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Home , Elaine (legend), Fisher King, Galahad, King Ban, Lamorak

LLT 180 Lecture 12 1

Today we're gonna talk about the part I'm not gonna have you read and I'm not gonna ask any questions on this. But we need to go through and talk about the part on

Lancelot, the ill-made knight, as he refers to himself -- the Chevalier Mal Fet -- because it has an effect upon the outcome of the work. It's just kind of a long section and we don't get a lot out of it, I can just tell you, and I didn't want to spend such a significant part of the semester reading just White's book. I wanted to get on and read some other stuff.

And so we're just gonna kind of go through this. And rather than having you write down everything -- I'm such a nice person -- I thought that if I gave you some basic notes so you can kind of scribble stuff that might be informative to you as we went along. And so if I get too tele-grammatic and kind of function in my own brain but not in reality, would somebody say, "Wait, you know, dumbling. You're not making any sense."

This part is referred to as the ill-made knight. refers to himself as that.

And we really deal in this part -- these sections overlap. We pick up with the story of

Lancelot from the time he's about 15 years old into his forties somewhere. So we get an overview of who Lancelot is.

And we saw in our preceding material -- maybe it was even the very first chapter

-- we talked about him being the son of , one of the two kings came to Arthur's aid when he became king at the end of the very first book. And he grows up in France in the Castle of Benwick.

His initial name -- now, he's gonna have a son later with the pure, the LLT 180 Lecture 12 2

super-pure -- she was boiled in water for five years -- and they're gonna call him

Galahad. And we know by later tradition, is gonna be the one who finds the grail.

Galahad was Lancelot's original name and his name changed when he became a knight. Lancelot always loved Arthur. Remember he was a kid at Arthur's court when they had the games afterwards and he did so well. And he's very much interested in

Arthur's order of and this fight against might, and they give you the French word for it there which Lancelot says is also how the world functions in France.

Lancelot calls himself, in French, Chevalier Mal Fet -- a nice trivia question. And unlike the pretty boy in the movie, Excaliber, Lancelot -- and this is not a tradition; this is

White trying to say something super simplistically -- is Ugly with a big G. I think somewhere else I typed in here -- about halfway down I typed in about five G's and a couple of extra L's. The boy definitely was in a battle with axes and lost. I mean, he's really, really ugly. He's not romantic and not debonair. So, you know, we immediately ask, "Well, how come he and Guenever get together later?"

Everybody in here has tutors. Of course, Merlyn was Arthur's, St. Toirdealbhach is the 's faction, the four boys. And so we look to tutors as being symbolic of somehow how the product's gonna turn out. The old thing about the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree. And his tutor is gonna be Uncle Dap. And Uncle Dap, whose real name is Gwenbors, plays Merlyn's role, then, for Arthur. And he is a great armor. He is like -- supposed to be the best armor in all of continental Europe.

And so what we expect for Lancelot, then, is to be the perfect knight more in a LLT 180 Lecture 12 3

sense of prowess. In other words, he's a great swordsman, he's all these things, but he doesn't have any socialization. His socialization -- he has like half the education that

Arthur has. He just has the athletic part of the education.

Guenever -- by the time he's gonna show up in England, Guenever and Arthur have been married for quite some time and they have gotten a present from her father,

King , of a table plus 100 knights. And so this that

Leodegrance gives them is supposed to seat 150 knights. Big thing. Big thing. And he gave them, as part of the wedding present, 100 knights. And Arthur on his own, through knighting people, admitting them to the round table, has filled another 29.

This kind of upsets Lancelot because he hoped to be one of the first ones. In other words, he thinks he's been honing himself to be the perfect knight, to be the perfect representative of chivalry. He is jealous of Gawaine, of the fact that Gawaine has become a knight of the round table, and he hears about Guenever.

And kind of interestingly, Guenever here has black hair and blue eyes. And so I think if, you know, somebody in Hollywood was casting these movies generally, they'd probably pick out some blonde. But you notice in that material, and really in a lot of

Germanic material, your heroines or your main characters do have brown hair and whatever color eyes. But here, Guenever has black hair and blue eyes.

We refer once again to the Orkney faction, just trying to keep some of these terms familiar to you, which remember is Gawaine and his group.

Lancelot -- and this gets back to original sin -- had this intrinsic feeling that not only was he ugly but that he was bad, and so that he had to do good because he was LLT 180 Lecture 12 4

bad. And so he is going to endeavor at all junctures to do good as a very conscious effort on his part.

He has lots of adventures and there's a lot of, you know, characters that turn up in here like Sir Kadagost, Sir Turkin, who represent two of the very evilest knights, kind of like Sir Bruce Sans Pitié but much, much worse. And so we have all these adventures where he's saving maidens, he's saving fellow knights. He saves Gawaine.

He saves .

And so when we get to the last part of this book, Candle in the Wind, at one point

Gawaine, I think, says in Candle in the Wind -- you know, when Agravaine and stuff is after Lancelot -- "How can you guys be after him? He saved all of us at some point."

Well, it doesn't matter to Agravaine. It doesn't. But that refers to stuff that happens in this particular part.

There's a civil war of ideologies, new versus old, and obviously the new is the

Arthurian view of things but the old is still out there. And it's gonna take a certain period of time. We're going to have a time lapse in there. In other words, if we're taking

Lancelot from the time he's 15 and bring him over, we have about 20 years. And so we're, you know, back to the old cyclical aspect.

It's one of the things I always get a kick out of, when people always talk about the

'60s, you know. "Well, that was true in the '60s." Well, having gone to high school in the '60s and started college at the end of the '60s, that's so strange for me to hear.

Because the early '60s were much more like the '50s than what most people think of the

'60s. When most people say the '60s culturally, what they're thinking of is really about LLT 180 Lecture 12 5

the last two to three years of the '60s and the early '70s. You know, things in the earlier part of the '60s was much more of a forum culture.

I grew up in Long Island, I think I told you, and actually Saks Fifth Avenue had a fashion board. And they invited two people from each of 10 high schools in the New

York City area to be on this thing. It was a sweet deal, let me tell you. And, you know, it's reflective of how forum was. I mean, when I went to high school -- my wife is 7 years younger than I am. When she went to high school in Des Moines, you couldn't wear jeans to school. I mean, it was still very much of a forum culture. That really changed very late in the '60s or early '70s. So again, we're having a civil war of ideologies.

Arthur is trying to put in more of a forum. We know what he's trying to put in.

We talk about the relationship of Guenever and Arthur. And remember, this is a made marriage, so to speak, or not made. That Guenever has no passion -- this is kind of sad. There's some really sad stuff in here. Has no passion for Arthur. She likes him.

It's kind of like First Knight. He's a nice guy. But we say here at some point their relative ages -- Arthur's supposed to be about 30 and Lancelot and Guenever are supposed to be seven, eight years younger. So, you know, not like First Knight where you're 102 years old or -- yeah, I'm just kidding. I like Sean Connery. But, you know, I mean, somewhat older. Somewhat older.

Now, being your age, 30 might sound really old. To me, it does not sound very old at all. In fact, the first time I lied about my age I was 27. No, no. I know. I was teaching here. And I had just turned 28 and somebody said, "You had a birthday, didn't you?" and I said, "Yeah." They said, "How old are you?" and I said, "27." Because LLT 180 Lecture 12 6

somehow 27 was nearer 25 which was young and 28 was nearer 30 which sounded old.

As you get older, the little numbers don't matter to you anymore. You just don't want to change the first number. The other numbers are okay. You know, what's 41 or 42 -- but no 50.

What's Lancelot like? Lancelot is courtly, he's merciful. To repeat, lest you missed it, he's ugly and he's invincible. All swords again, just miscellaneous stuff, and kind of curiously joy -- the word joy is associated with Lancelot. And later when we get his castle -- I did that wrong -- is associated with Lancelot. Lancelot believes there is a right so he believes in absolutes and he believes that chastity gave him strength -- or gives him strength. And so he's gonna do a miracle and, in his mind, he can only do this miracle because he is chaste.

King Pelles -- and I think we've heard this name in one of the movies I've shown you and the documentaries. King Pelles is the . And we're gonna talk a little bit about the grail today. That's gonna be the significant focus of the last part of the course, but it's gonna come up in this part because the for the grail and what happens for it. But King Pelles is the fisher king.

Now, the fisher king is by tradition the keeper of the grail. And the fish is a very old symbol -- you see fishes on cars. Of course, the fish got Republic in trouble and the

City of Republic could've been really smart in this whole thing if they'd just said, "Well, you know, this is, you know, an old symbol which -- since antiquity which represents wisdom and all these things." And so he is a fisher king. His daughter is Elaine. So we're gonna have a bunch of people with the same names floating around. Of course, LLT 180 Lecture 12 7

one of the three sisters, the Cornwall sisters, is Elaine. We never see that Elaine. We see this Elaine. And so she and Lancelot are gonna get together and have Galahad.

But anyway, they are -- she is the most beautiful damsel

-- and rescuing her is gonna be the last adventure of Lancelot's virginity. He always wanted to do a miracle and he's out there, doing adventures, having adventures, and he comes to this town and everybody knows him by name. And they say, "Wow," you know, "it's so great you've been here."

And what's happened is the fisher king's daughter, Elaine, has had an enchantment put on her by . And Morgan le Fay was jealous because she had heard how beautiful Elaine was supposed to be. So she put an enchantment on her when she was like 13 -- again, of course, puberty -- and put her -- she had to sit in a pot of boiling water, a tub of boiling water, until the perfect knight came and freed her.

So Lancelot -- they all tell him, you know, "You gotta go up here. There's this maiden in boiling water." And so he goes up, offers her his hand, and presto-chango she gets to come out, and they run up with the proper attire for her. Whatever the proper attire is, I don't know.

He thinks she's beautiful. They make a point -- White makes kind of a sarcastic point. He says, "Of course, she's the first person -- the first female he ever saw naked."

Whether that had any effect on it at all, he wasn't sure. But she is much taken by

Lancelot, as you probably would be too if somebody got you out of a big barrel you've been sitting in for five years being poached. LLT 180 Lecture 12 8

They get him drunk -- the poor boy, you know. And guys are bad enough as they are. So you get 'em drunk, they're really bad. But they get him drunk and then they send him this note. And the note is kind of written in a strange way, so he thinks it's from Guenever, in his drunkenness. And it says, "Hey, Lance Baby. If you'll meet me in this next castle over here, you know, we could have sweet times." And so he says, "Oh, cool deal." So he hustles, or staggers, over to this other castle, spends the night, has a sweet time, and wakes up and goes, "Hey. This isn't Guenever. This is Elaine." And so he's fairly upset. But she says she just wants to have his baby and that she loves him, and she's gonna call their baby Galahad.

I didn't show the chapter divisions in here. That is actually the break of a chapter then. And we come back to look at Guenever. Guenever is 22 years old at this particular point. And balance -- they're talking about this whole idea of balance. And, of course, it's important, important literature, and they say balance is much easier to have as you get older -- which I'll concur with. And that since Guenever is only 22, she's still in chaos. The idea that she can really behave as she might later think she wishes she had is not possible.

Elaine -- some of these words we apply to Arthur -- simple. Not meaning a simpleton, but I wrote on here "not clever." That is, she's just kind of a straightforward person. Again, she's been sitting around being poached, so she didn't have much chance for experience.

White, in this section, spends a certain amount of time kind of labeling people.

Well, not "kind of." He really is labeling people. And he says Arthur is kind, simple, and LLT 180 Lecture 12 9

upright. Again, so simple -- I think in the idea of not being devious. Without malice, vanity, suspicion, cruelty. Sounds like a pretty good person, to me. Those are good things to be without: malice, vanity, suspicion, and cruelty. His three great virtues are courage, generosity, and honesty.

Talking about Galahad. Now, Lancelot, of course, leaves after this one-nighter, goes back to . Not bragging about this, to be sure. And so Galahad is born out here and, you know, his mother's kind of -- you know, she's left alone. She takes him to a convent and raises him which would seem to make your mysterious child if nothing else did. And he is raised there, by himself, in this totally religious environment.

We then have a lapse of 15 years. So much like in the movie, Excaliber, we're gonna kind of leave our hero as a young child. I think the last we saw of him here was he was three. And we're gonna go ahead and leave Lancelot. And we're also doing what? We're leaving these people from the time of their chaos, and so we can imagine what's been going on, sneaking around from castle to castle, being bad children. And now, all of a sudden, they're gonna be in their late 30s which we assume a lot of that badness is gone.

And so they tell us in here -- and again, it's always hard to put pencils to these years in here. But he tells us specifically in the book that Lancelot and Guenever are now 39 and that 21 years have been spent building Camelot. And so what's true in

England now is the chaos, the anarchy, all those things we saw at the end of the first book, were still true when Arthur became king, are gone. Arthur is the champion of civilization. He is the champion of right, of unity. And so civilization is now the rule. It's LLT 180 Lecture 12 10

a golden time.

Arthur, though, is now coming to realize that might in any form is bad. Because even though it's been in the service of right, it's become kind of a mania in and of itself.

Like I can do more right than you can do. And so it's back to that Norman games mania that Merlyn complained about again. It's still alive. And so he's come to the realization that we have to have right established through right. And so his next big project is going to be law.

In-between, though, we get signals that all is not even right as a result of might because it is reported that Agravaine has killed his mother after finding her in the bed with . Now, at this time should be about 70, if you start putting your numbers to it, and Lamorak is one of the sons of King . Remember when

Pellinore was giving the names of his kids and I said, "This guy is gonna be important later"? Well, Morgause seduces Lamorak. Agravaine finds and kills his mother, and then kills Lamorak, too.

And Lamorak was one of the great knights. Of course, whoever gets killed, whoever we're talking about, is already one of the knights at the great round table. He's supposed to be the third best and he gets killed, too. Arthur obviously is not happy with this. And so he decides at this point that one of the problems is that the goals of the round table have been temporal. They've been related to time. They've been related to this world. And so we need to make them spiritual, and so we have to look for the .

By the way, one of the things I do out of curiosity -- you know, if you've ever LLT 180 Lecture 12 11

watched Jay Leno, once in awhile he has like weird names together from weddings and stuff? I actually have one in my drawer I've been meaning to send for a long time, that I won't say what it is in class 'cause it's too gross for words, but pretty amazing it's in the paper. So I always look at wedding announcements and I saw in here that Percivale got married. And so, you know, he's really letting us down. Now he's not pure anymore so he's not gonna be able to find the grail. So everybody's in deep doo-doo, as former

President Bush would've said. The guy got married. God, you know -- letting us down.

We're gonna come back -- we're not leaving this, but I just want to say a few things about the grail material. We're gonna come back and talk about this in specifics.

And so as far as what we're doing now, you don't need to really take serious notes on this 'cause I'm gonna go over this very carefully when we get to Percivale.

But the grail story has some main features. What is the grail? The grail comes into literature in the late 1100s, as they told us in one of those documentaries, after we've lost the holy lands. And so it's almost like the West is saying, "Okay. You have the holy lands. But ha, ha, ha, we have the holy grail." Which is what: evidence of

God's presence in the world.

And the whole goal of mysticism, the goal of mystical thought, is what? Mystical union with God when? Now. You know, not later. But now. And so if you can become keeper of the grail, you're keeper of God's presence. You drink from the grail and you have immortality. If you saw Harrison Ford's -- was it The Last Crusade -- you know, you want to make sure you drink from the right one.

But anyway, certain features -- the , the idea in LLT 180 Lecture 12 12

Excaliber -- and I want to talk about that movie a little bit. Not today; in a couple of days. Merlyn says in that movie to Arthur, "You are the land, the land is you." And so this is a very good movie except they really make Arthur in this movie like the grail king.

They tie his well being to the land. And in the tradition, those are two separate things.

Arthur's one thing over here represent all this ideal in an earthly sense. And then the grail king exists over here as representing the ideal in a spiritual sense, and his well being is tied to the well being of the land. Two separate things.

And so if the ruler is ill, which happens in the movie -- if the ruler is ill, the land is ill. And so it's gonna become the goal of the questor after the grail, you know. And what does the knight say? Remember the Indiana Jones movie. What does that old knight -- you know, one of the problems of that movie is that since the grail is supposed to give you eternal youth, the knight shouldn't be old. I don't care how old -- if he's 800 years old, he should still look like whatever age he was when he started drinking it, you know. So that's a little flaw in the movie.

But what does the knight say when they first show up? He says -- you know, I don't remember the exact words, but something like "You came to relieve me?" In other words, he thought somebody else had been called to be the keeper of the grail so his time -- he's ready to die. He's been living in a cave for 700 years by himself. And so the goal of the questor is to heal the fisher king. The fisher king has fallen ill for some reason, fallen ill for some reason, and so you have to heal the fisher king. By healing the fisher king you heal the land. And so you have to ask concerning what's wrong with him. LLT 180 Lecture 12 13

We see certain things, obviously, at -- remember, I think they mentioned the name of the castle and it comes up in here: Cabanik -- Cabonik is how it's really spelled.

Gare, the questor who is called -- and you are called to the grail -- sees certain things.

And what he sees is, he sees communion. He sees communion and he sees the grail, he sees the lance that was used on Galgatha to pierce Christ's side, and so he sees these magic things. And only people who are baptized and have been called to see the grail can see these things. So this is, you know, a real religious high stuff, you know?

And so we see this mysterious feeding vessel. And when the grail first appears in literature, it is not a chalice. It's not even told us what it is. It's just a thing. It's just there. The first completed grail romance by , based on

Criteon's Percivale, it's actually a stone. And so the grail can take all kinds of shapes.

But anyway. In the grail material, you know, which is something I really want to talk about and we're gonna deal with quite a lot. Anyway, he sends everybody that's looking for the holy grail. The idea that if we can get the holy grail, if we find the holy grail and bring it back, that somehow this will ennoble everybody, make everybody better. The reality is, though, that as they go out questing, the people who aren't good knights in the first place -- they kind of go out halfheartedly to do it so nothing bad happens to them. The knights who are really serious, either they die in the quest or the ones who find the grail don't come back. And so the effect upon Arthur's court is that all the good knights don't come back, you know. They either die or they remain because they have found the grail. The best. Who finds it? Remember, Lancelot was viewed as the best knight, but who's gonna find it? LLT 180 Lecture 12 14

Now, when we go back -- to tell you how it really is. Not this later tradition.

Percivale is the one who finds it, you know. Nobody else finds it. And actually, in

Excaliber the movie, Percivale is gonna be the one who finds it. So that's very true to tradition. What happens, explained to you in that one early documentary, the stories change with time, you know. As they go through century after century and a different viewpoint -- whether it's Elizabethan times or whatever, they look at Percivale and say,

"Well, hey," you know, "Percivale is married, he has a couple of kids, he's not pure enough, you know? He's not pure enough to find the grail, you know, so we gotta forget about him."

And so what are we gonna do? We'll take Lancelot the first time he has sex, you know, with Elaine who's never had sex and is so clean because she's been boiled in water for 5 years. It's almost like an immaculate conception or something, you know?

They're gonna have Galahad. So Galahad now, who is a vegetarian -- you know, he's actually probably a vegan -- a teetotaler-- this guy's a mess -- and a virgin. He's gonna find it because he's just super clean, super pure.

Percivale will find it -- again, one of the other sons of Pellinore, right? -- because he's a gentle, humble maiden knight, benevolent, simple, clean -- isn't this a Boy Scout?

-- perfectly innocent. Well, almost perfectly innocent. We gotta have a report that the grail exists, though. So even if we don't bring back the grail, it doesn't do any good for the grail to exist with the idea that God exists, we have evidence of it, but somebody has to report it. So Galahad -- I mean, I'm sorry -- Lancelot is going to be made aware of it. He gets close but he can't go in. We know. You know, he's been over there with LLT 180 Lecture 12 15

Guenever -- a lot of times. And so he returns two years later and reports the grail has been found by Galahad, Percivale and . Bors is another son of Pellinore, so two of his sons are among the ones who found it.

Guenever is 42 years old and starting to look bad. It kind of reminded me of growing up when you went out and you see -- you know, they say, "She started to wear

LOUD silks" and bad stuff. The funny thing in my own life is I'm finding as I get older I'm having just the opposite effect. When I was young I would wear anything. I'd wear anything. And now I go shopping and I think, "Naaah, I think that's a little too outlandish. I don't think I can wear that anymore." But a lot of people see it opposite.

And she's looking bad, looking bad. It's no wonder she's gonna be looking good; she's looking bad.

What's a Nutona Court? Nutona Court is youth and enthusiasm is used up.

What do we mean by that, "enthusiasm is used up"? I think it's the idea that we can create the great society, we can create the perfect society and people are more self- centered. They're into themselves. It's a greed decade. And the grail's been found.

What else is there to do? So anything we do is not as good, so let's forget this. Let's just be concerned about ourselves and, you know, forget society.

Arthur is unhappy, as well he should be, because he thought he was producing -- that's not working -- he thought he was creating the great society. I guess that was

Lyndon Baines Johnson. Have to use a different term. Apathy, you know? I think that's when you're on drugs, you know -- "I'm on apathy." I didn't say that, no. He's unhappy because of the change of atmosphere of his court, this new atmosphere, this self- LLT 180 Lecture 12 16

indulgent, self-centered atmosphere.

His new efforts, as we said before, are law. So to have law serve right so right becomes in and of itself. And, you know, he's just getting tired. He's getting old and tired. And in the end of Excaliber, we'll see that he is old. He gets a period of rejuvenation, but his time's passed, you know. That's why he has to go off and wait to come back. Because the time for him has passed at this time.

Mordred and Agravaine. So two of the brothers want Lancelot and Arthur dead for varying reasons. And at different times in the story, Lancelot has defended the queen's honor on three different occasions. Of course, we know three strikes and you're out, so each one of these, as it tells us in the book, bring them closer to destruction.

Merlyn -- it said right in here that Merlyn did not intend Arthur for private happiness. So my tendency in here is to feel sorry for Arthur, poor guy. He evidently really loved Guenever and she had no passion for him, blah-blah-blah-blah. But, you know, that's -- and, in fact, in Excaliber, in the early part, when Merlyn in the movie was talking to Uther he said, "How about private happiness?" and Merlyn said, "Maybe not even that." And that again is not maybe the lot of kings.

But anyway, that takes us through that particular part, and then we pick up

Candle in the Wind. And Candle in the Wind goes from page 517 until the end. And the symbolism that titled that is picked up from at the end of the work when Arthur wants to leave somebody behind to carry on the news. In other words, what good does it have -- does it do to have this great period if someone doesn't speak about it in the future? LLT 180 Lecture 12 17

And so we're gonna have to have a resolution of Arthur's fate. Of course, this has to involve who's a very scary figure. And so we'll pick this up and I think we can well do this in three days. And so what I'd like to do, looking ahead, is next time we will do the first third of this about which would put us over -- I think there's a pretty good page break in here

-- yeah. That'd take us over -- why don't you read through Chapter 5 which ends on 560.

Kind of looking on ahead, where we'll be if it takes us three days to do this. We'll have to look at Chrétien -- that'll take part of a period -- and then read Eric and that'll probably take about three, four days to do those three things -- those two things, looking at Chrétien and Eric. So what I would guesstimate is that we'll probably have another test just on Candle in the Wind and the beginning of Chrétien, maybe about the 20th or sometime in there, maybe that Friday or Monday. I'd like to break there for a test because we'll pick back up with Gottfried which will take us in quite a little bit different direction.

We look at 'cause Tristan is going to be the educated knight. And it's a fairly long work. We'll go over to the contemporary German material and then we'll go from there. We probably won't have a test on Tristan. We'll probably just save Tristan and do Percivale as the final. And Percivale -- I didn't want you to have to buy another book. I think I said right at the beginning. If you get interested -- and Penguin does have by Wolfram von Eschenbach in paperback. But I just -- what we're gonna do is we'll read the fragment by Chrétien so you get more use out of that book and then

I'll tell you the very end of it. LLT 180 Lecture 12 18

If we can integrate another film in here as we can, as we go along, we will. But I do want to make sure that we save two days at the end for . Some people might view that as ridiculous. But I think when we get all through the grail material and you really start looking, and you view that movie again, I hope with the background of the course material you'll see how clever it really is, even though it can really confuse you at that point and you say, "Wait. No. Don't show me this until I take my final 'cause

I'm gonna be confused all over again."

Questions? Let's go a little early today. Go work on your suntans. It's supposed to be cold by the weekend.