Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles - Patricia Terry

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with marriage, because true love must be free of social constraint. Erotic passion, in antiquity, was considered a disaster, a curse from the gods, and the warriors of early medieval French epic poems had essentially no interest in women, except as a form of property. It was a radical transformation when, at least in literature, a knight could be regarded as lacking prestige unless he won the love of a noble lady. He would devote himself to performing heroic deeds, but at least as much to a discreet courtship of his beloved, in the hope that she would consider him worthy of her favor. Occasionally he might even be granted a transcendent physical proof of her acceptance. From this we derive the homage that Western literature has paid to passionate, adulterous, and, almost inevitably, tragic love ever since the twelfth century.

      The Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, however, do not reflect this trend, since they most often are concerned with finding a means to reconcile the demands of a knight’s career with his desire for a happy marriage. The exception among his romances is a story of Lancelot called The Knight of the Cart, whose plot and meaning were both provided by the poet’s patron, Marie de Champagne, granddaughter of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, the first known troubadour, and daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. It was she, presumably, who first imagined the exemplary knight in love with King Arthur’s wife, Guenevere. Chrétien does not relate the beginning of Lancelot’s love for the queen but concentrates on a later episode in their relationship: the queen has been abducted, and Lancelot abruptly appears, already on his way to rescue her. The abduction of the queen seems to be a Celtic motif, and the hero’s name, Lancelot du Lac, may have had a Celtic source as well. Chrétien writes briefly of Lancelot’s having been raised by a fairy who gave him a magic ring, capable of distinguishing enchantments from realities. The fairy will come to help him whenever he is in need.

      The cart mentioned in Chrétien’s title suggests the guiding principle of the story: the true lover must be ready to sacrifice even his honor for the sake of his beloved. In this first test of his devotion, Lancelot can only rescue the queen if he agrees to ride in a vehicle considered shameful because it was used for the transport of criminals. The knight hesitates, though only for a few seconds. When her freedom has been restored, the queen refuses to see him, outraged by this evidence of imperfection in his love. Later, he is given a chance to redeem himself during a tournament. Guenevere requests that he behave like a coward, and he does so, with no sign of distress.

      The intensity of Lancelot’s love causes him almost to lose his mind; he is so lost in adoration that he notices nothing of the world around him; he is so determined to reach his beloved that he can find the strength to wrench iron bars apart; he is so moved by finding the queen’s comb, with some of her hairs caught in it, that he venerates it like a holy relic. The queen acknowledges her own passion only when she believes that Lancelot has died. The tale is filled with odd and marvelous adventures and with much that can be seen as unsympathetic caricaturing of “courtly” love. Chrétien left it to be finished by a colleague, whether from disapproval or simply loss of interest is not known. But the adulterous relationship of Lancelot and Guenevere had now found a permanent place in Arthurian legend.

      The work with which we are concerned here is an anonymous series of early thirteenth-century French prose romances collectively called the Lancelot-Grail, or Arthurian Vulgate Cycle.1 It narrates in elaborate and leisurely detail the rise and fall of King Arthur, intertwining a chronicle of politics and warfare, chivalry and love with the sorcery of Merlin and the quest for the Holy Grail. It is a broadly ranging fiction, expressive of the ideals, realities and underlying questions of its time, uncomfortably caught between a Christian imperative and the vibrant memory of a pagan past. Of the five romances – The History of the Holy Grail, The Story of Merlin, Lancelot, The Quest for the Holy Grail, The Death of King Arthur – Lancelot is by far the longest and most luxuriantly filled with character and incident. The story of Lancelot and the queen is fully developed here and in the fifth romance, where it will reach its unhappy end, along with the downfall of the kingdom.

      Many motifs connect The Knight of the Cart with the Prose Lancelot, among them the hero’s discovery of his eventual tomb, and the extreme deference that he shows to the queen, but the spirit of the prose work is entirely different. Two factors are particularly important: magic and a new understanding of love.

      The helpful fairy mentioned by Chrétien has now become the Lady of the Lake. Named Niniane, or Viviane, she has a prior history connected with that of Merlin, who attempted to seduce her. Knowing that Merlin’s father was a devil, she only pretended to accept him, trading illusory favors for his knowledge of sorcery. In the end, she has learned enough to confine the magician in an invisible tomb from which he will never emerge. Among the gifts she has learned from Merlin is an ability to foretell the future.

      Thus it can be assumed that when the Lady of the Lake carries off the infant Lancelot, to raise him in her magical kingdom concealed by the semblance of a lake, she does so as an agent of his fate. He grows up believing her to be his mother, and even after he has apparently been released from her influence and fallen in love with the queen, the Lady of the Lake still shapes his life. In times of danger she sends him magical weapons, she heals him when a fit of madness has brought him close to death, and she encourages Guenevere in her illicit love. She is not deterred by her foreknowledge that that love will ultimately destroy the Arthurian kingdom. On the contrary, it would seem that she has extended her hatred of Merlin to include his protégé King Arthur, born thanks to Merlin’s sorcery. In our retelling of the story, the final gesture of her own magic is to slip Excalibur, which has been Arthur’s sword, into Lancelot’s tomb.

      Lancelot lives in exile from a land he has never known, from a royal birthright he has never made an effort to recover. His real homeland is the Lady’s domain, and it seems indeed to be real in every way. But it is an otherworldly, enchanted place, and no one who meets him in later life can fail to find him correspondingly extra-ordinary. His exceptional beauty is always mentioned – and beauty, in medieval times as well as today, was regarded as a sign of a person’s moral worth. There is a radiance about Lancelot as a child, and a physical ease, so that everything comes naturally to him, whether it be reading or riding fine horses or jousting. The intensity of emotion that will characterize him as an adult is shown, in his early years, by his response to perceived injustice. When the Lady, for a moment, seems somewhat remote, he is ready to gallop away in the direction of King Arthur. He does not notice that she is in distress, having realized that her cherished ward has reached the age when he must leave her and become a knight. Later on, he will not always notice the grief of others.

      A certain insensitivity is useful in a hero. Lancelot, when he fights, is more a force of nature than a man. He is impersonal also in his ignorance of his past, of his lineage. The Lady, bidding him farewell at Arthur’s court, reveals that she is not his mother, but tells him little more about his identity. In the white armor she had given him, he goes out alone into the world looking for trials of his prowess. The greatest of these is his conquest of Dolorous Guard, a victory not only over forces that had defeated many famous knights, but also over the supernatural. In the aftermath, he discovers not only the tomb where he will be buried but also learns his very name, and that he is the son of King Ban. The discovery is to remain his secret, however, until much later.

      Perhaps this revelation seems to him merely abstract. Or perhaps he feels unworthy of such a heritage, despite his extraordinary accomplishments. The Prose Lancelot offers no speculations. What is clear is that when he turns once again toward King Arthur’s court, the White Knight, who might be recognized, takes on a new persona as the Red Knight, whose valiant performance on the battlefield will be surpassed on a subsequent occasion by the even more impressive Black Knight. No one imagines a connection between the Lady’s beautiful youth dressed in white and this warrior on whom King Arthur’s very survival has come to depend.

      Before Lancelot’s return, King Arthur was challenged by Galehaut, Lord of the Distant Isles, a realm almost as mysterious as the domain where Lancelot had spent his childhood. Galehaut’s mother, we are told, was a giantess, and we learn, from another thirteenth-century source, that his father imposed such cruel customs on visitors as to make his son prefer a life of exile. Galehaut’s ambition was nothing less than conquest of the world, and so far he had known nothing but success. By the time he sent

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