A Grail stone is carried into the Grail ceremony by a maiden in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.
Wolfram’s Grail differs sharply from the cup that dominates many later popular images. In his poem, the Grail is a wondrous stone called lapsit exillis in the surviving medieval text. A group of temple guardians, supported by angels in the poem’s backstory, protects it at the Grail castle.
During the ceremony, an unmarried woman carries the stone before the assembled Grail community. The Grail provides miraculous nourishment, and the ceremony follows a highly ordered ritual structure rather than a simple search for a lost drinking vessel.
This detail is one reason Parzival is important in the history of Grail literature. Medieval writers did not agree on what the Grail was: it could be a cup, a dish, a stone, or a more symbolic object. Wolfram’s version is especially distinctive because of its mineral form.