King Evelake

King Evelake’s life bridges the Grail’s early Christian history and its fulfillment in the age of Galahad. A ruler first encountered in the tradition of Joseph of Arimathea, he becomes a Christian, receives a shield marked with Joseph’s blood, and endures for centuries under a promise: he will live until a knight of his own line comes to achieve the Holy Grail.

Identity and Conversion

Evelake is introduced as a king of Sarras, a city where Joseph of Arimathea arrives after leaving Jerusalem. He is at war with Tolleme la Feintes, a wealthy and powerful Saracen king who is his cousin. Joseph’s son warns Evelake that he will be defeated and killed unless he abandons the old belief and accepts the new law. Evelake embraces the Christian faith, and Joseph’s son makes him a shield in the name of the one who died upon the cross.

The shield’s power becomes evident in battle. Evelake has a cloth placed before it; when danger is greatest, he orders the cloth removed. His enemies see the figure of a man on the cross and are routed. When one of Evelake’s men loses a hand, Joseph directs him to touch the cross on the shield, and the hand is restored. The cross later vanishes, and Evelake is baptized, as are most of the people of the city. His conversion is thus presented not only as a decision prompted by prophecy, but as a change confirmed by wonders associated with the Christian sign.

Joseph and the Shield

Evelake’s attachment to Joseph shapes the next stage of his life. When Joseph is dying, Evelake mourns that he left his own country for Joseph’s sake and asks for a token by which to remember him. Joseph chooses the shield Evelake carried against Tolleme. Bleeding from the nose and unable to stop it, he draws a cross in his own blood upon the shield. He explains that Evelake will remember him whenever he sees it, and that the mark will remain fresh.

Joseph also gives the shield a future purpose. No one may bear it without repenting until Galahad, the worthy knight of Joseph’s lineage, carries it; the last of Joseph’s line will then perform many marvelous deeds. Joseph instructs Evelake to leave the shield where the hermit Nacien will be laid after his death. The appointed knight is to arrive there on the fifteenth day after receiving knighthood. In this way the shield is both a personal remembrance of Joseph and a sign that connects Evelake’s lifetime to a future Grail quest.

Centuries of Waiting

The book later presents Evelake as an extraordinarily old, wounded king. When Percivale spends a night at a monastery, he sees a crowned figure lying behind the altar in a rich bed, with his face initially covered. At the consecration, the figure rises enough for Percivale to see that his shoulders, arms, and face bear many wounds. He raises his hands in prayer, and the priest brings the sacrament to him. The monks identify him as Evelake, the king converted by Joseph in Sarras.

The account explains that Evelake came with Joseph into Britain and remained devoted to the Holy Grail. Once, he approached it so closely that God was displeased and struck him almost blind. Evelake begged not to die before a good knight of his blood, descended from him in the ninth degree, arrived. He hoped to see that knight openly and kiss him, and the monks’ explanation ties his extraordinary longevity to this deferred meeting. His waiting is at once a consequence of his closeness to the Grail and an expectation directed toward a particular descendant.

The Grail’s Fulfillment

The narrative makes Evelake’s long wait part of a history extending beyond his own scenes. Joseph’s blood-marked shield passes forward as a trial and inheritance, while Evelake’s prayer specifies the descendant whose arrival will fulfill his hope. At the Grail’s revelation, Joseph appears as the first bishop of Christendom, though he has been dead for more than three hundred years; the vision places Evelake’s former companion within the sacred history that the Grail continues to disclose.

Evelake’s significance therefore lies in the joining of personal loyalty, Christian conversion, and dynastic expectation. His story gives the Grail quest a human past: the holy object is not merely sought by later knights, but is bound to Joseph’s mission, to a king changed by faith, and to a promise preserved through generations. Galahad’s eventual Grail achievement answers the expectation for which Evelake has endured, making the aged king’s life a link between the first witnesses of the sacred history and its destined culmination.