Long the inspiration for legend, myth, and poetry, the Holy Grail has profoundly shaped Western literary and cultural consciousness: the imaginative romances of Chrétien de Troyes, the lush paintings of Dante Rossetti, the haunting verses of Tennyson that seem to elide the natural and supernatural realms. In our collective imagination, the Grail has figured as an emblem of moral testing and spiritual longing in the borderlands between worlds.
What few realize, however, is that tales of a quest for the Holy Grail are not entirely fictional. The origin of the notion of a quest for the Holy Grail is often attributed to the fertile imagination of a 12th-century French trouvère, Chrétien de Troyes, writing about the Arthurian legends.
