Lancelot and Guinevere

A Casebook

Lori J. Walters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780815306535
• eBook ISBN: 9781317721543
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beginning with an introduction that examines the portrayal of the characters of Lancelot and Guinevere from their origins to the present day, this collection of 16 essays-five of which appear here for the first time-puts particular emphasis on the appearance of the two characters in medieval and modern literature. Besides several studies exploring feminist concerns, the volume features articles on the representation of the lovers in medieval manuscript illuminations (18 plates focus on scenes of their first kiss and the consummation of the adultery), in film, and in other visual arts. A 200-item bibliography completes the volume.

1 THE PRESENTATION OF THE
CHARACTER OF LANCELOT

CHRÉTIEN TO MALORY

Derek Brewer

I

In the development of Arthurian story Lancelot seems as it were to spring fully-formed from the mind of Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century. Compared with Kay, Gawain and others, he is a newcomer to Arthur’s company. Yet, by the first quarter of the thirteenth century he seems to have achieved that pre-eminence which he has held ever since. This suddenness is not the least of the puzzles and paradoxes which surround the figure of Lancelot, and which contribute to the lasting interest that is attached to him.

Though Lancelot is interesting, he is not interesting as a ‘character’, that is, as an individual personality, such as we expect to find in a good novel. In some versions he has some ‘inwardness’, some specific, idiosyncratic contour of personality, and even in Chrétien, as will be noted, he is recognisable if only for the extravagance of his feelings, but he is primarily the type, the example, representative in its very extremity, of the good knight. In considering Lancelot we must recognise that we are dealing with a figure in traditional literature, whose story exists before the named character, whose adventures are recounted by numerous different authors, in works which develop out of each other, with multiple similarities and variations. Being the hero of many such related narratives gives him a status both less and more than that of a fully realised character in a single novel, and even makes it possible to speak of a ‘biography’ of Lancelot, a history of his development as a figure, which should be as it were a biography of his biographies, of the stories about him. A modern version of the admirable but outdated study by Jessie L. Weston is much to be desired. The present essay attempts only to point to one literary aspect, mainly in Malory, that such an account would include.¹

II

The elements from which Chrétien built the structure (which is all the present essay is concerned with) of his story have long been recognised as partly derived from Celtic stories of the abduction of a woman, usually to the Otherworld, and her rescue. To this we shall return. The other main element has been less sharply focussed. It is the theme known to folklorists as that of the Fair Unknown, which was coming into prominence in the twelfth century in Western Europe in a variety of versions. It became probably the most frequent of themes in medieval romance. The living survivors are those folktales known as ‘fairy tales’, which evoke the sense of mysterious origins, describe the emergence of the individual into the adult world through various tests, establish the protagonist’s sense of his own identity, and usually signalise both self-identification and emergence by successful marriage. I consider the theme of the Fair Unknown first.

It will be recalled that the name of Lancelot is referred to by Chrétien several times in poems apparently earlier than his Lancelot poem, Le Chevalier de la Charrette and his existence, apart from Chretien’s invention, is suggested by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, written in High German verse probably around 1200 in Switzerland.² This poem claims plausibly to be based on an Anglo-Norman original, and was composed perhaps twenty years earlier, apparently in ignorance of Chretien’s Charrette. The origin of the name Lancelot is still uncertain. Whatever the origin of the name, Ulrich’s poem is a relatively simple romance of the Fair Unknown type. The hero is the son of King Pant, but the father dies and the child as a baby is stolen by a fairy from the sea, variously called ‘a lady’, ‘a wise mermaid’, ‘a queen’. She brings him up lovingly, and has him trained in various exercises, but keeps him ignorant of his name and rank, and of chivalric practices, in a land somehow lost in the sea, inhabited solely by women. At the age of fifteen he insists on departure, so the fairy gives him fine white armour, and a horse which he does not know how to control. He rides forth, and the story tells how he meets a succession of knights with beautiful daughters. The knights he kills, the daughters he mostly sleeps with, to the number of four, all the while being praised by the poet for his bravery and nobility. The lady he finally stays with and marries is actually the third in this agreeable series. The hero is ashamed that he does not know who he is (3165–3232). It is significant that as soon as he has killed his main antagonist, Iweret (whom it turns out that the water-fairy has reared him in order to kill), and has promptly had sexual intercourse with his daughter, Yblis (who had luckily fallen in love with him in a dream the previous night), a messenger arrives from the water-fairy to tell him his name and rank. Full adulthood is expressed in sexual maturity, knowledge of one’s identity, and a stable loving relationship. Lanzelet has several more adventures, including some at Arthur’s court, and strays with another lady, though against his will. Despite the episodic nature of the story, which has probably been amplified by the stringing together of various similar stories, the underlying structure is a clear version of that family drama embodied in so many medieval romances, which I have discussed fully elsewhere.³ The pattern of the mysterious origin, the testing battles against various father-figures and others, the achievement of the lady as an equal, and the establishment of identity, thus solving the mystery of origin and finding a place in society, is quite unequivocal. The water-fairy as foster mother is a distinctive marker for this stage of the Lancelot story, but she is not absolutely necessary in herself for the pattern. The hero, Perceval, from whose story Ulrich probably borrowed some elements, is another form of the Fair Unknown pattern, but he knows his own mother. A dead father, never known by the hero, is more significant to the quest for identity in the Middle Ages, as for example in Sir Degarre.

Ulrich’s Lanzelet, and a few other references to Lancelot, are enough to establish the existence of some sort of Lancelot story in the twelfth century, probably including Celtic antecedents, but by then an independent version of a wide-spread theme. There is more precise evidence for a type of Celtic story concerning the abduction of a woman and her rescue which has a quite different pattern. The numerous Celtic analogues which must lie among the antecedents of the story have been tested and discussed by Cross and Nitze, and the theme itself frequently studied, most recently by Professor W. Haug.⁴ Cross and Nitze isolate the original elements and consider that the accounts of Guinevere’s abduction in various romances are based ultimately on a Celtic tale of the following type:

1. A husband is visited by a mysterious stranger. The visitor is a former

lover of the lady and has come to claim her.

2. (a) The stranger claims the right to demand anything he may wish.

When his claim is acknowledged, he asks for the person of the lady, (b) He
snatches the lady away without ceremony.

3. He does not, however, consummate his union with her at once.

4. He is pursued by the husband (a) alone, (b) in company with a band

of armed followers.

5. He resides in a supernatural realm, which the rescuer reaches after traversing

perilous passage and being entertained and directed by a ‘hospitable
host’.

6. The rescuer finally succeeds in recovering the lady (a) by the help of a

‘wise man’, (b) by a ruse.

7. The heroine is a fée, the former wife (or mistress) of the abductor.

(Op. cit. , p. 61)

Although these scholars tend to reduce the origins of traditional stories to one hypothetical tale, this is to go beyond the evidence. What we have is a significant cluster or pattern of elements hanging together in a recognisable but by no means invariable shape. No one version accords with the simple hypothetical archetype, because there was almost certainly no such thing. Each has a characteristic selection and within limits of recognition a variable sequence of events, which embody the pattern which is only pre-existent in so far as it lies ‘behind’ or ‘beneath’ a variety of manifestations. It can only be traced through the verbal realisations which are the various narrated versions we possess, themselves influenced by current social and other pressures. This phenomenon is well recognised in the study of myth and folktale, but it also applies to that kind of literature I have called ‘traditional’. As Cross and Nitze observe, there is no evidence that the abduction theme was connected with any particular heroine. “Like other traditional plots, it was a sort of blank check to be filled in with characters according to the predictions of the narrator” (op. cit. , pp. 55–6). The metaphor is too rigid for the fluidity of such clusters, but it makes the main point. Put simply, Chrétien wrote ‘Lancelot’ and ‘Guinevere’ in the blanks of the abduction story.

The story in its barest outline is powerfully resonant. It calls to mind similar tales from classical antiquity, of Orpheus and Eurydice, of Pluto and Proserpine. They all image the pain of loss and death, and the irrepressible hope with which vital societies and persons confront such loss. The stories are non-naturalistic, whatever social base they may sometimes have had in violent times. The essentially non-naturalistic structure determines certain responses, for example, the absence of shame on the part of both husband and wife (because the abductor is a supernatural being), and the failure of an apparently lustful abductor to consummate his success. It may also account for the frequent pattern in abduction stories of the rescuer being not the husband, but someone else, a young hero.

It may be this latter fact which attracted Chrétien. It is natural for a story-teller to wish to make his received story as convincing as possible. In his telling he interprets, rationalises and makes vivid his tale. Although Chrétien enjoys puzzles, symbolic mysteries, paradoxes, as much as anyone, he is greatly interested in the workings of the mind under the stress of love. For all his love of mystification Chrétien has also a vein of rationalism and an interest in motive, to which his secularism is a witness. When he contemplated the young hero, not her husband, rescuing the abducted lady, what better motive could he perceive than that the hero loved the lady? In Lancelot he knew of a young hero who had amply demonstrated his susceptibility to female charm, perhaps in several short lais, of the kind which Ulrich may have strung together. There was furthermore a tradition of Guinevere’s unfaithfulness to Arthur: Marie de France’s Lanval makes some play with this, and one early tradition makes Mordred, Arthur’s nephew, her lover. It was natural in telling such tales as that of the abduction to make husband and wife king and queen, archetypes of humanity. The king in Chretien’s poems could only be Arthur. Arthur is blameless and who was Chrétien to hold the Queen up to scorn? For the noble Lancelot to be not the lover of several women, but devoted to Guinevere alone accounts for his rescue of her, leaves her relatively blameless, and Arthur is not made ridiculous. The intensification of Lancelot’s love, if it be not the cause, is certainly the effect of the combination of Lancelot as the Fair Unknown with the abduction story; and it allows Chrétien to explore, not without a touch of satire, that obsessive passion of love which so greatly interested him, his audience, and so many readers since. This humanising and deepening of the feeling makes the relationships between the three principals more human and potentially more painful. It could ultimately lead only to tragedy, the antithesis of romance. It may be, as I have argued elsewhere,⁵ that it was for this reason that Chrétien did not himself finish his poem. As now completed, the story has the happy ending intrinsic to romance, but once the situation is seen in terms of the ordinary human existence of actual people, the implications—granted medieval social conditions and assumptions about marriage, honor and loyalty—are disastrous. Chrétien may have felt this, and left the story to be conventionally finished with a happy ending by Godefroi de Leigni, with Chretien’s consent, but perhaps without his heartfelt endorsement.

Chrétien presents us in his poem with a most sophisticated and creative treatment of traditional materials. He picks and chooses, rejects, borrows from a variety of sources, gives unusual twists to what is familiar, and invents. Thus he twists the theme of the Fair Unknown to tease the reader or hearer about Lancelot, not naming him for most of the poem, though he seems to assume that the reader recognises who he is, and that he is the lover of the queen. Lancelot is at last triumphantly identified, but he is never in doubt about his own identity. His fairy foster-mother and the magic ring she gave him are briefly mentioned (2354–62) but Chrétien makes nothing of Lancelot’s ignorance of his origins or of any solution of his ignorance. There is a playful element in the poem, which does not prevent Chrétien also suggesting the profounder echoes in the story. He is thus able in the first part to narrate a sequence of puzzling events which modern critics, even Frappier, have often considered feeble, yet whose power to fascinate they have been unable to resist. The second part of the poem, following Lancelot’s passage of the sword-bridge, in which Lancelot and Guinevere are seen, at least occasionally, together, has been considered less illogical and improbable. It is right to recognise the convincing humanity of Lancelot’s relationship here, but surely mistaken to divorce it from the illogicality of the first part. Logic is not intrinsic to powerful stories. They draw their strength from deep patterns of the mind. It seems similarly mistaken to attribute the interest that Lancelot holds for us to Chretien’s establishment of a “well-defined, clearly individualised character” (Frappier, op. cit., p. 104). Realistic, personalised characterisation is by no means intrinsic to the presentation of a personage in a traditional story. Frappier himself gives a truer insight a paragraph later, when he refers to Lancelot’s representative, typical, virtually archetypal character. Lancelot has two simple exemplary traits. He is the best knight in the world; he obsessively loves the Queen, which causes him occasionally to fall into a trance.

In the portrayal of Lancelot generally we recognise a vein of extravagance. He is the most obsessive of lovers, as he is the most beloved of ladies, and the greatest of fighters. Chrétien screws the tension to its highest point. When this hyperbole of character is placed in conjunction with the illogicality of events, and both are judged by the terms of what goes for commonsense nowadays, that is, according to contemporary naturalistic assumptions, the effect is as memorable as ever, but the interpretation may be confused. Some critics have seen Chretien’s portrayal of Lancelot as condemnatory or burlesque.⁶ This is surely anachronistic and confuses several issues by imposing modern assumptions about behavior which there is no reason to think that Chrétien shared. One such assumption is that stories, and characters, and their standards, ought to be like ordinary life; whereas it is clear that Chrétien liked the strange, the remarkable, the extreme, as many less sophisticated readers and writers do today. Science fiction, folktale, myth, are better analogies for Arthurian romance than realistic novels. Plausibility is no more the main criterion for Arthurian literature than it is for these other forms, or even for much really modern art.

The art-historians have shown us how few strokes of a brush are enough to create an image of life. Our own imaginations do the rest. The point here is that Chrétien in both story and character of the Charrette builds an image of human life upon the basis of a non-naturalistic but significant story-structure, with characters who are sketched in with very few traits. It is as if the characters are serious caricatures. The lack of naturalism in the base, and the simplicity of character structure it requires and allows, are sources of power, which underlie, and often break through, the agreeable but thin surface of realistic observation and description.

If we over-emphasise the individualised quality of Lancelot’s character, or demand unlimited realism, we are in danger of neglecting the more significant element of structure which Chrétien’s genius evolved from his combination of the abduction motif with that of the Fair Unknown: this more significant structure lies not in characterisation but in the forces of feeling between Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot, which depend on recognising the human implications of their situation rather than its possibly supernatural origins. The once mythic sequence of events takes on a new power when it is the loyal rescuer, not merely the remote or unknown abductor, who is the accepted lover of the Queen; and when the rescuer is an intimate companion of the King, to whom he owes his primary allegiance; and when marriage is held to be indissoluble in human social terms...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Presentation of the Character of Lancelot: Chrétien to Malory
• Chapter 2 Lanzelet: A Flawless Hero in a Symmetrical World
• Chapter 3 An Interpreter’s Dilemma: Why Are There So Many Interpretations of Chrétien’s Chevalier de la Charrette?
• Chapter 4 The Figure of Lancelot in the Lancelot-Graal
• Chapter 5 Lancelot and Guinevere in the Middle Dutch Lancelot Compilation
• Chapter 6 Illustrating Lancelot and Guinevere
• Chapter 7 Unifying Makers: Lancelot and Guinevere in Modern Literature and Art
• Chapter 8 Arthurian Myth Devalued in Walker Percy’s Lancelot
• Chapter 9 Lancelot’s Last Metamorphosis
• Chapter 10 The Character of Guinevere in the Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes
• Chapter 11 Guinevere: A Re-Appraisal
• Chapter 12 Desire, Meaning, and the Female Reader: The Problem in Chrétien’s Charrete
• Chapter 13 Which Queen? Guinevere’s Transvestism in the French Prose Lancelot
• Chapter 14 Recovering Malory’s Guenevere
• Chapter 15 The Figure of Guenevere in Modern Drama and Fiction
• Chapter 16 Sharan Newman’s Guinevere Trilogy