Subject: Re: Fischer King
From: barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Barb Miller)
Date: 1991-06-30, 05:34
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks
Reply-to: barb@zurich.ai.mit.edu

I realize this is tangential, but since traffic is down and a number
of people seem to be interested in this, I am posting rather then e-mailing.

In article <eFiB51w163w@zitt> joe@zitt (Joe Zitt) writes:

   A bunch of posts in the past few weeks here have made reference to the
   myth of the Fisher King. What is this, and where does it come from?

   I'd been wondering about it since I saw it here, and have since stumbled
   across another reference to it in the liner notes to a Sting album, which,
   however, was not particularly informative.

   (I wonder if there's a corresponding myth of the Spassky Rook...)

No, I hadn't caught the chess allusion that your deliberate
misspelling in the subject field brings up (although, did I really
believe that there was some serious Fisher King allegory going on in
Twin Peaks I wouldn't have put it past the writers to have thought of it).

The Fisher King is a major figure in the legendry surrounding the Holy
Grail, which is (by most interpretations) the cup that Jesus used at
the Last Supper, carried into Europe by Joseph of Arimathea.  This cup
appears in a vision to King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table
and the knights decide they will go off on a quest to find the actual
Grail.  This is generally taken to be the first sign of the breakup of
the Round Table.  The full basic story can be read in Bulfinch's
Mythology (almost certainly available at your college library).  The
interesting part about the story in Bulfinch is that the Grail was
given over into a line of kings to protect it, but the requirement was
that they live lives of perfect purity.  This worked fine until one
Grail King had impure thoughts about a female pilgrim whose robe
loosened as she knelt before him.  After this he was called "Le Roi
Pescheur", or the Sinner King.  Well, in French "Pescheur" for sinner,
is very close in sound to "Pecheur" for fisherman, and so the name
eventually became the Fisher King.

There are many variants on this legend from different traditions.
The elements that have generally shown up in later allusions (T. S.
Eliot's "The Waste Land" springs to mind) center around the fact that
the Fisher King is wounded in the "thigh" (a euphemism for saying that
he's impotent) and at the same time his lands are unable to bear
fruit.  The people are starving.  Fertility can only be restored by
the arrival of a pure knight, who in different versions has different
requirements made of him, and if this knight does what he's supposed
to do, the Fisher King's wound will be healed (presumably by the
Grail) and the land will come back to life.  In the Parsifal legend,
the knight fails on his first try and has to have a number of
adventures before he can try again, but he is eventually successful.
In the Galahad legend (which is quoted in Bulfinch), the pure knight
Galahad has a fairly easy time of it, although his father Lancelot is
not able to see the Grail because of his involvement with Queen
Guenevere.

Jessica Weston wrote a book in the 1920's called "From Ritual to
Romance" in which she ties in the symbols of the Grail legend with
ancient fertility rites mentioned in Fraser's "The Golden Bough".  It
is worth reading if you're interested in the theme of restoring energy
to something that's spiritually or emotionally dying.  I do remember
reading somewhere that later scholarship has shown her theories to be
wrong, but I don't know whether this was anthropological, literary, or
mythological scholarship.  I also don't know if there is a particular
source which has succeeded it as the definitive thought-provoking book
on the Grail Legend.

I'm sure this is More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about the Fisher
King, but perhaps it will clarify the Sting reference for you.

Barb Miller