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Hello, Tennyson wrote,

a cracking and arriving of the roofs and rending and a blast and overhead thunder,

and in the thunder was a cry, and in the blast there smote along the hall a beam of light seven

times more clear than day and down the long beam stole the holy grail. The dread elure of the

holy grail has fascinated writers and ensnared nights about a thousand years ago, and it goes on

from Mallory to Monty Python. It has one of the richest associations of any artifact in British myth.

But where does this spring from? What does it symbolize? And why are its stories so

resolutely set in these islands and so often written by the French? With me on this quest for the

truth behind the holy grail, I Caroline Larrington, tutor in Medieval English at St John's College

Jonathan Riley Smith, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University,

and Juliet Wood, Associate Lecturer in the Department of Welsh at Cardiff University.

Caroline Larrington, the grail first appears in Medieval literature when Crétienne de Troix,

Troix, writes his romance Percival in the 1180s. Can you outline that story for us?

And fundamentally what happens in Crétienne is that Percival, who's a knight who's had little

education, little formal training, he's been brought up, rather removed from nightly society by

his mother, who doesn't want him to become a knight, has arrived at the court and is involved in

really quite a different adventure when he stumbles across a castle next to a lake. And on the lake

there are two fishers who point him in the direction of the castle. So he goes off to spend the night

at the castle and while he's there he's welcome very warmly and he sees a curious procession

in the hall at dinner time. Some maidens pass through the hall carrying a candelabra,

...