LANCELOT (Lancelot du Lac, or Lancelot of the Lake), a famous figure in the Arthurian cycle of romances. To the great majority of English readers the name of no knight of King Arthur’s court is so familiar as is that of Sir Lancelot. The mention of Arthur and the Round Table at once brings him to mind as the most valiant member of that brotherhood and the secret lover of the Queen. Lancelot, however, is not an original member of the cycle, and the development of his story is still a source of considerable perplexity to the critic.
Briefly summarized, the outline of his career, as given in the German Lanzelet and the French prose Lancelot, is as follows: Lancelot was the only child of King Ban of Benoic and his queen Helaine. While yet an infant, his father was driven from his kingdom, either by a revolt of his subjects, caused by his own harshness (Lanzelet), or by the action of his enemy Claudas de la Deserte (Lancelot). King and queen fly, carrying the child with them, and while the wife is tending her husband, who dies of a broken heart on his flight, the infant is carried off by a friendly water-fairy, the Lady of the Lake, who brings the boy up in her mysterious kingdom. In the German poem this is a veritable “Isle of Maidens,” where no man ever enters, and where it is perpetual spring. In the prose Lancelot, on the other hand, the Lake is but a mirage, and the Lady’s court does not lack its complement of gallant knights; moreover the boy has the companionship of his cousins, Lionel and Bohort, who, like himself, have been driven from their kingdom by Claudas. When he reaches the customary age (which appears to be fifteen), the young Lancelot, suitably equipped, is sent out into the world. In both versions his name and parentage are concealed, in the Lanzelet he is genuinely ignorant of both; here too his lack of all knightly accomplishments (not unnatural when we remember he has here been brought up entirely by women) and his inability to handle a steed are insisted upon. Here he rides forth in search of what adventure may bring. In the prose Lancelot his education is complete, he knows his name and parentage, though for some unexplained reason he keeps both secret, and he goes with a fitting escort and equipment to Arthur’s court to demand knighthood. The subsequent adventures differ widely: in the Lanzelet he ultimately reconquers his kingdom, and, with his wife Iblis, reigns over it in peace, both living to see their children’s children, and dying on the same day, in good old fairy-tale fashion. In fact, the whole of the Lanzelet has much more the character of a fairy or folk-tale than that of a knightly romance.
In the prose version, Lancelot, from his first appearance at court, conceives a passion for the queen, who is very considerably his senior, his birth taking place some time after her marriage to Arthur. This infatuation colours all his later career. He frees her from imprisonment in the castle of Meleagant, who has carried her off against her will—(a similar adventure is related in Lanzelet, where the abductor is Valerîn, and Lanzelet is not the rescuer)—and, although he recovers his kingdom from Claudas, he prefers to remain a simple knight of Arthur’s court, bestowing the lands on his cousins and half-brother Hector. Tricked into a liaison with the Fisher King’s daughter Elaine, he becomes the father of Galahad, the Grail winner, and, as a result of the queen’s jealous anger at his relations with the lady, goes mad, and remains an exile from the court for some years. He takes part, fruitlessly, in the Grail quest, only being vouchsafed a fleeting glimpse of the sacred Vessel, which, however, is sufficient to cast him into unconsciousness, in which he remains for as many days as he has spent years in sin. Finally, his relations with Guenevere are revealed to Arthur by the sons of King Lot, Gawain, however, taking no part in the disclosure. Surprised together, Lancelot escapes, and the queen is condemned to be burnt alive. As the sentence is about to be carried into execution Lancelot and his kinsmen come to her rescue, but in the fight that ensues many of Arthur’s knights, including three of Gawain’s brothers, are slain. Thus converted into an enemy, Gawain urges his uncle to make war on Lancelot, and there follows a desperate struggle between Arthur and the race of Ban. This is interrupted by the tidings of Mordred’s treachery, and Lancelot, taking no part in the last fatal conflict, outlives both king and queen, and the downfall of the Round Table. Finally, retiring to a hermitage, he ends his days in the odour of sanctity.
The process whereby the independent hero of the Lanzelet (who, though his mother is Arthur’s sister, has but the slightest connexion with the British king), the faithful husband of Iblis, became converted into the principal ornament of Arthur’s court, and the devoted lover of the queen, is by no means easy to follow, nor do other works of the cycle explain the transformation. In the pseudo-chronicles, the Historia of Geoffrey and the translations by Wace and Layamon, Lancelot does not appear at all; the queen’s lover, whose guilty passion is fully returned, is Mordred. Chrétien de Troyes’ treatment of him is contradictory; in the Erec, his earliest extant poem, Lancelot’s name appears as third on the list of the knights of Arthur’s court. (It is well, however, to bear in mind the possibility of later addition or alteration in such lists.) In Cligés he again ranks as third, being overthrown by the hero of the poem. In Le Chevalier de la Charrette, however, which followed Cligés, we find Lancelot alike as leading knight of the court and lover of the queen, in fact, precisely in the position he occupies in the prose romance, where, indeed, the section dealing with this adventure is, as Gaston Paris clearly proved, an almost literal adaptation of Chrétien’s poem. The subject of the poem is the rescue of the queen from her abductor Meleagant; and what makes the matter more perplexing is that Chrétien handles the situation as one with which his hearers are already familiar; it is Lancelot, and not Arthur or another, to whom the office of rescuer naturally belongs. After this it is surprising to find that in his next poem, Le Chevalier au Lion, Lancelot is once, and only once, casually referred to, and that in a passing reference to his rescue of the queen. In the Perceval, Chrétien’s last work, he does not appear at all, and yet much of the action passes at Arthur’s court.
In the continuations added at various times to Chrétien’s unfinished work the rôle assigned to Lancelot is equally modest. Among the fifteen knights selected by Arthur to accompany him to Chastel Orguellous he only ranks ninth. In the version of the Luite Tristran inserted by Gerbert in his Perceval, he is publicly overthrown and shamed by Tristan. Nowhere is he treated with anything approaching the importance assigned to him in the prose versions. Welsh tradition does not know him; early Italian records, which have preserved the names of Arthur and Gawain, have no reference to Lancelot; among the group of Arthurian knights figured on the architrave of the north doorway of Modena cathedral (a work of the 12th century) he finds no place; the real cause for his apparently sudden and triumphant rise to popularity is extremely difficult to determine. What appears the most probable solution is that which regards Lancelot as the hero of an independent and widely diffused folk-tale, which, owing to certain special circumstances, was brought into contact with, and incorporated in, the Arthurian tradition. This much has been proved certain of the adventures recounted in the Lanzelet; the theft of an infant by a water-fairy; the appearance of the hero three consecutive days, in three different disguises, at a tournament; the rescue of a queen, or princess, from an Other-World prison, all belong to one well-known and widely-spread folk-tale, variants of which are found in almost every land, and of which numerous examples have been collected alike by M. Cosquin in his Contes Lorrains, and by Mr J. F. Campbell in his Tales of the West Highlands.
The story of the loves of Lancelot and Guenevere, as related by Chrétien, has about it nothing spontaneous and genuine; in no way can it be compared with the story of Tristan and Iseult. It is the exposition of a relation governed by artificial and arbitrary rules, to which the principal actors in the drama must perforce conform. Chrétien states that he composed the poem (which he left to be completed by Godefroi de Leigni) at the request of the countess Marie of Champagne, who provided him with matière et san. Marie was the daughter of Louis VII. of France and of Eleanor of Aquitaine, subsequently wife of
