structural:scholar_edition, structural:expansion, information:filtering
Fertility and the Fisher King myth

In his notes, Eliot credits Weston's analysis of the Grail legend in From Ritual to Romance with inspiring "the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem". Weston concentrates on the story of the Fisher King, part of the Holy Grail mythos which has its origins in Perceval, the Story of the Grail, written by Chrétien de Troyes in the 1180s. In the story, Perceval is a young man who meets a group of knights one day in the forest and leaves with them to be trained in knightly ways at King Arthur 's court. The key lesson he is taught is not to speak too much. While out riding one day, Perceval meets two men fishing in a river; they offer him hospitality in a nearby castle. In the castle hall, he meets the Fisher King, who is gravely wounded. Supernatural events begin to occur: a boy brings a white lance into the hall, and a drop of blood falls from its tip. Two more boys holding candlesticks appear, and then a girl holding a gold grail set with precious stones and radiating light. The grail, in this telling a kind of platter, provides food for the guests in the hall. Remembering his training, Perceval asks no questions about these strange happenings, and when he awakens the next day he finds the hall empty: his apparent lack of curiosity has been taken as indifference. Perceval returns to Camelot, and while at the Round Table a "loathsome damsel" appears to denounce him, saying that various calamities will occur because the Fisher King cannot defend his lands, still being in his injured state. As a result, Perceval loses his religious faith. Five years later, Perceval seeks help from his uncle, a hermit. His uncle instructs him in knightly ways, and Perceval receives communion.

At this point Chrétien's story ends. It was continued in several different versions by various authors. Robert de Boron introduces an explicit link between the grail and Jesus' crucifixion, and in this version Perceval returns to the castle, asks the correct (secret) question of the Fisher King, and becomes keeper of the grail himself. Another continuation was by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who made the Fisher King's injury a sterilising groin injury, and the question Perceval asks "What aileth thee, mine uncle?" (in Weston's translation). The asking of the question, an act of compassion, is ultimately what heals the king and restores the land.

Weston interprets the story of the Fisher King as a continuation of pagan fertility rites. She focuses on the idea of a "waste land" surrounding the Fisher King's castle, which will be restored along with the king's health, only after the correct question is asked. In this sense it is a story of death and rebirth, as well as an allegory for reproduction, with the lance representing male genitalia and the grail female. Weston considers the fish symbol as an analogy for fertility, a connection later lost in readings of the Grail legend.

The Waste Land can be interpreted as being, at least in part, narrated by a Fisher King character, living in a modern industrial "wasted land". Eliot's notes indicate that he associated the Fisher King with one of the tarot cards drawn in "The Burial of the Dead" (the man with three staves); "The Fire Sermon" contains a figure fruitlessly fishing in a polluted canal in winter as a direct parallel of the men Perceval encountered fishing in a stream; and the final verse of "What the Thunder Said" describes a Fisher King character fishing in the sea, considering the question "Shall I at least set my lands in order?"

The mythic themes of fertility take on a more concrete role in the middle parts of the poem, which deal with scenes of sexuality. "A Game of Chess" includes a scene of a married couple playing chess in an opulent setting which contrasts with two sexless dialogues "illustrating two aspects of the terrible emotional barrenness of the modern world". The section continues to a matter-of-fact conversation between two women about infidelity and abortion, blending into the last words of Ophelia in Hamlet before she committed suicide by drowning – an end to life, rather than a baptismal rebirth. "The Fire Sermon" describes a dispassionate affair, perhaps a parody of Frazer's "sanctified harlotry" ritual in which "in order to promote fertility, a girl consorted with a stranger before marriage, the act being accompanied by a ritual feast and music."