Perlesvaus
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Perlesvaus, also called Li Hauz Livres du Graal (The High History of the Holy Grail), is an Old French Arthurian romance dating to the first decade of the 13th century.
It purports to be a continuation of Chrétien de Troyes unfinished Perceval, the Story of the Grail, but it has been called the least canonical Arthurian tale because of its striking differences from other versions. It survives in three manuscripts, two fragments, and two 16th-century printings.[1][2]
Perlesvaus begins by explaining that its main character, Percival, did not fulfill his destiny of achieving the Holy Grail because he failed to ask the Fisher King the question that would heal him, events related in Chrétien's work.
The author soon digresses into the adventures of knights like Lancelot and Gawain, many of which have no analogue in other Arthurian literature.
Often events and depictions of characters are thoroughly at odds with other versions of the story.
For instance, while later literature depicts Loholt as a good knight and illegitimate son of King Arthur, in Perlesvaus he is apparently the legitimate son of Arthur and Guinevere, and he is slain treacherously by Arthur's seneschal Kay, who is elsewhere portrayed as a boor and a braggart but always as Arthur's loyal servant (and often, foster brother).[3]
Kay is jealous when Loholt kills a giant, so he murders him to take the credit. This backfires when Loholt's head is sent to Arthur's court in a box that can only be opened by his murderer.
Kay is banished, and joins with Arthur's enemies, Brian of the Isles and Meliant.
Guinevere expires upon seeing her son dead, which alters Arthur and Lancelot's actions substantially from what is found in later works.
Though its plot is frequently at variance with the standard Arthurian outline, Perlesvaus did have an effect on subsequent literature.
Arthur's traditional enemies Claudas, Brian and Meliant appear for the first time in its pages, as does the Questing Beast (though in a radically different guise than it would take).
The story of Kay murdering Loholt is mentioned in the Lancelot-Grail cycle as the one evil deed Kay ever committed, but the details and retribution are left out. Perlesvaus was adapted into Middle Welsh as part of Y Seint Greal, and one episode was rewritten in verse and included in Fouke Fitz Warin.
Nothing is known of the author, but the strangeness of the text and some personal comments led Roger Sherman Loomis to call him "deranged"[4]; similarly the editor of a French Arthurian anthology including extracts from the work notes an obsession with decapitation.[5]
Loomis also notes an antisemitic air absent from most Arthurian literature of the period, as there are several scenes in which the author symbolically contrasts the people of the "Old Law" with the followers of Christ, usually predicting violent damnation for the unsaved.[6]
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
http://human-threshold-systems.whitlarks.com/bpchp3p6.html
“The Fisher King myth has a lot of derivations”
Parry says this, reminding the audience that there is no single Grail legend, but rather a coalescence of disparate sources–a long, ever-changing development.
Unlike Excalibur, The Fisher King makes no attempt to reduce this diversity to simple, repetitive patterns. The very incoherence of the Grail myths provides rich material for the movie’s comic chaos. According to the novelization, Parry is the Fool named Percival: “Percival, also known as Parsifal. Parsifal ... Parry” (Fleisher 189). The movie’s “fairies” are cherubim and Jack is Galahad: “Hallucinations of floating cherubim dispatched Parry upon a quest, to achieve God’s grace and healing. But to do that he needed a Galahad” (Fleisher 189). As noted above, however, Gilliam saw Jack and Parry as both Percival and the Fisher King simultaneously, with no Galahad involved. Indeed, the name Parry for a professor of Arthurian studies may come from John J. Parry, co-editor of the multivolume Arthurian Bibliography.
Interpretation of details in the movie depends on what version of the legend one has in mind. Take, for instance, Lydia’s saying that Parry has only one name as did Moses. Ostensibly, this associating him with a Biblical prophet simply foreshadows her later attraction to him.
There is, however, an Arthurian allusion. In Lestoire del Saint Graal, a sinner named Moses (not to be confused with his Biblical namesake) unworthily approaches the Grail, is punished in flames, and finally saved by Galahad. Thus he undergoes a purgation comparable to the Fisher King and Parry.
At one point, Parry mutters “Et in arcadia ego.” This is not from a medieval version of the Grail myth but a modern one. In the best-seller Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the words “Et in arcadia ego” (“And I in Arcadia”) are presented as the following: a clue to the mystery of the Holy Grail; a Latin anagram for “Begone: I conceal the secrets of God”; an inscription in a series of paintings by Nicolas Pousin and Giovanni Guercino; a motto of the Plantard family; and an allusion to the possibility that Arcadia in ancient Greece was settled by a lost tribe of Israel (Baignent, Leigh, and Lincoln 35, 181, 275).
The authors imply that assembled together these scraps of information somehow reveal the following: the Merovingian dynasty of Medieval France descended from a child of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalen. They allege that virtually all subsequent history has conspired to conceal this secret.
To those like Parry (and eventually Jack) who accept such mysterious interconnections throughout the universe, the superficial consistencies of logic seem less useful in choosing a life direction than metaphors.
One of these is the underlying theme of all therapeutic tropes: the imaginary can become real, as here a cheap trophy heals like the Holy Grail.
Not just the puppet to boy of Pinocchio and the ham to hero of The Fisher King, but such movies as Dave (1993), Leap of Faith (1992), and The Music Man (1962) make this their central suggestion, that a willingness to take responsibility can transform the fraudulent to the authentic, because the structure of life is as fluid as a dream.
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