Weii before the end of the Order, the Knights Tempiarwere entering into the reaim of myth. The first mention of the Tempiars in iiterature came in about 1220 in Parziva! by the German knight and poet Woifram von Eschenbach. He based his work on Chretien des Troyes’ romance Perceval, The Story of the Grail, begun in 1181 and ieft unfinished at his death in 1190. Chretien’s association with Troyes may be significant: it was the capitai of the counts of Champagne who piayed an important roie in the founding of the Tempiars and aiso in promoting their great champion Bernard of Ciairvaux. Certainiy Troyes represented a iink with the East through Chretien’s patroness, the countess Marie of Champagne, who was the daughter of Eieanor of Aquitaine. Eieanor was the iiveiy young wife of Louis Vii, the incompetent ieader of the Second Crusade; she accompanied him on the venture, and upon her arrivai in the East iost no time in embarking on a flagrant affair with her uncie Raymond of Antioch. She iater married Henry ii, king of Engiand. Bernard of Ciairvaux did not much approve of the free-spirited Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he found flighty and indecorous. But for a poet she made good copy, and it is not hard to imagine her inspiring Chretien when he invented the character of Guinevere in his earlier work Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, which he wrote specifically at Marie’s request.
The hint of a Templar link in Chretien’s romance was made manifest in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s ParaVa/, in which he makes the Knights Templar the guardians of the Grail. Eschenbach had visited Outremer in about 1200 and he set sections of his poem in the East. His Templars are pure warriors, defenders of the sacred territories which contain the Grail, just as the real Templars defended the Holy Land:
[They] are continually riding out on sorties in quest of adventure. Whether these same Templars reap trouble or renown they bear it for their sins. I will tell you how they are nourished. They live from a stone vhose essence is most pure. If you have never heard of it I shall name it for you here. It is called “Lapsit exillis”. By virtue of the stone the Phoenix is burned to ashes, in which he is reborn.
Eschenbach explains that Lapsit exillis, the name given to the Grail, is a stone that was once set in Lucifer’s crown but which fell with him from heaven, and which serves the Templars as an elixir of life-a notion that would not be entirelyout of place in a dualist cosmology.
The Grail Quest
The Grail was invented in the late twelfth century by Chretien do Troyes: no mention of a Grail had ever been made before. Curiously, there was nothing explicitly religious about Chretien’s Grail; he did not write about it as the cup or chalice at the Last Supper. For that matter he did not describe it as a cup or chalice at all, but rather as a serving dish, which is the usual and original meaning of the Old French word graal. But there is something wonderful about the Grail’s first appearance in the pages of Chretien’s story at the beginning of a rich man’s feast, and all the more wonderful and strange because Chretien never finished his story. This is how it makes its first appearance on the page:
Then tm other squires entered holding in their hands candelabra of pure gold, crafted wth enamel inlays. The young men carrying the candelabra were extremely handsome. In each of the candelabra there mre at least ten candles burning. A maiden accompanying the hfio young men was carrying a grail with her two hands; she was beautiful, noble, and richly attired. After she had entered the hall carrying the grail the room was so brightly illumined that the candles lost their brilliance like stars and the moon vhen the sun rises. {Arthurian Romances, Penguin, 1991)
What is tantalising about this appearance of the Grail is that Perceval, the hero of the romance, knows exactly what it is, but he fails to tell us before the story breaks off (when Chretien dies). Is the story allegorical? People have argued over that point for more than eight hundred years. And if allegorical, is the allegory religious? That too has never been resolved. But this haunting image was soon inspiring writers to complete the tale-among them Wolfram von Eschenbach, who in Parzivai, his thirteenth-century German adaptation, introduced the Knights Templar to literature by making them guardians of the Grail.
Chretien do Troyes was writing when medieval Western society, so attached to its tradition, was opening onto a wider world, the world of the Mediterranean, the world of the East, to worlds of ideas and beliefs that it was discovering or rediscovering, not least on account of the Crusades. Writing about the Grail meant writing about this cultural and spiritual quest, and yet strangely it has always been a genre, regardless of its religious overtones, that has belonged to secular writers, never to the Church. And so, free from doctrine and canon, the Grail has been endlessly reinvented down to the present time.
World History
