The earliest version of the Grail legend is found in Le Conte del Graal (The Story of the Grail) by Chretien de Troyes. This romance, also known as thePerceval, introduces the grail as a wide dish containing a single consecrated Host, but there is no attempt to link it with the Chalice of the Last Supper; in fact, the Christian allusion is complicated by the obvious Celtic ambience of the Grail episode. What Chretien does accomplish is to bring the story into the orbit of Arthurian legend.
The Celtic antecedents of the story are found in the Welsh Mabinogi, in the story of "Branwen, Daughter of Llyr." There, the magical dish is a platter upon which the severed head of the hero Bran, Branwen's brother, is kept. The head of Bran provides magical sustenance for his warrior band until the spell is broken; his head is then buried and becomes a "guardian" of the island of Britain.
Specific links with Christian apocrphyal legend are found in the The Story of the Grail by Robert de Boron. Here the Chalice is taken by Joseph of Arimathea, in whose sepulchre the body of Jesus was buried, and is eventually brought to England. The Christian elements become increasingly more involved as the legend develops through the twelfth century, becoming widely dispersed throughout European literatures.
The Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian Romance, a massive sequence of romances that
integrate the stories of Chretien and others into a fairly coherent tale (presented
in English in a different form by Thomas Malory, who called the cycle his "frensshe
bookes"), contains The Quest of the Holy Grail. Here the romance legend
is read through a "lens" of Cistercian piety, and the ideals of chivalry are
found wanting; the "perfect" hero, Galahad,
is substituted for the fallible (and married) Perceval. The Vulgate Quest
became the "authoritative" version of the legend.
