Le motif de la gaste terre dans le Conte du Graal

Abstract

Abstract The topic of this paper revolves around the links that unite the motif of the Waste Land with the wound of the Fisher King in the Conte du Graal. These links are based, on the one hand, on ancestral beliefs that connect the land’s fecundity with the goodness of the king, while his faults are punished with its sterility, and on the other, with Augustinism. The ills of the Grail’s family constitute a deserved castigation derived from a chain of sins, originating in the previous generation with the commission of a sin of origin. The punishment embraces all the members of the family, and, in the very same way that Original sin is the cause of both mortality and the earth’s aridity, its punishment presupposes the king’s impotence and the kingdom’s barrenness, Perceval’s matricide, and his silence in front of the Grail. The awaited irruption of Perceval in the Fisher King’s domain signified for the Grail’s family the same as that of redemption for mankind. Perceval thus redeems his lineage, and with it, the earth, in the line of the old belief that linked the king’s sins with the earth’s sterility, in conformity with the pattern of the Fall, Punishment and Redemption.