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A quest is a journey toward a specific mission or a goal. It serves as a plot device in mythology and fiction: a difficult Travel towards a goal, often or Allegory. Tales of quests figure prominently in the folklore of every nationJosepha Sherman, Once upon a Galaxy p 142 and Ethnic group.
In literature, the object of a quest requires great exertion on the part of the hero, who must overcome many obstacles, typically including much travel. The aspect of travel allows the storyteller to showcase exotic locations and cultures (an objective of the narrative, not of the character).Michael O. Riley, Oz and Beyond: The Fantasy World of L. Frank Baum, p 178-9, The object of a quest may also have supernatural properties, often leading the protagonist into other worlds and dimensions. The moral of a quest tale often centers on the changed Moral character of the hero.
Sometimes the hero has no desire to return; Galahad's quest for the Holy Grail is to find it, not return with it. A return may, indeed, be impossible: Aeneas quests for a homeland, having lost Troy at the beginning of Virgil's Aeneid, and he does not return to Troy to re-found it but settles in Italy (to become an ancestor of the Romans).
If the hero does return after the culmination of the quest, they may face who attempt to pass themselves off as them,Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, p60, or their initial response may be a rejection of that return, as Joseph Campbell describes in his critical analysis of quest literature, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The quest, in the form of the hero's journey, plays a central role in the monomyth described by Campbell: the hero sets forth from the world of common day into a land of adventures, tests, and magical rewards.
If someone dispatches the hero on a quest, the overt reason may be false, with the dispatcher actually sending them on the difficult quest in hopes of their death in the attempt, or in order to remove them from the scene for a time, but the tale proceeds just as if the claim were sincere, except that the tale usually ends with the dispatcher being unmasked and punished.Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, p77 Stories with such false quest-objects include the legends of Jason and Perseus, the fairy tales The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird and Go I Know Not Whither and Fetch I Know Not What, and the story of Beren and Lúthien in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion.
The quest object may, indeed, function only as a convenient reason for the hero's journey. Such objects are termed . When a hero is on a quest for several objects that are only a convenient reason for their journey, they are termed Plot coupon.
Many medieval chivalric romances sent knights out on quests. The term "knight-errant" sprang from this, as errant meant "roving" or "wandering". Thomas Malory collected many quests from the Arthurian legend in Le Morte d'Arthur, including that of the eponymous Questing Beast. The most famous of them — perhaps in all of western literature — is the great Grail Quest. This tale exists in multiple variants, telling stories both of the heroes who succeed, like Perceval (in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival) or Galahad (in the Lancelot-Grail), and also the heroes who fail, like Lancelot. Romances often sent their heroes into perilous enchanted forest,Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, p 177, where they may achieve their quests.Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, p 181, Their aventures are often explained to the knights, particularly those searching for the Grail, by acting as wise old people.Penelope Reed Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth: from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages, p 179–81, So consistently did knights quest that Miguel de Cervantes set his Don Quixote on mock quests in a parody of chivalric tales.
Many depict the hero or heroine setting out on a quest, such as in East of the Sun and West of the Moon where the heroine seeks her husband, The Seven Ravens where the heroine seeks her transformed brothers, or The Golden Bird where the prince sets out to find the golden bird for his father. Other fairy tale characters may set out with no more definite aim than to "seek their fortune", or even be cast out instead of voluntarily leaving, but learn of something that could aid them along the way and so have their journey transformed from aimless wandering into a quest.Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales, p63, While other characters can also set forth on quests — the hero's older brothers commonly do — it is the hero that is distinguished by their success.
Grail Quest
A familiar modern literary quest is Frodo Baggins's quest to destroy the One Ring in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.W. H. Auden, "The Quest Hero", Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, p45 The One Ring, its baleful power, the difficult method which is the only way to destroy it, and the spiritual and psychological torture it wreaks on its bearer.
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