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The Wasteland is a strange image for Middle earth - where or what is the Grail?
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Davem The interesting thing about the chapter discussions is you never know where things are heading! Despite my use of the term, I had not thought about linking the motif of the wasteland with the Grail legends as a whole.
I do want to clarify what I initially meant, since I was coming at this from a quite different angle. I did not mean for "wasteland" to typify Middle-earth as a whole, which your question above seems to suggest. Rather I was speaking of certain specific tracts of land. Leslie Ellen Jones in Myth and Middle Earth has written about Isengaard, Mordor, and the Shire of the Scouring as examples of the wasteland operating in Middle-earth. Her contention is that these represent not the medieval wastelands of the grail legend, but "modern" ones that have been created by the hand of war and technology. The prime ingredient of a wasteland for Tolkien, according to Jones, is for it to be stripped of trees.
What struck me in reading this chapter is that the specific area through which Strider and crew are trudging in this chapter sound suspiciously like a wasteland, but one modelled on medieval rather than modern terms. I wasn't thinking about the wider ramifications of the grail legend per se. Of course, we can look back and know about the Percival of Chretien de Troyes, Eschebach's Parzifal and such. I was thinking not of this literary tradition, but of the pre-Christian myth that preceded it.
Before any of the grail legend was set on paper, there were Celtic tales of myth and faerie that embodied the idea of the wasteland. (The literary embodiment of this earlier mythic tradition does appear in the Third Branch of the Mabinogi, but the legends themselves go back much deeper.)
Unlike the grail legends which would have been accessible only to the literate and privileged, these faerie concepts of wasteland would have been widespread through the general populace. In this "popular" medieval concept, a wasteland is a general term for lands that are of no use to humans. You can't really farm or graze or even make your living by hunting there. The popular wasteland even has monstors or evil spirits. (There are hints of this in the land Gawaine must go through when he meets the Green Knight.)
In the medieval mind, there is very little sense of the wilderness as a place of renewal and beauty which was so often voiced in the romantic era. The feeling is that the best land is domesticated and undomesticated land -- in effect, a wasteland --is a curse.
I have other ideas on this, but I actually want to put them up as a separate thread so will wait to discuss them there.....