The Fisher King

He appears first, unnamed, in Chretien de Troyes' Perceval, around 1180. A young knight riding through a desolate country comes upon two men in a boat, one of them fishing, and is directed to their castle for the night's lodging. There he learns that his fisherman is the king of that place, wounded through both thighs by a javelin in battle, who goes out upon the water because his hurt allows him no other sport. That evening the hall fills with light and the famous procession passes: the bleeding lance, the candelabra, the golden grail, the silver trencher. Perceval, taught that knights must not ask questions, holds his tongue, and wakes to find the castle empty. Only later, from a hermit and a grieving cousin, does he learn what his silence cost. The grail had served the king's father in an inner chamber; and had Perceval asked whom the grail serves, the Fisher King would have been healed of his wound and ruled his land in peace. The question unasked is the wound enlarged: by one man's courtesy, a kingdom stays waste.

Robert de Boron gave the keeper a name and a lineage. His Rich Fisher is Bron, the brother-in-law of Joseph of Arimathea, who catches the fish for the table where the Grail stands, and becomes the first guardian of the vessel and the founder of a line of keepers that runs down to Arthur's day. Robert's Fisher is not yet wounded; the maiming belongs to the later romances, which made the keeper's wound the sign of an office too holy for the flesh that bore it. The name itself has tempted scholars: Bron sits very close to Bran, the wounded god-king of the Welsh Mabinogion, whose severed head kept his companions feasting for eighty years, and behind both stand the old Celtic figures of sovereignty, like the Irish Nuada, who lost his hand and with it his throne, because a blemished man could not be king.

The fullest portrait belongs to Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose Parzival names him Anfortas, lord of the Grail mountain of Munsalvaesche. Wolfram's king is wounded in the groin by a heathen's poisoned spear, taken while he fought for a love forbidden to the Grail king, and his suffering is rendered with a physician's patience: the wound that will not close, the stench that drives his courtiers out, the frosts that rack him, the doctors who fail him, and the cruel mercy of the Grail, which will not let him die while he still beholds it. His cure is one sentence, and it must come unforced from a free heart: dear uncle, what ails thee? Parzival fails to ask it out of politeness, spends years in bitterness against God for the failure, and comes again at last to ask it, and the moment the words are spoken the king is whole and the fool is king in his place. Wolfram makes the meaning explicit: the wound is pride and the cure is compassion.

Malory gathers all of it into the Arthurian frame. His keeper is King Pelles of Corbenic, also called Pellam of Listeneise, as if two traditions had merged in one wounded man, and his hurt has a date and a cause: the Dolorous Stroke. When Sir Balin, pursued through the castle, found his sword broken, he snatched from a chamber the very spear that pierced the side of Christ and struck the king down with it, and the blow fell on three kingdoms at once: the castle cracked, the lands about were laid waste, and the king lay maimed, for no surgeon could heal what Longinus' spear had made. Pelles becomes the quiet architect of the cure. Knowing the prophecy that the best knight in the world must beget the knight who would achieve the Grail, he arranges, by the enchantments of Dame Brisen, that Lancelot lie unknowing with his daughter Elaine, and so Galahad is conceived. At the end of the quest, Galahad comes to Corbenic and anoints the old king's wounds with blood from the bleeding lance, and the king is healed and the waste land flowers again.

The tradition has always known what it was talking about. The king and the land are one flesh: his wound is in the thighs, the seat of generation, and his kingdom answers with barren fields and empty rivers. Jessie Weston read lance and cup as the stripped symbols of a lost fertility rite, and her Fisher King walked straight out of her book into T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, sitting upon the shore, fishing, with the arid plain behind him. Wagner made him Amfortas, whose wound is healed by the pure fool made wise through compassion. John Boorman's film Excalibur fused him with Arthur himself - you and the land are one - so that the sick king is healed when the Grail is found. And Terry Gilliam carried the pattern into modern New York, where the wounded man still waits in his waste city for the fool to ask. He is the oldest lesson of kingship told as a fairy tale: the hidden wound of the ruler becomes the weather of the ruled, and healing begins the moment someone dares to ask what ails thee.