Three legends supplied Wagner with the principal characters in this music-drama. They were "Percival le Galois; or Contes de Grail," by Chrétien de Troyes (1190); "Parsifal," by Wolfram von Eschenbach, and a manuscript of the fourteenth century called by scholars the "Mabinogion." As usual, Wagner has not held himself strictly to any one of these, but has combined them all, and revivified them through the alchemy of his own genius.
Into the keeping of _Titurel_ and his band of Christian knights has been given the Holy Grail, the vessel from which the Saviour drank when He instituted the Last Supper. Into their hands, too, has been placed, as a weapon of defence against the ungodly, the Sacred Spear, the arm with which the Roman soldier wounded the Saviour's side. The better to guard these sanctified relics _Titurel_, as King of the Grail knighthood, has reared a castle, Montsalvat, which, from its forest-clad height, facing Arabian Spain, forms a bulwark of Christendom against the pagan world and especially against _Klingsor_, a sorcerer and an enemy of the good. Yet time and again this _Klingsor_, whose stronghold is nearby, has succeeded in enticing champions of the Grail into his magic garden, with its lure of flower-maidens and its arch-enchantress _Kundry_, a rarely beautiful woman, and in making them his servitors against their one-time brothers-in-arms.
Even _Amfortas_, _Titurel's_ son, to whom _Titurel_, grown old in service and honour, has confided his reign and wardship, has not escaped the thrall of _Klingsor's_ sorcery. Eager to begin his reign by destroying _Klingsor's_ power at one stroke, he penetrated into the garden to attack and slay him. But he failed to reckon with human frailty. Yielding to the snare so skilfully laid by the sorcerer and forgetting, at the feet of the enchantress, _Kundry_, the mission upon which he had sallied forth, he allowed the Sacred Spear to drop from his hand. It was seized by the evil-doer he had come to destroy, and he himself was grievously wounded with it before the knights who rushed to his rescue could bear him off.
This wound no skill has sufficed to heal. It is sapping _Amfortas's_ strength. Indecision, gloom, have come over the once valiant brotherhood. Only the touch of the Sacred Spear that made the wound will avail to close it, but there is only one who can regain it from _Klingsor_. For to _Amfortas_, prostrate in supplication for a sign, a mystic voice from the sanctuary of the Grail replied: