#lanzelet

Reading off of Lanzelet and comparing it to Vulgate Lancelot, there are some common beats that may point to a particular plotline:

A king and his family get ousted (by Claudas in Vulgate, by the King's own subjects in Lanzelet). The king dies while the queen mother and newborn son (Lancelot) flee.

The newborn son gets taken by a fairy while the queen wasn't looking

The son grows up to be an overly eager warrior that dashes off to his adventures... all while not knowing his name.

At a pivotal point - usually defeating a great foe and seizing his keep (Iweret in Lanzelet, Dolorous Gard in Vulgate) - the young man finally learns his name: Lancelot.

From there, it gets murky as this where different stories go in different directions but a popular plot might be the Guinevere Abduction theme, which some other heroes have done.

Eventually though, Lancelot goes on to retake his kingdom and overthrow his family's usurpers. He reunites with his mother and the story ends.

This way, it looks like a classic revenge story with the long lost prince coming of age and proceed to take back what's rightfully his.

I came to this conclusion because I was contemplating about how one of Lancelot's most defining aspect (outside of his love affair) is him being seized and raised by a fairy and how a hero could condense out of the "Child-Stealing Fairy" motif

But then I noticed that Lancelot eventually reunites with his birth mother at some point in the stories:

(Source: Vulgate Cycle - Lancelot pt. VI)

(Source: Lanzelet, by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven)

Then it dawned on me.

This is the speculative part: I believe Lancelot's birth mother - Elaine/Gostanza/Clarine/whatever - was originally a sorceress. I think Lancelot's hypothetical "original" tale was that of a fallen witch queen who rears her son to be her instrument of revenge and defeat their enemies.

I think the "kidnapping fairy" was conceived to absolve the mother of the charge of wielding sorcery when tastes changed, when it was no longer culturally acceptable to have a scheming witch as the protagonist's mother.

Hypothetically, the proto-story would go like this:

After being overthrown and her husband killed, the Queen escapes with her son and using her magical powers, creates a hiding spot to lay low as she raises her son to manhood

The Queen hides her son's identity and heritage to protect him from being assassinated before gaining enough strength to oppose their enemies in public, all while providing her son magical aid from time to time.

After achieving enough renown, gain allies and receiving knowledge of his heritage, Lancelot proceeds to take back their kingdom (probably getting a love interest along the way) and in the end, Lancelot triumphs, the mother comes out of hiding and they all live happily ever after.

Hey violet my best friend violet

🥺🥺🥺🥺 honestly there wasnt a whole lot of thought behind it, other than my goal to push my gnc character agenda sjdhdjd but in seriousness! the thought first crossed my mind after learning about the story of tristan & iseult - the idea of forbidden/secret romances in a historical setting + just being very endeared by the thought of this very sweeping tragic love story between two lesbians was very 💕 to me. it's been a few weeks since i made that comment so im sure i had more reasons then that ive forgotten but! yeah maybe i'll revisit this once my head's a little less scrambled :)

DONT CALL HIM THAAAT 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

A few weeks ago I was delighted when Pinterest randomly suggested this image for me:

(This painting is “Four Queens Find Lancelot Sleeping”, by Frank Cadogan Cowper.)

Not because I’m a particular fan of Cowper, but because of the evocative title and scene. This scenario was unfamiliar to me, and after tweeting that RuPaul’s Drag Race should do some reconstructions of this tableau, I decided to draw something based on it. 

So I was initially operating under the assumption that these queens were on an innocent forest stroll when they came upon Lancelot sleeping and that the above scene captured the moment when they became alarmed because he failed to wake up in response to normal speech. That’s also the assumption my pal Lilah was under when she remarked that the queens in my first (bad) sketch attempt looked oddly unconcerned.

Playing with the idea of how to visually demonstrate their concern, the next day I came up with this:

- which is still my favorite of this whole saga in spite of the fact that, I’m ashamed to say, the queen in purple is wearing a late 14th century hat with an early 14th century gown and the others  are dressed out of the 11th and 12th centuries (apart from the cell phones... and the fact that Lancelot’s armor is more Monty Python than any of the centuries in question).

Anyway, only then did I read about the whole thing on Wikipedia. And it turns out that this episode is taken from the Vulgate cycle via Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, and consists of Morgan le Fay, another recurring Arthurian-and-early-medieval-romance character Queen Sebile (elsewhere in literature Morgan’s lover), and two (or, in the Vulgate cycle, one, because apparently Malory preferred the number four?) nameless other enchantress-queens who find Lancelot having a nap in the forest, admire his beauty and get into an argument about which of them is most deserving of being his lover, and then kidnap him, take him back to ‘their’ castle, and wake him up to demand he choose one of them or stay imprisoned there until death in an extremely fucked-up twist on the Judgment of Paris.  Yikes. There’s a lot of tiresome women=magic=evil here, and it all seemed a bit dubious to me, especially if they were supposed to be the second through fifth most powerful sorceresses in the world.

But during my Wikipedia spiral, I also read about a peculiar outlier among surviving early medieval works in the Lancelot fandom - unusual because it is one of the few Lancelot works that doesn’t contain his adulterous love for Guinevere. Lanzelet is a late 12th century poem in which, rather than having an affair with the queen, Lancelot marries four different women consecutively (even though the others are all still alive). All the marriages are arguably opportunistic, or at least circumstantial, as they take place immediately after he kills the women’s male guardians in battle, and enables him to assume their titles and holdings (although he does settle down happily ever after in the end after an enchanted coat reveals his third wife to be the only perfectly faithful lady at the court of the Queen of Fairy). Perhaps this sequential polygamy reflects a cultural practice that was accepted in some time and place... but how did the ladies feel about it? Therefore...