“ One day, however, he meets a party of knights in armour; he first adores the leader as God, and then takes them to be some new and wondrous kind of animal, asking the most naive questions as to their armour and equipment. Being told that they are knights he determines that he too will be one, and returns to his mother announcing his intention of at once setting forth into the world to seek for knighthood. Dressed as a peasant (or a fool) , he departs (his mother, in some versions, dying of grief) , and comes to the king's court. Of course in the romance it is the court of Arthur ”

“ The immediate source of this version is the poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach, though the Grail, of course, is represented in the form of the Christian relic, not as the jewel talisman of the Parzival, but the psychological reading of the hero’s character, the distinctive note of von Eschenbach’s version, has been adapted by Wagner with marvellous skill, and his picture of the hero’s mental and spiritual development, from extreme simplicity to the wisdom born of perfect charity, is most striking and impressive. ”

“ The text shows a curious mingling of sources; the real primitive Perceval story, the Enfances, is omitted, he grows up in his father’s house and goes to court at his wish. Later, however, stories which certainly derive from an early non-Grail tradition are introduced, and there are references which imply a knowledge of the prose Lancelot and of Chrétien’s poem. The romance is probably a somewhat late, and not very skilful, compilation. The other prose romance, the Perlesvaus, is decidedly superior in literary form, but here too we have a mingling of old and new elements. ”

“ The probability seems to be that the earliest Perceval-Grail romance was composed at Fescamp, and was coincident with the transformation, under the influence of the Saint-Sang legend, of the originally Pagan talisman known as the Grail into a Christian relic, and that this romance was more or less at the root of all subsequent versions. ”

“ This particular variant appears to be of British-Celtic origin, and the most faithful representative of the original tale is now very generally held to be the English Syr Percyvelle of Galles, a poem preserved in the Thornton manuscript. Here the hero is nephew to Arthur on the mother's side, and his father, of the same name as himself, is a valiant knight of the court. A noticeable feature of the story is the uncertainty as to the hero's parentage; the mother is always a lady of rank, a queen in her own right, or sister of kings (as a rule of the Grail kings) ”