SOURCE: Wood, Juliette. “The Holy Grail: From Romance Motif to Modern Genre.” Folklore 111, no. 2 (October 2000): 169-90.

In the following excerpted essay, Wood provides overviews of several Grail texts, beginning with a summary of Grail romances, their primary themes and motifs, and concluding with an examination of popular twentieth-century Grail-related material.

In his search for the Grail, Tennyson's Lancelot follows a “sweet voice singing in the topmost tower”:

… as in a dream I seemed to climb For ever: at the last I reached a door … It gave, and throe' a stormy glare, a heat As from a seventimes-heated furnace … And yet methought I saw the Holy Grail All palled in crimson samite … 

(Idylls of the King, 2:829-44)

Just over a century later, publishers regularly advertise Lancelot's vision of the Holy Grail with promises of new discoveries about the world of ancient Druids, Templars and assorted mystics. Books purporting to...