about the meaning of the lance and the grail, he would have healed his maimed host.

Chrétien refers to this object not as "the Grail" but as "a grail" (un graal), showing the word was used, in its earliest literary context, as a common noun. For Chrétien, a grail was a wide, somewhat deep, dish or bowl, interesting because it contained not a pike, salmon, or lamprey, as the audience may have expected for such a container, but a single Communion wafer. The story of the Wounded King's mystical fasting