The Arthurian Wing · Reading Path
The Matter of Britain · A reading path in Arthurian mythology
The Wounded King
the Fisher King · the Maimed King
A king wounded through the thighs, alive but not whole, who can be healed only by the coming of the destined knight and the asking of the question. In Chrétien he fishes because he cannot ride; in Wolfram he suffers because he loved outside his calling; in the Post-Vulgate his wound is the Dolorous Stroke itself. Around him the tradition arranges its deepest equation: the king's wound and the land's wasting are one condition.
Weston made him the survival of a vegetation rite; the theological readings make him fallen nature awaiting grace; the moderns made him the modern condition. He is the matter's standing image of institutional and personal woundedness — authority that cannot heal itself, and knows it.
Where it surfaces
- 15 The Conte du Graal: The Question Not Asked — The Fisher King of the Conte du Graal.
- 18 Wolfram's Parzival: The Stone from Heaven — Anfortas: the wound as the cost of misdirected love.
- 21 The Queste del Saint Graal — The Maimed King healed at Corbenic.
- 23 Revision and Dissent: Post-Vulgate and Prose Tristan — Pellehan and the Dolorous Stroke.
- 32 Weston, Eliot, and the Waste Land — The Fisher King in the gashouse canal: Eliot.