The Queste del saint Graal, composed c. 1225–1230, survives in a large number of manuscripts – currently forty-three complete manuscripts – which contain either the entire Lancelot-Grail Cycle or the Lancelot–Queste–Mort Artu trilogy. In the epilogue, the name ‘Mestre Gautier Map’ purports to be the one who, ‘pour l’amour du roi Henri son seigneur,’ transposed from Latin into French this estoire that has been kept since the days of Arthur in the armoire [library] at Salesbieres [Salisbury]. The attribution of the narrative to Gautier Map, a cleric who lived at the court of Henry II and composed works in Latin, is of course a literary hoax. The hoax testifies nevertheless to the anonymous author's desire to inscribe the genesis and the trajectory of this disconcerting text in a space-time that goes from the fictional world of Arthur to the Norman kingdom of England at the end of the twelfth century, the time and the place in which the Arthurian legend did in fact come into its own, no doubt promoted by the Plantagenets.

One more fact seems certain. Even though the origin of the Lancelot-Grail still eludes us, the Queste, a narrative whose real title is given in the epilogue as Les Aventures del seint Graal (280), presents itself as the expected and programmed continuation of the Lancelot and, given the reduction of the normal resources of the narrative it entails, it announces La Mort le roi Artu as the text that will conclude the Cycle. There may have been, as Elspeth Kennedy believes, a non-cyclic Lancelot that focused on the heroic and amorous adventures of the titular hero and located the quest for the Holy Grail and its hero, Perceval, in a time long past. The Lancelot has nonetheless come down to us as a narrative whose hero was given the ‘droit nom’ of Galaad, which his son will eventually bear; a narrative in which the quest for the holy Grail is defined as the quest for the grans repostailles, the secrets of Our Lord, and is projected into the future; a narrative which announces several times that the quest will be completed by Galahad because Lancelot's sin of adultery will disqualify him from being the Elect.