To Guenevere the young knight responded as both fearless warrior and timid lover. She, however, perceived nothing of either. Seeing the disguised black-armored defender, she would scarcely have remembered the youth dressed in white whom she once dismissed with a kind but meaningless word; and later she was more amused than impressed on learning that, when Lancelot conquered Dolorous Guard, and then held back the huge armies of Galehaut, the memory of that word loomed large as his inspiration. A simple mistake! She can hardly be faulted for being what she was: a queen, experienced in the world, perhaps disenchanted, the most beautiful of women, of whom it was said she ennobled all who came into her presence. If the king had loved her once, little of that was left but ceremony, and now affairs of the heart seemed to her an inconsequential game. Thus, having accepted Lancelot’s love in the tale’s remarkable scene of avowal, she could assign the Lady of Malehaut to his friend, simply to make a foursome, and to have a confidante. Fear and sorrow would eventually change her, but, almost always, she would let herself be ruled by expediency.
If King Arthur could be said to do the same, it was in his instinctive refusal to perceive Lancelot as a threat to his marriage. No doubt he relied on Lancelot too much: Lancelot the greatest warrior in the world, Lancelot who made the peace with Galehaut, Lancelot who could defend his realm from endless threats of invasion. Arthur only thought to draw him closer to his court, to keep him there as a knight of the Round Table. One could say that he was credulous, or, convinced of his own greatness, could not imagine a rival for the queen’s love. He himself, however, was easily and frequently seduced. He was also given to hasty, and damaging, decisions. When he had a last chance to save his kingdom, he lost it out of pride, or perhaps out of dignity. There was dignity, at least, in his final moments, and ambiguity as well. Whether the king has foreseen it or not, the hand that rises from the lake to seize his sword Excalibur will place it in Lancelot’s grave, suggesting that the weapon always identified with Arthur more truly belongs to the younger warrior. Arthur himself is borne away by his half-sister Morgan. Her appearance at this point is darkly disturbing, for she has been, throughout the romance, an agent of evil, attempting to use Lancelot in order to destroy the queen. Now she takes possession of Arthur, who goes with her willingly; his mortal wounds will perhaps be healed in Avalon. Whatever we may think of this alliance, it could hardly surprise the Lady of the Lake. For her it can only be a final justification of her enmity.
The trajectory of the fictional King Arthur reproduces that of the early Britons when the chaos of Saxon invasions gave way to a time of peace and confidence, only to be reduced to chaos again, and finally defeat. When Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father, died, his son was too young to dominate the kingdom. The barons fought for the kingship, and there was no safety for anyone, anywhere. With Merlin’s help, Arthur prevailed. The kingdom was powerful, its borders secure, and King Arthur’s court became a source of reliable justice.
At the time of our story, this is no longer true. Lancelot provides a kind of last hope, a vision of a knight as knights were imagined to be. But he alone cannot defend the realm against an enemy as powerful as Galehaut. And Galehaut, deflected from his conquest by his love of Lancelot, then spurred by that very love to satisfy Lancelot’s yearning for the queen, makes possible the adultery that will eventually destroy the court of Arthur from within.
After King Arthur, as the Lady of Malehaut says in the end to Guenevere, the kingdom is even worse off than it was when Uther died, since Arthur leaves neither son nor heir. Excalibur lies magically in the grave with Lancelot, the grave he shares with Galehaut, and of all the participants in the drama, only one, the Lady of the Lake, remains undiminished.
The story of Lancelot and Guenevere has, since the twelfth century, been part of every significant account of King Arthur. The second, overlapping, love story related in the Prose Lancelot, in which Galehaut, Lord of the Distant Isles, sacrificed his power, his happiness, and ultimately his life for the sake of Lancelot, has been wholly forgotten.
Lancelot is the book that Paolo and Francesca have been reading in the fifth canto of the Inferno when they yield to their love. Dante mentions Galehaut in passing as the intermediary between Lancelot and the queen, and Boccaccio, moved by the great lord’s generosity, uses his name as the subtitle of his Decameron (“Il Principe Galeotto”). But in later imaginings of the Arthurian saga itself, Galehaut, for all his prominence in the original narrative, was rapidly marginalized and even eclipsed. The greatest retelling in English, the fifteenth-century work of Thomas Malory, reduced the character to one of no significance, leaving Guenevere without a rival for Lancelot’s affections, and subsequent novels, plays, poems – now films as well – have accepted that simplification of the tale. Indeed, so obscure has Galehaut become that modern readers sometimes take the name to be a mere variant of Galahad – a gross mistake. Galahad is the “pure,” the “chosen,” knight who achieves the quest for the Holy Grail in a part of the Arthurian legend quite distinct from the story that concerns us here. There is no connection between the two figures.
What accounts for the fate of Galehaut since the Middle Ages is not at all clear, though one may certainly suspect political embarrassment: the character is, after all, King Arthur’s outstanding adversary and would have defeated him easily, had he not fallen in love with Lancelot. Moral disapproval may also explain it, since the Old French text is wholly sympathetic to the homoerotic relationship. Certainly, in the case of Malory, various factors may be adduced, including the writer’s general inclination to concentrate on tales of chivalry rather than love, treating love with a prudish aversion not characteristic of the French romance; and his readiness to draw from several sources – not only the Prose Lancelot – with a consequent de-centering of Lancelot by the inceasingly salient figure of Tristan. Moreover, Malory was surely aware of the need for caution in handling conflicts and alliances that might too readily be taken to reflect, perhaps with dangerous partiality, the troubled state of Britain in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Galehaut, powerful and ambitious, taking aim at Arthur’s England from a region readily perceived as Wales, would too strongly have suggested contemporary tensions between the Crown and its Welsh adversaries for the writer not to fear charges of supporting the wrong side. Nor could Malory ignore the perils of seeing his narrative interpreted in the light of the ongoing dynastic struggles between Lancastrians and Yorkists, the so-called Wars of the Roses.
Whatever the cause of Galehaut’s fading, it was obvious to us that the character deserved to be rescued from oblivion – or, for some, from the opprobrium attached, wrongly, to his action in bringing Lancelot and Guenevere together. Ours has been a work of restoration. The masses of detail and the labyrinthine complications of the original obscure, for modern readers, the great double love-story which we have tried to bring to light. To the best of our knowledge, in all the broad corpus of modern fiction derived from the Arthurian legend no such attempt has hitherto been made. Isolating the major strands of Lancelot and, to a lesser extent, The Death of King Arthur, we have rewoven them into a spare recounting for our time. Such treatment has the further advantage of making apparent the central irony of the plot: Lancelot proved indispensable to King Arthur but also became the instrument by which the Arthurian kingdom was destroyed. Without Galehaut’s solicitude, the fateful adultery would not have occurred.
Like the original, our retelling concentrates on character and incident, with little concern for the explicit depiction of milieu common in modern novels. Description of persons and places remains minimal and suggestive, just as the flow of time is noted without consistent precision. In the same spirit, we have often presented dialogue bare of comment or, as happens frequently in the medieval text, in fragments emerging directly from the narrator’s prose. We have, of course, preserved the supernatural elements as integral parts of the tale and so inherent to its universe that they appear continuous with the natural. In our retelling, as in its s
ource, there are thus crucially important otherworldly beings and dwellings, enchantments and magical events, and fabulous enhancements of reality. These may even be said to shape the story.
We have preserved, as well, characteristic modes of behavior that may be unfamiliar to modern readers, whose understanding of chivalry tends to emphasize its idealistic aspects. When people today think of the strong protecting the weak, or the transformation of warfare by the imposition of rules – such as the obligation to show mercy to an opponent who surrenders, or the equation of true nobility with generosity and refinement of manners – they tend to forget that knights live as warriors in a context of violence. Knights are always in a state of readiness for battle, and scarcely know what to do in a time of peace; thus Galehaut’s men regret the imposition of a truce, and Lancelot, on Galehaut’s isolated island, complains that they are wasting their time. In the intensity of warfare they find their truest way of being, and it leads to a kind of forthrightness in the expression of emotion. Warriors in epic poems, as well as in the literature of romance, readily shed tears, and even faint. But modern athletes, too, may have tears in their eyes, whether at moments of victory or defeat.
Another aspect of epic poetry preserved in chivalric romance is the theme of male companionship. Like Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, Roland and Oliver in The Song of Roland know nothing of the courtly idea that a man can be ennobled by devotion to a woman. Galehaut and Lancelot would have been just like them, had it not been for Guenevere. Indeed, an important aspect of our story is its playing out of the conflict between that ancient warrior tradition and the emergence of a new, competing ethos. It should be noted in passing that, whatever else in the narrative may give evidence of homoeroticism in the relationship of Lancelot and Galehaut, the sharing of a bed does not by itself point in that direction, for such sharing, by men or by women, seems to have been common enough in the Middle Ages as an expression of friendship (or practicality) with no erotic overtones.
It may be useful to point out as well a central trait of the feudal society depicted in our book: it was a polity held together by bonds of reciprocal obligation. Lancelot’s first adventure after becoming a knight offers an example. If the Lady of Nohaut calls upon King Arthur for protection, it is because he is her “liege lord.” She, as his “vassal,” “holds” her “fief” from him, meaning either that he gave her title to her land in return for economic and/or military service, or that she pledged such service from her estate in return for royal protection. In either case, if her own people cannot defend Nohaut against invaders, it is the king’s duty to provide the defense – which here takes the form of Lancelot’s engagement as her champion. It will be in essence a trial by combat, and it will be but the first in Lancelot’s career.
In such confrontations, it is understood that, however uneven the contending forces may be, God will guide the right side to victory. This was an integral part of the medieval judicial system, a way of resolving disputes when an accused person had no clear proof of innocence. The practice was not infrequently used to settle even disputes concerning Church property, although it was periodically condemned by conservative clerics. A well-ordered appeal to divine judgment clearly marked an advance over undisciplined violence or the arbitrary imposition of seigniorial power. Trials presided over by a disinterested human judge and subject to the deliberations of a jury were not yet the norm at the time of our story. And the possible contradiction between an apparently God-sanctioned combat and a Christian doctrine opposed to fighting seems not to have troubled too many people. In literary works, a trial by combat frequently entails such an imbalance of contending forces that the protagonist’s victory will appear inexplicable if not for the beneficent will of God. In the trial at Nohaut, Lancelot is young and inexperienced, his opponent a formidable warrior. Later on, when he fights for Guenevere, Lancelot will insist on facing three opponents at once.
Unlike our Old French source, we have stripped the legend of everything not closely related to the development of Lancelot’s affective life and the role of Galehaut in that evolution. Thus, various subplots and missions involving one or another knight of the Round Table have been omitted, including some exciting magical adventures and, most notably, all traces of the quest for the Holy Grail (an episode that occurs after Galehaut’s death). We have eliminated a host of characters, reduced the presence of others, and even reshaped the trajectories of a few.
All changes have been made in the interest of tightening the story without distorting the fundamentals of the original narrative. In any case, it was our intention, not to prepare either a translation or an abridgment of the Old French source, but to retell the central love-drama in such a way as to restore its complexity and emotional depth for the modern reader.
PART ONE
BEFORE THE BIRTH OF KING ARTHUR, MERLIN THE SORCERER MADE THIS PROPHECY:
From the Distant Isles will come a wondrous dragon. Flying left and right over many lands, he will constantly grow in power as he subdues them. When he reaches the kingdom of Logres, his shadow will be so vast that it will darken the whole realm. The dragon will have thirty heads all made of gold. Logres will not fall, because a magnificent leopard will hold the invader back and put him at the mercy of the ruler that the dragon was on the very point of defeating. Later there will be such love between the dragon and the leopard that they will feel they are one being, each unable to live without the other. But a golden-headed serpent will steal the leopard away and corrupt his heart. And that is how the great dragon will die.
Then the kingdom he spared will be lost, and the king, who had brought it forth from chaos, will leave it to chaos again. The dragon, that great lord who saved what it found most worthy in the world, at the cost of everything it most desired, will never reappear, except in stories.
BOOK ONE: THE BOY
BESIDE A LAKE SO VAST IT EXTENDED beyond the horizon, the exhausted travelers stopped for the night. Anxious as they were, sleep seemed impossible, but the sound of the water lapping against the shore gradually calmed them, while fatigue overcame the hardness of the ground. At dawn King Ban mounted his still weary horse and rode to the top of a nearby hill for one more sight of Trebe. This was the last of all his castles, and would remain to him only as long as it could hold out against the besiegers. With the queen, their infant son, and just one squire, he had followed a hidden path through the marshes that kept out invaders from the south. Trebe would be in the care of his seneschal while Ban traveled by land and sea to King Arthur’s court. One after another, his allies had fallen to King Claudas; appeals to Arthur, busy with wars at home, had remained unanswered. The seneschal had urged Ban to go to Camelot himself, the better to make Arthur understand his dire need for help. Now Ban, barely on his way, could see in the distance the great walls of Trebe with the early light upon them, and the high tower. Would he succeed, he wondered, in saving this final vestige of his kingdom?
What looked like a patch of mist suddenly became a dense cloud of black in which the tower disappeared and, even as he watched, the castle was enveloped in smoke and flame. Then there was fire everywhere, making torches of lofty halls and turning the sky blood red; and all the land around reflected the hideous brightness.
King Ban knew that he had lost all hope on earth, that he would never regain his kingdom, for he was old and powerless and his son was far too young to help him. He and his lovely highborn wife would live henceforth in exile, dependent on charity, condemned to poverty and sorrow, although he had been a mighty king. In the shock of this understanding, he fell unconscious from his horse, hitting his head so hard that the blood rushed from his ears and nose. He lay senseless on the ground. After a time, he half-opened his eyes, conscious enough to ask God’s forgiveness for his sins, “and I beg you, Lord, to watch over my wife, Elaine, who, by her lineage, belongs to the House of David, but who now lacks all protection in the world. I commend to you the life of my infant son, knowing that the most defenseless orphan has a
true father in you, and no one is so weak that you cannot give him power.” With his last strength he plucked three blades of grass, a sign of the Holy Trinity.
King Ban’s stallion, frightened by his master’s fall, had galloped down to the lake, where the other horses were standing. Alarmed, the queen called to the squire, who caught the stallion and rode in the growing light to the top of the hill. He found the king lying dead. The queen heard the young man’s loud cry, put the baby down, and, holding up her skirts, ran through the thick brush to where the squire was weeping beside his lord’s body. She fainted at the sight, regaining her senses only to fill the air with lamentation for her valiant husband, the noble king, now lost to her forever in this life. She was pleading with God to let her die with him, when the thought of her baby suddenly broke in on her grief. She could almost see the helpless child under the hooves of the horses! Half mad with terror, she began running back down the hill, crying for help, stumbling, overwhelmed by the thought that he might have been trampled. Branches tore at her hair, drew blood from her face. By the time she reached the shore of the lake, it was broad daylight. The queen saw her baby, untouched by the horses, lying naked in the lap of a young woman who was smiling at him, caressing him, lifting him up to hold him tight against her breast, kissing his eyes and mouth, and no wonder! for the beauty of the child was truly astonishing.
Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles Page 2