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Perlesvaus, also called Li Hauz Livres du Graal ( The High Book of the Grail), is an Old French Arthurian legend romance from the 13th century. It purports to be a continuation of Chrétien de Troyes' unfinished Perceval, the Story of the Grail, but contains striking differences from other versions as well as other Arthurian romances more generally.
The work begins by explaining that its main character, Perceval, did not fulfill his destiny of achieving the 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. It is also notably both darker in tone and significantly more brutal and violent than a usual Arthurian romance.
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 Sir Kay, who is elsewhere portrayed as a boor and a braggart but always as Arthur's loyal servant (and often, foster brother).The details of Loholt's murder occur in Bryant, The High Book of the Grail, pp. 172-174. 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.
/ref> It survives in three manuscripts, two fragments, and two 16th-century printings.Busby, Keith (1991). "Perlesvaus". In Norris J. Lacy (Ed.), The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, pp. 358–359. New York: Garland. . The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 80–81. It was adapted into Middle Welsh as part of Y Seint Greal, and one episode was rewritten in verse and included in the Romance of Fouke Fitz Warin.
The story's supposedly original author, Josephus, seems to refer to the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus. The actual author is not proven but Hank Harrison was the first, in 1992, to suggest the author was Bishop Henri de Blois, the brother of King Stephen and the Abbot of Glastonbury.Harrison, The Cauldron and the Grail, p. 223. The strangeness of the text and some personal comments led Roger Sherman Loomis to call the author "deranged";Loomis, The Grail, p. 97. similarly the editor of a French Arthurian anthology including extracts from the work notes an obsession with decapitation. La légende arthurienne. Le Graal et la Table ronde, Paris, Laffont (Bouquins), 1989. Loomis also notes an Antisemitism 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.Loomis, The Grail, p. 97; 100.
The book's theme is that of the Church Militant Catholicism, highly influenced by the Crusades, and in fact one of the manuscripts was commissioned by Jean de Nesle, one of the leaders of the Fourth Crusade. Barbara Newman thus attributed the issues that concerned Loomis to the author's possible post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps from battles in the Holy Land.
Not all scholarship has judged the Perlesvaus so negatively. Dr Sebastian Evans, a nineteenth century translator of the text, wrote that: "In very truth, however, the story of the Holy Graal here told is ... the most coherent and poetic of all the many versions of the legend..." He argued that the anonymous author should be assigned 'a foremost rank among the masters of mediaeval prose romance.' Evans, Sebastian (1910) The High History of the Holy Graal, London: JM Dent & Sons. pp. xiv-xix.
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