Description:
The greatest of all the medieval romances about the Holy Grail, Parzival was written in the early thirteenth century.
The narrative describes the quest of the Arthurian knight, Parzival, for the Holy Grail. His journey is filled with incident, from tournaments and sieges to chivalrous deeds and displays of true love. The poem influenced several later works, most notably Richard Wagner's opera of the same name and Umberto Eco's Baudolino.
The text used in this recording is Cyril Edwards's modern prose translation.
Brief description:
Leighton Pugh trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art after studying modern languages at Queen's College, Oxford. He has narrated audiobooks for Penguin, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Random House, Hachette, and Quercus. His radio work includes the plays Murder by the Book and Scenes from Provincial Life for BBC Radio 4 and the voice of Heinrich von Kleist in the BBC Radio 3 documentary The Tragical Adventure of Heinrich von Kleist. From 2010-2011 he was in four productions at the National Theatre, including The Habit of Art and A Woman Killed with Kindness.
Review Quotes:
"This prose translation of one of the earliest of the Grail stories is a corker of a medieval romance, and narrator Leighton Pugh makes the most of its tension and occasional flashes of humor and emotion. Listeners should be prepared for some surprises. The Grail itself, for example, is a stone, not a cup, and has nothing to do with Jesus. By the time the legends reached Malory, who wrote Le Morte d'Arthur, they had evolved considerably. Pugh uses a range of voices and accents to differentiate characters, but the text gives him little help; not until the Renaissance, for the most part, did the people in stories start becoming more than symbols. The one exception here is Eschenbach, who pops in occasionally as himself."
-- "AudioFile"