Grimm Legends: Tristan & Iseult

Well, I'm not going to manage a full reread of Malory and Knowles and the Belloc translation of Bedier's Romance of Tristan and Iseult, because nobody can be concise. You think we're wordy? Try reading medieval manuscripts for purposes of essaying. Or don't. I highly recommend don't, unless you're as much of a glutton for punishment as I am. If you want, though, you can see the links to the sections I pulled from Gutenberg up above, and feel free to play picky detail-oriented word games with the source material! THAT said, we can hit some of the highlights of the myth as it bears a passing resemblance to the Renard-Juliette-Nick arc they've so neatly set up for us. There are some very interesting aspects to this, not least in the versions that include Arthur - though the original Romance predates cramming all the legendary figures of the Isles together into one overarching story.

Love Potions And You: Grimm Grail Legends

Or, How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love Whoever The Potion Told Me To.

We are far from done picking apart Grimm for its Arthurian and Grail parallels, but we've been waiting to get more of a mytharc for this season before combing through it again. I think, at this point, you can safely expect a flurry of Arthuriana at mid-season hiatus and/or at season finale times, followed by long stretches of accumulating data. However! We have at this point two instances of love potions used in the show, and I judge it only a matter of time before we get a third for Rule of Three reasons - though I wouldn't put it past the writers to include that in backstory rather than dropping it into a season arc. At this point I'd rather prefer it, because love potions get very old, very fast. Unless you want to count Juliette's coma and Renard's pure of heart potion as two instances, which I don't, really. We saw in SotH that Adalind's was fairly surprised that Renard took the pure of heart potion, which implies a whole lot of things, up to and including that she thought he knew more about how the potion(s) worked than he did. At any rate! Two for-sure instances of love potions, which means it's time for a brief refresher on love potions in Arthurian legends.

Grimm Legends: Go Fish

The Fisher King. Not just a movie with Jeff Bridges and Robin Williams! (Although I would say that movie is well worth watching.) The concept of the Fisher King is a simple one: in the abstract, the king is the land is the king, and what befalls the king befalls the land as well. In the slightly more specific, the origins of the Fisher King are tied in with some of the first Grail stories. The Fisher King is the keeper of an artifact of power, usually the Grail, and he is wounded or disabled in some way, usually in the groin or upper leg area. If a questing knight asks the right questions, the king and thus the land are healed and the artifact is passed down to the questioner, who becomes the new guardian.

This is a very popular trope. Just off the top of my head the places where "the king is the land is the king" appears include: Pirates of the Caribbean (succeeded by Will Turner), the Dreaming world from The Sandman by Neil Gaiman (succeeded from Morpheus by Daniel), the Last Unicorn both book and movie (succeeded from Haggard by Lir), the Dark Crystal (succeeded by the Gelflings), a couple of countries in the Kushiel trilogy (most notably Drujan, but arguably Phedre herself, buying ten years of peace with the lives of ten knights sworn to her), the Lord of the Rings series with Mordor and the elven kingdoms, the Dark is Rising sequence, Discworld, the Wizard of Oz, the Chronicles of Narnia (always winter and never Christmas, anyone?), everything David Eddings ever wrote, Asimov's Foundation, Wheel of Time, I could go on. At length. Even in non-European myth this crops up, with the Green Willow myth from Japanese culture and there is mention of a king in the Ramayana whose emotions change the seasons of his country. I'm sure if we wanted to take another hour we could double this list, but you get the idea. The Fisher King and his (or her) kingdom appear all over the freaking place.

With that in mind, and with Adsartha already having taken you through the Grimm-Grail Quest parallels, let's address the Fisher King concept specifically. There are no direct Fisher Kings in Grimm, yet. The prevalence of the trope alone, not to mention previously discussed literal and historical geekery, is enough to convince me that that's very much a yet. But we can discuss the potential Fisher Kings, the existence of artifacts that deal with one's spiritual health affecting the physical world, and other related phenomena. 

Grimm Legends: Grail Quest

I'll be the first to admit that it took an outside perspective to smack me with the dead fish and point out the Grail parallels in Grimm. (Thank the husbeast.) But once I saw them, I couldn't un-see them for the life of me. I have Arthuriana goggles. They're worse than slash goggles. But they're HELPING.

We already know the writers and show-runners are using old-school symbolism. Characters have significant(ly groan-worthy)  names, Billy Capra, Hanson and Gracie, Leo Taymor. The allied species are the more benign ones, foxes and a wolf and Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, and the enemy species are hags, trolls, and ogres. The forest is the place where all the bad shit happens. Blood magic, both sympathetic and bloodline.

We also already knew that they were playing up the numbers game. We touched on the Rule of Three in the ritual with Renard and his priest-assassin thing in Last Grimm Standing, and seven is probably the most common number to choose when you want a blatantly Significant Number that's greater than three but manageable with a simple core storyline. Still, with the seven royal families and their seven knights (who I still suspect of being part of the Templars, but we don't have in-canon proof on that yet) and their one greatest treasure to rule them all, we've got some hefty evidence pointing not at the One Ring, but at the Grail itself. Or a Grail-like object, anyway.