The Fisher King
A wounded king, a dead land, and a question that could heal them both. This old story is the link between the poem and the novel.
1. The story
The Fisher King comes from the medieval romances about the Holy Grail. The first version is Perceval, the Story of the Grail, written in French by Chrétien de Troyes around 1180.
The king of a castle has been wounded through the thighs. He cannot walk, ride or hunt, and he cannot father children. The only thing he can do is sit in a boat and fish. That is why he is called the Fisher King.
Because the king is wounded, his kingdom is wounded too. The rain stops. The crops do not grow. Animals do not have young. The kingdom becomes a waste land.
A young knight, Perceval, comes to the castle. He sees a strange procession: a lance that bleeds and a shining dish, the Grail. He wants to ask what it means, but he has been taught that a polite knight does not ask questions. He stays silent. In the morning the castle is empty, and he learns that his silence has left the king unhealed and the land still dead.
In a later German version, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (about 1210), the knight returns years later and asks the king, “Uncle, what is it that troubles you?” With that question, the king is healed and the land lives again. Richard Wagner turned this version into the opera Parsifal (1882).
2. Where Eliot found it
In his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot wrote that “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem” came from one book: Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920).
Weston argued that the Grail stories are much older than the Middle Ages. Behind them, she said, are ancient fertility rituals. In those rituals, a god or king dies and comes back to life, and his return brings back the rain and the spring. Eliot also names the book Weston built on: James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a study of these “dying and reviving gods” (Adonis, Attis, Osiris).
The key idea: the health of one person and the health of the whole land are the same thing. When people are wounded inside, the world around them dries up.
3. The Fisher King in The Waste Land
Eliot never tells the story straight. He gives you pieces. Here they are. Each link takes you to the line in the poem. You may already have saved some of them.
- Part I, line 51: “the man with three staves.” Eliot’s note: “I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.”
- Part III, lines 189–92: “While I was fishing in the dull canal … Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck.” The speaker becomes the king, fishing among rats and bones.
- Part III, line 202: “Et, O ces voix d’enfants…” from Verlaine’s “Parsifal,” the knight who heals the king.
- Part V, lines 385–94: the empty chapel. In Weston, this is the Chapel Perilous, the test before the knight reaches the king.
- Part V, lines 423–25: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Eliot’s note: “V. Weston, From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King.”
Notice what is missing. Nobody asks the healing question. Rain is coming at the end, but we never see it fall. The king is still fishing. He has not been healed.
4. Crossing to Hemingway
Jake Barnes, the narrator of The Sun Also Rises, was a pilot on the Italian front in the First World War. He was wounded there. Hemingway never names the wound directly, but it becomes clear: Jake can still love, but he can never make love or have children. He is in love with Lady Brett Ashley, and she is in love with him, and nothing can come of it.
A wounded man who cannot have children. A group of friends who drink, travel and quarrel, and find no meaning. A journey south into dry country. A river full of trout. A religious festival with bulls. You can probably see where this is going.
Hemingway did not write a retelling of the myth, and he did not like Eliot much. In 1924 he wrote that he would gladly grind Eliot into a fine dry powder if that would bring the novelist Joseph Conrad back to life. But the two writers shared a friend, the poet Ezra Pound, who edited The Waste Land and helped the young Hemingway in Paris. And both men took words from the same book of the Bible. Eliot’s note to line 23 points to Ecclesiastes. Hemingway took his title and his epigraph from Ecclesiastes. Critics have read the novel as a “waste land novel” since the 1920s. Your job is to decide how far that reading goes.
5. What to look for in the novel
The first two columns are filled in. The third column tells you where to look. You fill it in as you read, by saving passages to your notes.
| The myth | The Waste Land | The Sun Also Rises | |
|---|---|---|---|
| The wound | The king is wounded and cannot have children. | The man with three staves; Tiresias, “throbbing between two lives”; the dead of the war. | Look in Chapters 3, 4 and 13. |
| The land | No rain, no crops. | “Here is no water but only rock”; “the dry stone no sound of water.” | Look at the landscape in Chapters 10 and 11. |
| Fishing | The king fishes because he can do nothing else. | “Fishing in the dull canal”; “I sat upon the shore / Fishing.” | Chapter 12, the Irati River. |
| Love | The king has no heir. | The typist and the clerk; Lil and Albert; the woman whose nerves are bad. | Chapters 4, 6, 7 and 16. |
| Ritual | The Grail ceremony; the old fertility rites. | The planted corpse; the Chapel Perilous; the thunder’s three commands. | Chapters 10, 15, 17 and 18. |
| Water | The rain returns when the king is healed. | “Death by Water”; “a damp gust / Bringing rain.” | Chapters 16 and 19. |
| The ending | The king is healed, the land lives. | “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” | The last page of Chapter 19. |
Think before you read
Write your answer first. After 20 characters you can compare it with a sample answer. Your answers go to your teacher with your notebook.