 Even if you've never read any Arthurian literature before, you probably recognize most if not all of the items on this list of what makes Arthurian literature Arthurian, what the story of King Arthur and his knights is. You know that he's the king of Britain. You know that he has a story called Excalibur, that he either pulled out of a stone in order to claim his kingship, or he received it from the Lady of the Lake, or both. You know that there's a wizard named Merlin who helped him do one or both of those sword retrievals. You know that he becomes king and has his knights seated around table. They all abide by a code of chivalry. He has a queen named Gwynevere. He has an enemy and his half-sister, the magician Morgan Le Fay. His knights go out on quests on their own. They're called Knights of Rant. They include Lancelot, who's probably the most famous, Betavere, Gawain, or Gowen, Percival, Yvane, Tristan, or Tristram, Galahad, and Kay. All these knights go on a quest for the Holy Grail. There's an affair between Lancelot, Arthur's best knight, and Gwynevere, his queen. He's betrayed by his illegitimate son, or nephew, or both, Mordred, and after the final battle at Camelon, he's taken to the Isle of Avalon to be healed. All of these elements are present in the 1470 book Le Morte d'Arthur by Sir Thomas Mallory. Mallory was an Englishman, and he was writing in English, but the French title of the book gives a way that he was dependent on a lot of French sources, for reasons I covered in the last lecture. So much of the source material during the 1200s and 1300s was being worked on and written in France, and these were the sources Mallory used. All of these elements that we know today as part of King Arthur's story Mallory was pulling from these French sources. However, as we've learned in the past in this class, when you redact multiple sources, you tend to find doublets. You tend to run into contradictions. Some of the stories disagree with each other. Some of them agree too much. In other words, there's two versions of the same thing. We have that sort of situation happen for Mallory with the sword Excalibur. Is Excalibur the sword that Arthur pulls from the stone, or is it the sword he receives from the Lady of the Lake? And Mallory seems to be confused. He refers to both sources Excalibur at one point. The movie in the 1970s called Excalibur tried to solve this problem by having Arthur pull Excalibur from the stone, break it in a fight with Lancelot, and then he gave it to the Lady of the Lake who put it back together and gave it back to him. But that's not what's in Mallory. Mallory just gives both versions of the sword. It seems that Mallory maybe didn't intend to make the sword in the stone Excalibur, but he does use the word Excalibur to refer to it one time. So if we go back in literary history and look at Mallory's sources and their sources, and maybe even their sources' sources, we find in the 1135 work, History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first sort of really extended version of the story of Arthur. We see that he has a sword called Caliburnus, and that's the Latin root for the name Excalibur. However, Geoffrey doesn't tell us whether the sword was pulled from the stone or where it came from. The name Caliburnus is the Latin version root of Excalibur, but it also seems to be the Latin version of the Welsh name for a sword called Caledfouk, and Caledfouk is what the sword is called in the Mabinozian story of Kilhoek and Olwyn. And Kilhoek and Olwyn, even though it's in the Mabinozian with some narratives that were produced at a later date, it probably dates back, the work itself dates to around 1100, which is before Geoffrey's time, and it seems to be an iteration of a story that goes back maybe centuries before that. One of the Welsh stories that Welsh Bards would tell during the 6, 7, 800s. And that sword, Caledfouk, itself seems to resemble the name for an Irish sword, mythological sword called Caledbolg, that many early Irish heroes use at one time or another, including Cahulun. But in Geoffrey of Monmouth's narrative of Arthur, we have no explanation of where the sword came from, or what happens to it in the end. In the sword, in the stone story, Arthur has been raised anonymously because Merlin took him after he enabled Uther Pendragon, the former king, to have the woman that he wanted, even though that woman was married to a rival king. Merlin said that, you know, I'm going to take the child, and he takes him away from Uther because he knows Uther is doomed. He gives the boy to a knight named Ector. Ector raises him, but Arthur doesn't know who he is, and the whole land is divided among contending kings until a sword appears one day in a stone, and inscribed on it says whoever pulls this sword from this stone, an anvil, there's an anvil in the early versions, is right wise king of all England. So all the nobles try to pull the sword to try to become king, none of them can, but only Arthur can easily, and once the others are fighting at a tournament and no one's paying attention to it, he goes and pulls the sword from the stone. In the other story, the story of Lady of the Lake, again Merlin is guiding Arthur, he's his mentor, and he takes him to this lake which is connected to the other world. There's something very supernatural about it, a woman lives in the lake, later variously named Nimue or Vivian or some combination of those two. And the Lady of the Lake gives Arthur the sword and a scabbard, and Merlin asks Arthur what you think is more valuable, the sword, Excalibur or the scabbard, and Arthur says well of course the sword, you know the scabbard is just what you keep it in, and Merlin said actually that scabbard will stop your wounds from bleeding, so if you ever get cut you won't bleed to death, that's you know that could save your life more than more easily than the sword cut. Well these two versions both appear decades, even a century after Geoffrey of Monmouth first gives us that connection of the sword Excalibur with King Arthur. So if we put this on a timeline, so we can sort of figure out how far back our evidence of the sword connected with Arthur goes, we see that the sword in the stone goes back to about 1210, the sword from the Lady of the Lake goes back to about 1240. The earliest text that tells us Excalibur came from the Lady of the Lake was from the, what's called the post vulgate cycle, which is a whole series of French works, which were based on sometimes other French works, which were based on either Welsh or Breton works, often borrowing from Geoffrey of Monmouth, sometimes taking from Troubadour poetry, and it was in one of these called Suite de Merlin that the first narrative iteration of the Lady of the Lake giving Arthur the sword in the scabbard comes. Now the sword in the stone story, whether or not it is Excalibur, the earliest version of that is from another work named after Merlin, and this one is by Robert de Boron writing in year 1210, and he gives the first account of Arthur pulling the sword, improving that he's the rifle king, although in Robert de Boron's version it's not Excalibur. Everything before that that mentions Excalibur or some variation on that name doesn't tell us where the sword came from, it just tells us it's a great sword. And so if we have a sword with this many connections to other stories, if we have Excalibur in the Latin form of Caliburnus, and it's in the Welsh form of Caled Fouk, and both of these come from sources that are heavily dependent on Welsh oral tradition, and it also resembles the name of this Irish sword, that tends to indicate that this probably had a long oral history, the sword. The thing is it would have to be really long oral history to get back to the time of a historical King Arthur if the historical King Arthur fought at the Battle of Badon around the year 500. Remember that the Battle of Mount Badon was where the Britons defeated the Saxons, and at least for a while stopped the advance of Anglo-Saxons into the Isle of Britain. That's the time we want to get back to. That's where the references to certain identifiable kings, like Ambrosius Aurelianus, and identifiable battles that are later associated with Arthur, that's when they took place. So if we can get any of these narrative elements back to that point in history, we've got something that will tell us something about a historical King Arthur. But so far with Excalibur, we only get specific references to it, starting with the year 1100, and evidence that it probably goes back further, but we can't tell how far. Another story element that seems to be inseparable from Arthurian literature is the ideal of chivalry. Thomas Mallory has, Arthur's knights swear what is called the Pentecostal oath, because they swear it on the Feast of Pentecost. In Mallory's accounts, every year at the Feast of Pentecost, all the knights had to swear that they would do the things that we today still use to define chivalry. He charged them never to do outrageosity, or never do murder, and always to flee treason, and by no means to be cruel, but to give mercy unto him that asketh for mercy. Upon forfeiture of their worship and lordship of King Arthur forevermore. In other words, they lose their honor and they lose whatever lands and titles that King Arthur had given to them. And always to do good to ladies, damsels, and gentlewomen, succor upon pain of death. In other words, go out of your way to help women in need. Also that no man take no battles in wrongful quarrel for no law nor for the world's goods, so you don't fight in order to take things for your own greed. You shouldn't be motivated by greed or arrogance. And this seems like a very necessary sort of code for knights to abide by. When we're talking about people who are extremely powerful, who have the capacity to do great violence, you don't have to worry about them using that violence to hurt those weaker than them, or to harass people that have what they want. And even if you're King Arthur, you need to keep your soldiers in check, because they could be a threat to you. They could also be a threat to the people who would then blame you for their behavior. So the Pentecostal Oath establishes for a very practical reason the sort of higher order value of chivalry that we associate with Arthurian literature to this day. However, not all Arthurian literature is so chivalrous. Writing in the year 1190, an English writer, this is actually the first Arthurian narrative in modern English. Geoffrey of Monmouth was British, but he wrote in Latin. But this writer named Laieman, it looks like Leieman, and I'll say Leieman because it's easier than Laieman. But he's actually translating Geoffrey of Monmouth, but he's adding a lot more material, and we don't know where he got all of the southern material. But Laieman's version of Arthur doesn't seem very chivalrous. Multiple times Arthur is using his military strength for conquest, and conquest for its own end. Never mind the weak, never mind helping people that need help, just use force to show that we're the strongest and no one can stop us. And even in sort of fits of rage when a knight starts a fight in court, Arthur is so aggravated by this that he threatens to not only punish that knight, that knight will be drowned in a nearby swamp, but then he says, take you all his dearest kin that you can find and strike the heads off of them with your broadswords. The women that you find of his nearest kin cut off their noses and let their beauty go to destruction, and I will destroy the whole race that he came from. In other words, all of his family and all of the people that are of his identity group. And then he says that if anybody else ever starts a fight in my court the way this guy does, nothing's going to save him. He won't be able to buy his way out of it, and Arthur wants everybody to know how serious he is. So he says, bring me these religious relics, and I will swear on them that I will always punish everyone this way for something that we might see as, you know, something that should be restrained, but something that doesn't justify Arthur's lack of restraint, hurting not only the person who started a fight in Arthur's court, but also, you know, killing and mutilating all of his kin and the people that are from his community. Not exactly the chivalrous ideal. Now, these aren't the only two representations of chivalry, or lack of chivalry, but they show two sort of extremes, and we see literature evolving as ideas about Marshall Valor, or evolving. In the Middle Ages, because knights are such a powerful potential threat, that's precisely why culture needs to put some sort of rain on them to keep them in check, keep them from turning violent against people who can't defend themselves, keep them from becoming a threat to society. And we do see chivalry being developed in the literature, but it's being developed gradually, and it's not always consistent. And that sort of channeling male aggression and sending it out into the world is a theme at the individual level, within what's called the Night Iran, that is a knight who wanders, who goes out in search of adventure. And most of Arthurian literature isn't actually about King Arthur, or at least King Arthur is a background character. Most narratives are about one of his knights. That wasn't always the case with Geoffrey of Monmouth and Lyamon and another French author named Was. The initial focus was about what Arthur himself did, and that was doing things like conquering Rome and fighting a giant. On the way to Rome, he stops at Mont Saint-Michel, an island off the coast of France, and fights a giant. That's what the picture in the middle depicts. The picture in the top left has King Arthur standing above the crowns of all of these kingdoms all over Europe that he's supposedly conquered. Most of these earlier works are about Arthur's individual actions, but most of the later works feature him as a background character, and it's some other knight that rides out in search of adventure, taking his sort of aggression, his potential to do violence, and channeling it, hopefully for good. He goes out looking for damsels to save or injustices to write. And of course, he always finds it, a narrative without conflict isn't going to keep us interested. And of course, the conflict is usually in the form of another knight, or several other knights, knights who do not show the same level of chivalry, knights who are looking for a fight just to show their own strength, or knights who are abusing the weaker people around them. It's these knights that Arthur's knights have to seek out, find, and beat, and kill them if necessary, but of course, if any of the knights that they defeat ask for mercy, they're supposed to give them mercy. But what we're also going to see in some of the literature we're going to read in this class is that sending knights out helps to keep them from hanging around the court and ending up in fights with each other. But it also is itself a threat to Arthur, because as long as his best knights are out on adventures, they're not there protecting Arthur in his court. So that leaves Arthur vulnerable to attacks from the usual enemies, the Saxons, the the Irish coming across the sea, the Scots and Picks coming down from the north. So there's this balance. We have to keep, you know, most of the knights around Arthur, but then send a few out at a time to go do things to improve the wider realm. But we don't want them to stay gone too long, and we don't want too many knights to be gone at one time, because then the kingdom is in jeopardy. Another way to keep the knights from fighting with each other is to keep their egos in check. And you do that by not having a long table where the most important knights sit to the left and right of the king himself. And then every seat further away from the king is a seat of less importance. Instead, Arthur, of course, has the round table where everyone is equal. Everyone can see everyone else. There's not an end of the table. In some versions, the round table could seat 1,600 knights. And Lyhaman tells us this. The Volgate tradition says more like 200. Robert de Boron says 50. One of these seats is the siege perilous. It's the seat that is set aside for one unnamed knight that is going to be the purest night and the most perfect night. And eventually that is revealed to be Galahad, the son of Lancelot, who eventually wins the Holy Grail in the Volgate tradition. And with the round table, it just so happens that we have a physical object we can point to and say, there's the round table. The top right corner, that is the Winchester round table, which was discovered during the Wars of the Roses, and just so happened to have the colors of the House of Tudor painted on it. And so, quite conveniently for the tutors, it pointed to the fact that they were descended from King Arthur. Well, this seems a little too convenient for the tutors who were fighting with other families to prove their claim to the throne after a long and bloody and divisive series of wars. That's because it is. The Dendrochronology, the Counting the Rings, to see how old the tree was, shows that it probably was cut down around the year 1250, between 1250 and 1280. At the earliest, it probably dates back to the reign of Edward I, who was very fond of finding Arthurian artifacts that proved his descent from King Arthur. And not to be outdone, Henry VIII had a picture of King Arthur painted on the table. And just so happened King Arthur looked pretty much exactly like Henry VIII. So is the round table historical? Well, yes, if thing is, the history it tells us about is the history of the Wars and the Roses and not anything to do with King Arthur. But the story of the round table first appears in a work called the Roman de Brute by the French poet Woss. Roman is, we're going to see the word Roman in a lot of titles, that's just the French word for novel or story of. And Brute here refers to the legendary founder of Britain named Brutus. But even though Woss is translating Geoffrey of Monmouth, he's adding a lot of things just like Lachamon did. And one of the things he adds is the story about the round table. Because of these lords about his hall of whom each knight painted himself to be the hardiest champion, and none would count him the least praiseworthy, Arthur made a round table so reputed to the Britons. So Arthur is creating this table so that no one fights over who's more praiseworthy than anyone else. And when they sit down to meet to their dinner, their chairs should be high alike, you know, equally prestigious. Their service is equally prestigious, equally relevant. And none before or after his comrade, no one is before or after, you know, in front of or behind his fellow knight. Thus no man could boast that he was exalted above his fellows for all alike were gathered around the table and none was alien at the breaking of Arthur's bread. So the round table that you can still visit hanging in the Winchester Castle in Southern England. Unfortunately, can't date back beyond around the year 1250. The story is about 100 years older than that, but it only goes back to around 1155. Another characteristic of Arthurian literature and of the Knights of the Round Table is the ideal of courtly love. The High Middle Ages saw sort of a cultural revolution when it came to ideas about love. For much of the Middle Ages, you at least if you were in the upper class, you had to marry who your parents chose for you. There were arranged marriages that had more to do with property than they did with actual connection between two people. We see in the literature, especially French literature of the High Middle Ages. And by that I mean, you know, late 1100s, early 1200s and on this idea that love transgresses the culturally established boundaries of what marriage is supposed to be. And courtly love in particular is not just being in love with someone. There's always some sort of conflict to the love. Either the love is unrequited and the lady doesn't love the night that loves her. Or there's a love triangle or frequently involves adultery. The woman that the night loves is already married. But he can't put her out of his mind and he obsesses over the object of his affection. The women in these portrayals tend to be pretty passive. It's even if they're in love with the night, they don't express it or they express the opposite they act as if they didn't want anything to do with them, even if they later admit that they were in love with him the whole time or something like that. But something is preventing the love from sort of going to the next level and being recognized and being legitimate in the the cultural terms established for people at this time. Now even though that term courtly love dates back to a work of scholarship in 1883. The idea that it describes the scholar was actually describing the work called Lancelot or the Night of the Cart from the year 1177 by Cretin de Trois. And this is the first sort of Arthurian step into the genre of courtly love. Now the possible exception to that statement is the story of Tristan or Tristram. This seems to have been a story on its own that wasn't Tristan wasn't originally one of King Arthur's knights, but it was such a popular story about this knight who was in love with the wife of his king. And that just was such a popular tale at the time that seems to have influenced Cretin's depiction of Lancelot in the his text the Night of the Cart. But it was Cretin de Trois who really sort of cemented this idea that the best kind of love story is a story where the people can't be together even if they want to be. Now there were certain conventions to courtly love almost so formulaic that it was the subject of parody and another one of Cretin's works which is Percival or the story of the Grail. And in that Percival in the very beginning is this very naive kid whose mother raised him away from the rest of society so he didn't know anything about how high society behaved. So his mother told him that you'll meet a woman that you'll fall in love with and she'll give you a kiss and a token of her affection like a ring or something like that. And that's how you'll know that the courtship process has begun. Well, he goes out and the first woman he meets that he thinks is beautiful. He walks up and kisses her and takes her ring without her consent and she's just flabbergasted. So some of these conventions were already in place were already being made fun of by 1182 by the same person who really popularized this idea with Arthurian literature. But it's that earlier work, Cretin's Lancelot or the Night of the Cart, that has really sort of linked Arthurian literature with this idea and specifically with the character of Lancelot. Lancelot frequently called Lancelot du Lac, Lancelot of the Lake. And he goes to Arthur's court and is the best night. He's the most chivalrous night, but he's also the most powerful night. And he falls in love with Guinevere, the Queen, who's married to Arthur, and they can't be together. But Guinevere loves him and he loves Guinevere. And in Cretin's accounts, they never actually get together, although the story of their adultery does become a very powerful narrative thread within the French tradition, especially, and then eventually with Mallory, it becomes part of one of the foundations of Arthurian literature. But in this story, The Night of the Cart, we see Lancelot for the first time. This is the first time Lancelot has ever been named in any Arthurian literature or any other literature for that matter. The title, The Night of the Cart, comes from an episode in which Lancelot is on his way to rescue Guinevere after she's been captured by an evil knight. And he rides all the horses that he can get hold of until they die underneath him. He's that obsessed. He's that he's in that much of a hurry to get to her. And he of course, he's a knight. He's wearing armor. He can't just sprint. So once all the horses he's ridden are dead, his only way to get to where she is is to get on this cart. And this guy comes along with pulling a cart and he says, you know, I'll let you on my cart, but be aware that we use this cart to transport criminals. So people don't just ride around on carts. If we see somebody on the back of a cart, that means this person is being taken to prison. This is a person of ill repute. So he hesitates for two steps with any eventually gets on the cart. The the driver takes him to where Guinevere is. He, you know, fights several battles and duels to get her back. And she refuses to speak to him. And he can't imagine why she refuses to speak to him. And along the way, everyone sort of says, Oh, that's the night of the cart. That's the shameful night who must have done something horrible dishonorable to be carried around on the back of that cart. And we at first think, well, maybe Guinevere thinks that he's done something shameful. That's why he was on this cart. But it turns out she knew that he hesitated two steps. She's angry at him that he didn't immediately jump on the cart. She's angry at him for hesitating. So it's almost sort of a parody before the genre really takes off. But this is our first look at Lancelot. And this one text sort of set the the paradigm for what courtly love romance should be. There should be this knight who's the best of all nights who goes and does the usual things nights do, which is fight battles. But that's still not enough because the the love that he seeks is one that he can't fully achieve. In later literature, Lancelot and Guinevere actually do sleep together and they do carry on a long adulterous affair without Arthur's knowledge. But eventually Arthur's half sister, Morgan Le Fay, finds out Mordred, Arthur's nephew and possible son and later combined to be both in later literature finds out and uses this as an excuse to turn King Arthur against Lancelot. And this leads to a battle between Lancelot and his allies and King Arthur and his allies and the remaining Knights of the Round Table who haven't left to side with Lancelot. And it's while they're in France fighting it out with each other that Mordred tries to take over the throne. And when he finds out Arthur comes back, but it's almost too late. He's able to defeat Mordred, but he's wounded and fatally wounded in the process. So what starts out as sort of a simple sort of lighthearted tale about this knight who really wants to prove himself to the woman that he loves, but it can't have turns into the fall of Camelot. But despite being an adulterous affair and despite sort of setting in motion the fall of Arthur's Round Table, this affair in particular and the idea of sort of love triangles and adultery and that sort of thing in this genre of romance is treated very sympathetically. And in fact in a lot of the literature it's the ones who actually want to catch them and punish them or the ones who want to put it into this affair that are shown to be the vengeful ones or the jealous ones or whatever. It's Lancelot we're intended to sympathize with, even more so than Arthur. Arthur becomes even more pathetic at this point. Not only in later literature does he just sort of remain in the background and not going out like his knights do and going on quests, but now his wife is cheating on him with his greatest knight, his greatest ally. But we're meant to think, well this is hurting Lancelot too. He doesn't want this situation to be as it is. He can't choose who he falls in love with, but he can't not be preoccupied with her. But before Cretien's Lancelot, Knight of the Cart narrative, there was no Lancelot. There was a tradition of Guinevere being an unfaithful queen. And Geoffrey of Monmouth mentions that she was notoriously unfaithful to Arthur, but he conspicuously says, I'll say no more about that. He brings it up, but then he drops it. He doesn't go into detail. But in Geoffrey's account, it's after Arthur goes to war with Rome and then comes back that Mordred and Guinevere have gotten together and tried to take the crown, tried to take over the throne. So in Geoffrey's version, it's sort of Guinevere plotting along with Mordred to make Mordred the king. Whereas in later accounts Mordred kidnaps Guinevere, but she's there unwillingly. She'd much rather be with Lancelot. In Lancelot, Knight of the Cart, Cretien de Troyes, and in later French literature, almost all later literature, including Sir Thomas Mallory, who uses the French literature as his sources. Lancelot is the greatest knight in Sir Gowen, or frequently in America pronounced Gawain, but I'm going to try to stay closer to the Welsh, at least the modern Welsh pronunciation of Gowen. Sir Gowen is sort of the foil. He's the one who is not as good in combat. He's the one that's not as honorable, not as courtly, not as chivalrous as Sir Lancelot. So he's usually represented as very arrogant and self-righteous and he acts before he thinks. The thing is this starts with Cretien de Troyes, Lancelot Knight of the Cart. And it seems to be Gowen in particular who's chosen to be a foe with a Lancelot for two reasons. One is a pun on his name in French. In French it's Gauvan, and the last four letters being V-A-I-N, meaning the same thing in French as they do in English, a vein. So someone who looks the part but doesn't have the interior substance. The irony there being that this character is being portrayed a certain way just because of four letters of his name, a sort of pun. But the other reason seems to be that he was before Cretien was writing, seems to be Arthur's number one champion. This was the greatest of Arthur's Knights and if you want to introduce a new character you have to do like the Hollywood movies do. You can't just say, here's my version. You have to say my version is better than everybody else's that has come before. And that's what Cretien de Troyes does and that's what the later French authors do. Of course as a Frenchman Cretien creates a French Knight. Lancelot comes from Brittany and of course the French Knight is going to be better than the British Knights in the eyes of the French author. But with Sir Gowen we have a character that's clearly much older. He shows up in the early medieval story of Keelhoek and Olin as one of Arthur's Knights, although his name in Welsh is Gwylchomei. He's in Geoffrey of Mamma's history of the Kings of Britain as Gwylganus. He shows up in Dutch and German romances as Wallowane, although if you read these and like the Dutch romance of Morien, it's usually translated into Gowen. That's the English version. Gowen appears in more Arthurian literature than any other of Arthur's Knights because he was around before Lancelot. He sort of had a head start. But he even shows up in most of the Lancelot narratives as the foil. As the one who's one of the best knights but he's not quite as good as Lancelot. This is just sort of used to show how good Lancelot really is. But by the time we get to Thomas Mallory, he's become almost the worst knight, the most arrogant, the most unsilverous. And even his own brother, Sir Gareth, who shows up in Morien as Gariot, wants to be a good knight so he idolizes Lancelot and not his own brother Gowen. But this whole tradition of Gowen is this sort of vengeful or vain or arrogant or brash or unsilverous knight. All of this comes from the French tradition, the Vulgate cycle, and that comes from Cretan's use of Gowen as the not quite as good as Lancelot character. This is the tradition that Mallory picks up in La Mort d'Arture. And because Mallory's La Mort d'Arture is the most comprehensive accumulation of Arthurian narratives, that's how that's the representation of Gowen that makes it back into English. Now if you read Gowen in the Green Knight, you see a very different characterization of the same knight. He's very virtuous, very silverous, very much the best knight in battle, but also the best knight for his virtue. And this goes all the way back to Jeffrey of Monmouth. Jeffrey tells the story of Arthur's invasion of Rome. In that battle, it's Gowen that actually turns the tide. Gowen leads a counter attack against the Romans and that's why Arthur's men, that's why Arthur's army is ultimately successful. And that's what you see depicted in the picture to the top right. So without question, in the earliest literature, Gowen is the most important of Arthur's knights. In the literature we're going to read in this class, we're going to see that that's still the case independent of the French tradition. Even in the case of Morien, we have the Dutch translation of the Lancelot Grail Cycle, the Vulgate Cycle, that is looking at the French source, which does try to portray Gowen negatively, but yet this Dutch source is going to rehabilitate Gowen, make him back into the formidable and virtuous knight that he once was. We'll also see his prominent role in the marriage of Gowen and Ragnel, where he thinks he's making self-sacrifice in order to benefit Arthur, to extract Arthur from a very socially difficult situation. It turns out to be to his benefit, but he didn't know that at the time. So despite his negative treatment in a lot of the French narratives, and then later in Sir Thomas Mallory, he does have his own tradition. He does remain the hero in a lot of iterations of Arthurian narrative. And in certain accounts, he's even the one who achieves the grail. By the way, if you're wondering about the three coats of arms at the top of the page, all three of those has been attributed to Sir Gowen. The one in the middle is probably the most famous because it's described in detail in the poem Gowen and the Green Knight, and it has all sorts of significance that the author of the poem goes on about the symbolism of the five points of the pentangle on the red shield. For the most part in this class, I'm going to use the one on the right, because it's the one that shows up in a lot of the artwork, especially a lot of the later artwork. You can identify Gowen in the Roman battle at the top right because he's got the double eagle on his shield and on his horse's trappings. The thing is, these aren't consistent across literature. This is one of the things that varies in all the knights, but I'm just using these in this class to help visually represent the knights we're talking about. Well, if there's one character from Arthurian literature other than Arthur himself and other than his knights that would cause a text to seem incomplete without his presence, that is the wizard Merlin. Most versions that we're probably familiar with have Merlin involved early in Arthur's life where he enables Arthur's birth by allowing Arthur's father Uther Pendragon to disguise himself as the Duke of Tentagel so that he can sleep with the woman that he is in love with, although he's in the skies. And then after he dies Merlin takes Arthur to be raised anonymously. And when it's time for Arthur to show his kingship, it's Merlin that takes him to the sword where he pulls the sword and reveals his identity. He takes him to the Lady of the Lake where he gets the same sword or another sword depending on the version. And shortly after that his narrative utility kind of runs out and so he is seduced by either the Lady of the Lake or Morgan Le Fay or one of his pupils with whom he's in love who demands that if he wants her love then he has to teach her all of his magical abilities. He does this and then she uses this to trap him either in a stone or in a tree or in a tower or several different versions. But Merlin is definitely an interesting character in his own right. Jeffrey Monmouth who gives us the most complete story of the life of Arthur earlier than than anyone else spends as much if not more time telling about Merlin. In fact he wrote a whole other work besides History of the Kings of Britain called Vita Merlini which is the life of Merlin. Is Jeffrey who first tells us the story of when Merlin was a child uh he didn't know who his father was and the implication is he had been fathered by uh some supernatural father and when King Vortigern was building a tower to help in his defense against the invading Saxons uh the tower kept falling every time his men tried to build it and Vortigern's magicians told him if you have the blood of a boy with no father we can sprinkle that blood on the ground here and that will enable us to build a tower. They overhear that Merlin who's still a boy has no father so they bring him there and they're going to sacrifice him but he asks what this is about uh they tell him and he tells the magicians you're idiots you don't know what you're doing uh don't you know what's underneath there underneath the ground is a lake an underwater pond and in that lake is a container with two dragons in it a red one and a white one and they're fighting with each other and that's why you can't build their tower. So they dig up the the two dragons they find it's exactly uh as he said and the red dragon eventually defeats the white dragon and then flies away and this is uh a a sign of future events the white dragon represents the Saxon invaders and the red dragon represents the native Welsh and eventually the Welsh are gonna defeat the invaders and be victorious. So a story that involves prophecy and magic seems like the perfect sort of origin story for Merlin. The only problem is that long before Jeffrey gives us this account about Merlin the Welsh annals tells us about a guy named Ambrosius in Latin and Welsh it's Imris who does exactly the same thing. He's the kid that tells the the story about the red dragon underneath the the ground where Vordigern is building his tower and this Imris or Ambrosius are really honest we're going to see is a actual historical figure and is mentioned in Arthurian literature very early as either a brother of Vordigern or brother of Arthur's father Uther uh but it doesn't seem to be Merlin and it seems that in Jeffrey's imagination uh Ambrosius and Merlin are the same person but Merlin is also based on a possibly historical figure named Leiloken uh who was a bard from uh northern Britain uh either Scotland or the very far north of England and even though many people tend to assume that Merlin has some sort of origin as a druid figure a Celtic druid uh he's actually associated with or he's actually called a bard and of course a bard is someone who travels around singing stories but bards for centuries before the conversion of the Britons to Christianity uh Julius Caesar and others confirmed that bards had a almost semi-divine status just like the druids did the druids were the ones who performed rituals and made laws and that sort of thing but the bards were the ones who were the the knowledge keepers they were the ones who could remember the past because they could remember the stories and uh potentially they were the ones who could see into the future uh and this bard Leiloken was at the battle of Arth Dareth and uh his allies lost the battle and he seems to have blamed himself and gone mad and went to live out in the woods as a as a wild man uh and it was at this time that he got the gift of prophecy uh this figure of Leiloken later merges with the name Myrthen which seems to come from the Welsh city of Carmyrthen or Carmarthen as it's pronounced today and seems to be a back formation where somebody uh said well Kerr is the name for like a fortress and so that's Kerr Myrthen is the fortress of Myrthen so this must be the founder of this city well these two sort of names merge into the same character and it's this Myrthen that Jeffrey is writing about the problem is he's writing in Latin and if you translate Myrthen into its Latin equivalent it would be Myrthen and to a Norman French speaker it sounds like you're saying this is shitty the bard so he chooses the more you know elegant name Merlin uh that rolls off the tongue a little bit better so Jeffrey develops this character combines lots of different narrative threads into this one character and has him uh having the gift of prophecy but also has him directing and sort of mentoring King Arthur uh but also sort of seems to acknowledge that he lived much longer than a normal human lifespan and also has him uh building Stonehenge as a battlefield marker uh Jeffrey implies that uh Myrthen's parentage is supernatural on its father's side but he doesn't go much further than that later Robert de Boron his tale of Myrthen uh develops the story to have uh Myrthen's mother is a a nun who is uh raped in the night by a demon an incubus and this was part of a demonic plan to have a sort of antichrist on earth that would do the devil's bidding uh the thing is Myrthen uh turned on them and he retained his sort of evil magical powers but he used them for good instead of evil and again that starts with Robert de Boron uh around the year 1200 later traditions uh like the Vulgate cycle uh introduced the uh narrative about him being uh seduced by Nimue or Vivian or the Lady of the Lake or uh all of the above uh using his own magic against him to entrap him but uh that comes much later and it uh doesn't coincide with the idea that he lives long after uh the fall of of King Arthur so it appears that one of the reasons that uh Myrthen is such an interesting character is because he was uh developed so many times by so many authors but he also seems to have evolved from so many different characters from so many different narratives. Another element of Arthurian mythology which seems to be just as integral as Merlin to the mythos and yet has been through probably just as many changes is the Holy Grail. Now as we understand it today the Holy Grail is the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper and in which Joseph of Arimathea uh caught his blood when he was on the cross and the tradition holds that Joseph of Arimathea uh brought that cup as well as the lance that appears to Jesus' side uh and the platter that was used at the Last Supper brought all three of those items to England where it was kept at a chapel that Arthur's knights eventually had to go and find but it remained hidden all these items remained hidden until the Grail appeared to Arthur and his knights at the roundtable and Arthur's knights uh all went off after that uh sort of miraculous appearance uh went off on a quest in order to find it and recover it and bring it back but only the purest of all Arthur's knights could find it and that is Sir Galahad, the son of Lancelot. Now if you're scratching your head because you don't remember anything about the Holy Grail in the Bible even reading about the Last Supper there's no mention of specifically what kind of cup he used and what happened to it after that well that's because it's not a biblical story. The Grail as it's described in Arthurian literature dates back only to uh the Percival or the story of the Grail by Cretien de Troyes, the same author who introduced Lancelot. Cretien's Laconte de Grail, the story of the Grail in 1182 is the first text to mention the Grail and it's not described as the Holy Grail, it's just a Grail. It has no origin story. The Young Knights or Percival comes upon this sort of other worldly castle and there's a wounded king there called the Fisher King and while he's talking with the Fisher King he sees this procession of these three objects, a lance, a platter, and a grail and he doesn't ask what these things are and uh earlier in the narrative Percival had asked all sorts of questions because he didn't know anything about knighthood and uh courtly society and he'd been embarrassed for asking these questions by people who mocked him for not knowing the answers so he's sort of given up his curiosity or he suppressed it and it becomes a great tragedy because he finds out afterwards after he's uh sort of wakes up the next morning in a forest with no castle around uh he finds out that if he had only asked who did the Grail serve then he would have healed the Fisher King's wound and ended the sort of curse that was put on the castle and all the people there. After this event he tells Arthur's knights about what he's seen and he vies to go find that grail and find that castle again and ask this time so that he can heal the king. We don't know if he's successful because Kretien didn't finish the story so that leaves it well open for speculation. It wasn't until Robert de Boron picked up the story and his history of the Grail and another story called Perlesfals or Percival around the year 1200. That's when the Grail becomes the Holy Grail. That's when the Grail becomes the Cup of Christ. It's Robert de Boron that has Joseph of Arimathea come to Britain. There's no apparent source material for this. Just like in his Merlin text Robert de Boron takes a material that has been in oral tradition or it comes from Kretien or maybe both and he puts a distinctly religious interpretation to everything. Merlin is no longer just a prophet. He's someone who must have been because Robert de Boron and Christians at the time refused to see a pre-christian Celtic mythology or supernatural beliefs as anything other than devil worship. That meant that if Merlin is a magician he had to be connected to the devil. So that's when Robert de Boron creates the story that he was part of a demonic plan but he sort of chose to do the right thing instead, rejected and turned away from the devil converted. Similarly the the Grail couldn't just be some sort of magic vessel that keeps this person alive. It can't be of significance unless it's this very religious object that's connected directly to God or Jesus. And the way both he and Kretien describe the Grail itself is kind of vague as far as what the object looks like. We typically have a concept of this chalice because that ends up being how it's represented in later art but if you'll notice the picture in the picture on the left side it just looks like this sort of soup bowl that Joseph is using to catch Christ's blood. And that's originally what Grail meant. It wasn't a platter but it wasn't a cup. It was sort of a bowl. And after Robert de Boron it's in the vulgate cycle in the prose Lancelot that Galahad is introduced. The character of Galahad is new at this point. He's the son of Lancelot and he's pure of mind, pure of body, specifically sexually pure. And of course in a tradition that is frequently being written down by monks like Robert de Boron. People who have taken vows of chastity, well of course the highest virtue is chastity. So Galahad is the most chaste of all the knights. So he's the one that is sort of the purest and he's the only one that gets to actually achieve the Grail. In this later version Percival is also a version but he has lusted whereas Galahad has never even been tempted to sexual sin. So Percival doesn't actually achieve the Grail. And of course Lancelot, despite being the best of all the knights in combat and in chivalry and that sort of thing, he has had an affair with Guinevere so he's ruled out. He gets to see the Grail at a distance but he doesn't actually get to find the Grail Castle like Galahad and Percival do. But like Merlin there seems to be some connection to a beliefs of a pre-christian world that Robert de Boron and other authors had to really reinterpret to give religious significance to. If we look further back in Arthurian literature we can look to Keelhoek and Olwen around 1100 in which one of the quests that King Arthur goes on is a quest to obtain a magic cauldron that serves unlimited food to whoever possesses it. And that's certainly not the only Celtic story about a magic cauldron. In the Irish book, the labor of Gabala Erein, the book of invasions of Ireland, we get the story of the Irish gods, the two Arthur de Danon, and the head of that family of gods is called the dogda, the good god. And he has two magical objects. One is a club that can kill people at one end and bring them back to life at the other end. And the other thing is this magic cauldron that never runs dry. The dogna seems to be the Irish version of the continental god Sukelus that has a club or a hammer in one hand and this bowl in the other, a bowl of sort of everlasting rejuvenation. And across the Celtic world and even on the borders and outside the Celtic world we find Celtic objects like this cauldron, this is called the Gundistrip cauldron, it's from the location of Gundistrip in the northern tip of Denmark, which is primarily like Norse cultural area, but we find this cauldron thrown into a bog and the designs are very clearly Celtic, although it was actually made in Thrace, which is almost down to Greece, but in an area that was settled by Celts for, you know, most of the Iron Age. And the reason it was thrown into a bog is the same reason we find a lot of Celtic objects across Europe, down in the bottom of lakes and that sort of thing, where they seem to be even thrown for sacrifices. And these are really ornate objects, really wealthy, you know, signs of wealth that people aren't just sort of losing, but they're actually throwing them down into these lakes and this is very likely the origin of a current custom of throwing money into fountains, especially coins. A version of this god, the dogda, is actually portrayed on the Gundistrip cauldron in this image that shows these warriors walking toward him and being dipped into this cauldron and then riding away on horseback, presumably, you know, this sort of procession of warriors in life eventually go to the other world and they are given the sort of new life after being, not just getting a sip from the cauldron, but actually being dipped head first into this cauldron. So whatever its origin, the holy grail or at least cauldrons that warriors win in quest of, that could give them, you know, better health or everlasting life or whatever, goes way, way back in the Celtic oral tradition and it shows up here and there in the literature that we have. But of course we get a very clear change in the narrative in Kretien's Percival, the story of the grail, but then it's still just a grail. It has magical properties, it's part of a ritual and it's actually used for communion, but there's no indication it's the cup of Christ, there's no indication that the lance is the holy lance, and that sort of thing. It's only with Robert de Boron that we have this deliberate recrafting of a secular and potentially mythological tale that is recrafted into a very symbolic Christian allegory. And of course it doesn't end there. There's going to be different variations on the grail. Some coming very quickly in 1210, Wolfram von Eschenbach, a German, has a very global narrative about the grail. So Wolfram von Eschenbach's Percival has a sort of very international scope. There are Muslims there, there are people from the Middle East, there are people from India that are all part of this brotherhood of the grail. The thing is, the grail isn't a cup or a chalice or a bowl at all, it's a stone. The one thing it seems to have in common with a grail is it's something you have to go and quest up. And that's why we use the phrase the holy grail of something to indicate there's this one thing everybody in this domain is trying to find. The one thing that would change the world if we only had access to it. And in that sense that's the way it functions in all of Arthurian literature. It's not so much what the grail itself does or where it comes from or what it's composed of. It's the fact that it's something to go and quest after. It is an object of the quest. So it may not surprise us that some of the more fanciful elements of Arthurian literature have a particular sort of point of origin. Merlin, Excalibur, the holy grail, the round table, these things we may not expect to have sort of historical ties. But we still wonder, we still want to find what is the, where did the core come from? Who was Arthur himself? Where was Camelot? When and where and why did something happen that set these stories into motion? And we'll talk about that in the next lecture.