What is the title of the guardian of the Holy Grail?

The title of the guardian of the Holy Grail is the Fisher King.

The Fisher King is a wounded ruler who guards, or belongs to the lineage guarding, the Holy Grail in Arthurian romance. His injury is linked to the barrenness of his kingdom: the king’s physical condition and the land’s suffering mirror each other.

The character first appears in Chrétien de Troyes’s late-12th-century Perceval, the Story of the Grail. In later traditions, the hero must ask a healing or meaningful question to restore the king and the wasteland. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival gives the Fisher King the personal name Anfortas, while other romances use names such as Pelles or Pellam for related Grail guardians.

Those names can cause confusion, but they are not usually the title requested by this question. “Fisher King” is the established identifying title across the broader Arthurian tradition. Depending on the text, there may be multiple Grail kings, different wounds, and altered family relationships, yet the wounded guardian archetype remains recognizable.