Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles. Patricia Terry
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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 source, 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.
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.