Fisher King - Modern Versions of The Legend

Modern Versions of The Legend

Richard Wagner used the myth in his opera Parsifal, based on Wolfram's work. T. S. Eliot made use of the legend in his poem The Waste Land.

In Stephen Lawhead's Pendragon Cycle, Merlin's grandfather Avallach, previously a king of lost Atlantis, is explicitly called the Fisher King. He carries a wound never healed from battle and spends his later years in Britain fishing on the lake. The character appears again in opera in Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage, partly inspired by Eliot's poem.

The story is told in Éric Rohmer's 1978 film Perceval le Gallois, based on Chrétien de Troye's Perceval. The story of a wounded king whose wounds cause the land to become a wasteland, then healed by the grail recovered by Percival, is woven directly into the story of King Arthur in John Boorman's 1981 film Excalibur. The story is also dealt with in the 1991 movie The Fisher King, directed by Terry Gilliam.

The Fisher King also appears in a series 3 episode of the BBC's Merlin. He lives in a kingdom called simply "The Perilous Lands."

Other modern takes on the Fisher King appear in novels like C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength, Paule Marshall's The Fisher King: A Novel, Tim Powers' novels The Drawing of the Dark and Last Call, Susan Cooper's The Grey King (part of The Dark is Rising Sequence), and Matt Wagner's comic book series Mage. Don Nigro's play Fisher King retells the story during the American Civil War. In 1998, David Crosby wrote and recorded a song with the band CPR, called "Somehow She Knew", based on personal experiences and the movie The Fisher King. Joan Didion compared president Ronald Reagan to the legendary king in her critical essay "In the Realm of the Fisher King," published in 1989. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series includes a game where the central piece is called "the Fisher", which is a piece in the shape of an old, blinded and wounded man in a similar manner to the main character of the series, Rand, whose emotions seem tied to the land. His presence should also be recognized in the novel The Natural where Pop Fisher resembles him in the fact that while he was sick, the team was on a losing streak.