christ as He was stretched on the cross where the Jews had hung Him. The blood that springs from the lance’s fine and shining head is the precious, holy blood that flowed from God’s side when Longinus struck Him. It is the very lance, the very head, that mortally wounded the one who harrowed Hell.”

While this was not written by Chretien, there is evidence in the original poem to suggest the bleeding lance is this spear. We learn in the interlaced story with Sir Gawain the bleeding lance's “head sheds tears of the clearest blood.” Additionally we learn that, “it is written that the time will come when the whole kingdom of Logres [the English realm of King Arthur] – once the land of giants[!] – will be destroyed by that lance.” And to add to the holiness of this object Sir Gawain is given a “precious reliquary” before he is sent off, presumably to hold the lance once it is found. 

So we have learned that the lance bleeds “tears” of the clearest of blood. This seems like an obvious reference to John 19:34 whereupon Jesus being stabbed spews not only blood, but also water, from His side. Next, the lance has immense powers to be able to destroy a kingdom once the land of giants. Even if Chretien didn’t intend for this lance to be the spear of St. Longinus, it is at the very minimum a very powerful Christian relic that ought to be placed in a “precious” reliquary to be venerated.  This detail seems to be overlooked by many scholars who have said such frankly ridiculous things such as “Chretien … fails to give his bleeding lance any trace of Christian coloring, and it seems evident no such coloring could have been suggested to him by the source from which he took the story.” Of course this is ignoring, among many things, the Christian Occitan and Catalonian connection people like Joseph Goering pointed out in his book The Virgin and the Grail. 

The Bleeding Lance as a Liturgical Spear

When the bleeding lance is first introduced in the poem in the Fisher King’s castle, Perceval witnesses a procession of the bleeding lance, candelabra, and a girl holding a glowing grail entering from one side of the room and exiting out the other. For us Orthodox, this immediately brings to mind the Great Entrance during the Divine Liturgy. At that point in the liturgy the gifts — the bread and wine that will be transformed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ — are processed around the nave of the church in full view of the congregation with the bread on a paten and the wine in the communion chalice. If available, they will also be followed by the altar servers who will carry candles, fans, crosses, etc. in the procession. Sometimes when there are enough priests celebrating, what is called the lance/spear will also be held by one of the processing priests. This spear or lance, as it’s actually called in the Byzantine rite, is used for preparing the host during the Proskomedia before the liturgy, and at one point during this preparation the priest stabs the lamb, the part of the bread that will later be consecrated into the flesh of Christ, and recites from the Gospel of John: “One of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately there came out blood and water. And he who saw it bore witness and his witness is true.” In that moment the liturgical lance the priest uses is the lance of St. Longinus through ritual participation which transforms the mere knife into the spear of St. Longinus which can later be processed in the Great Entrance along with the chalice which is suspiciously similar to what Perceval witnesses in the grail procession. 

This notion that the grail procession is playing some sort of eucharistic or liturgical role is made very explicit later in the poem when the hermit (forgive me for re-quoting) tells Perceval about the man served from the grail. “Don’t imagine he’s given pike or lamprey or salmon”, the hermit says, “he’s served with a single host which is borne to him in that grail: it comforts and sustains his life, such a holy thing is the grail.” The comment about the grail not being fish is interesting because it seems, and we don’t have really solid evidence of this, that a grail is some sort of serving dish probably designed specifically to hold fish. Maybe akin to a shallow bowl? The other interesting note is that this story that Chretien tells us, again we can’t say for sure nor to what extent, is related to Celtic folklore, where salmon play a large role (see: salmon of knowledge). The problem, however, is that many scholars seemed to have forgotten that pagans don’t hold a monopoly on Celtic folklore. For instance, St. Patrick is called the salmon of heaven. And of course fish and the symbolism of the fish giving itself up to be eaten has been connected with the Eucharist from the very beginning of Christianity to this day.

One objection to this interpretation is that the Great Entrance and the Proskomedia is a decidedly Eastern and not a Western phenomenon. While this may be true today with the way the Roman Rite is essentially the only rite performed in western Europe (I know there’s some exceptions to this), since historically the Roman rite was imposed at the exclusion of other rites such as the Gallican, Celtic, Mozarabic, Ambrosian which were indigenous liturgical traditions in much of the Christian West. Most interesting for our study will be the Gallican rite, which was popular in Spain and France, and the Celtic rite used in the British Isles and possibly in parts of France.

The Gallican rite very obviously had its own form of the Great Entrance inspired from eastern Christianity probably most specifically the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the rite calls it such, “It seems appropriate to give the Byzantine name to this ceremony, for, according to St. Germanus's description, it resembled the Great Entrance of that rite rather than anything which is now found in either the Roman or the Mozarabic of today, or in the Celtic Rite.” 

Another feature of the Gallican liturgy is an equivalent of the Proskomedia, the preparation of the host and chalice before the offertory. We have specific Gallican rite missals from both Lyon and Paris each of which includes reciting from St. John’s gospel about blood and water flowing from Christ — although the exact preparation instructions aren’t always clear as to what exactly the priest was doing —, and we can’t confirm that there was a ritualized piercing that took place with a liturgical spear as with the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in the east. However, we do have evidence of elaborate liturgical knives from Medieval western Europe, for instance a Eucharistic knife from the early 1200’s.

Outside of the indigenous evidence we also have to consider the increase in East-West Christian culture exchange taking place due to the Crusades which brought the west into rather “intimate” contact with Orthodoxy. The patron to whom Chretien dedicates this story to, “the worthiest man in the empire of Rome – Count Philip of Flanders” died of disease while crusading in Acre in the Levant. This time period and the connections in high places he must’ve had would have granted Chretien easy access to information about the Byzantine world including the Lance of St Longinus which was a relic held in different parts of the Eastern Christian world at different times and was of intense interest to the crusaders who were continuously bringing relics to the west.

Additionally, if we accept the thesis that Chretien’s story is impart Celtic in origin, then we should also point out how parts of Celtic Christianity during the early Medieval period were in many ways more Eastern (specifically Syrian) than it was Roman and may have had liturgical practices that included something akin to the Great Entrance, even if what if what we now call the “Celtic rite” itself did not – although how much we know about the details of liturgies in the early Medieval British Isles is rather limited. We do know though that Ireland was one of the last holdouts in the west against the Roman Rite with the 1172 Synod of Cashel insisting Ireland adopt the Roman rite, which according to some estimate is just a few years –at most a few decades– after Chretien wrote Perceval. 

But what I believe to be the real smoking gun is the Stowe Missal. A 9th century Irish missal (a Celtic connection I've never seen anyone use…) that has an interesting appendix explaining some of the symbolism in the mass. Specifically in explaining the symbolism of fraction, where the consecrated host is broken before communion, it says, 

“The particle that is cut off from the bottom of the half which is on the (priest's) left hand is the figure of the wounding with the lance in the armpit of the right side; for westwards was Christ's face on the Cross, to wit, contra ciuitatem, and eastwards was the face of Longinus ; what to him was the left to Christ was the right.”

This can only add evidence to our case that the bleeding lance is a liturgical spear, for we have evidence of a western Proskomedia in the Gallican rite that use this symbolism along with the Celtic rite which taps into the same symbolism but much later on in the liturgy. For a quick primer on how pre-modern metaphysics worked, an object is an object because it does what said object does. A flute player is a flute player because they play the flute. We even see this at the very start of the poem where the naive Perceval, awe struck by Arthurian knights, inquires of their equipment in terms of pointing and asking “What’s this? What’s it for?” (As an aside, the first two things he asks are about their lances and shields ([a shallow bowl, a grail?]). 

In practice what this means is that every chalice used liturgically becomes the cup of the last supper, even if there are many chalices being used to serve communion at the same time in the same parish. Likewise, every spear used in the liturgy is the lance of St Longinus because that’s what function it is serving at that point in the liturgy. You can say “it’s just a symbol” but a symbol is something that unites two realities together (think: symbiosis), so yes, because it is a “just” a symbol the nature of an object can change. 

This explanation has a certain beauty to it since it adds to the eucharistic imagery of the grail, which we know contains the body of Christ, by saying the lance is complimentary in this symbolism through dripping the blood of Christ.

Even if the reader didn’t buy the argument presented earlier that Chretien connected the bleeding lance with the lance of St. Longinus, if I have been successful in connecting the bleeding lance liturgically then the conclusion of the previous section remains unchanged, for the liturgical spear is the Lance of St. Longinus. 

Perceval’s Finished Quest

With all this in mind, we still are left with the task of figuring out how Perceval finishes his quest of finding “the bleeding lance and learn[ing] the certain truth about why it bled.” 

I have already demonstrated that the grail and bleeding lance procession is, at its root, liturgical, and it reveals Chretien’s knowledge of the Great Entrance, or something very close to it, either from the East or indigenously from the West. Perceval could have seen the bleeding lance in some form of the Great Entrance at the Easter mass which, as the feast of feasts, has the most pomp and grandeur and if there was ever a time to have a Great Entrance, it would be Easter. Again I have to insert, even if Perceval didn’t see the same collection of atoms that make up the spear at the Fisher King’s castle, through ritual participation Perceval would’ve nonetheless seen the bleeding lance in this liturgical procession.

Likewise we know that he attends the Good Friday service where he most likely would’ve heard hymns and probably scripture readings about the crucifixion of Christ and the piercing of his side from John’s Gospel. As the entirety of Holy Week is based around a chiasmus St. John sets up in his Gospel, it stands to reason St. John’s inclusion of the piercing of Christ side almost certainly would have been mentioned. Another real possibility is that he witnessed, as was popular in Western medieval piety on Good Friday, a passion play showing the crucifixion of Christ. This is the interpretation that French film maker Eric Rohmer gives in his movie Perceval le Gallois.

Another way Perceval could have completed his task would’ve been on Easter. We know that Perceval partakes of communion, the Western medieval controversy of communion under one versus two species being ignored for now, if we take the traditional Christian view that communion administered to the laity is supposed to be both the blood of Christ along with His body, then in partaking of communion Perceval encounters the blood of the bleeding lance in a very intimate way by partaking of the “clearest blood” which it drips through the chalice. Even if Perceval took only the body of our Lord then, per the Gallican and Celtic ritual which I showed earlier, the lance would have been used at some point to prepare the host.

All of these situations are of course complementary and can all be true at the same time without negating the other. In any case, we know that Chretien has Perceval complete his task to find whom the grail serves and the lance and the meaning of why it drips. Delving into the medieval world and trying to understand their world as they themselves understood it I see no reason why his quest went unfinished.