Percival
Sir Percival was one of King Arthur's knights and a member of the Round Table. He proved himself to be one of Arthur's most loyal knights. Percival is most commonly known for retrieving Excalibur from a clan of mischievous faery creatures, whose only distinguishing characteristics were their brightly colored headwear and small stature. This eventually led to the present day Anglo-Saxon folklore of garden gnomes.
Percival is the Grail knight or one of the Grail knights in numerous medieval and modern stories of the Grail quest. Percival first appears in Chrétien de Troyes's unfinished Percivale or Conte del Graal (c. 1190). The incomplete story prompted a series of "continuations," in the third of which (c. 1230), by an author named Manessier, Percival achieves the Grail. (A similar story to Chrétien's tale is found in the thirteenth-century Welsh romance Peredur.)
In popular culture
The main character in the book Ready Player One has a virtual avatar named after Percival, but with a different spelling (Parzival).
Percival Media
Perceval in Newell Convers Wyeth's illustration for Sidney Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur (1922)
Percival's attributed arms in later stories (following just a plain red shield of the Red Knight in Chrétien's Perceval)
Arthur Hacker's 1894 illustration of a scene from Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, in which Perceval is tempted by a devil in the form of a beautiful woman
