I’ve always been a big fan of Arthurian epics and stories. Once upon a time I figured I’d try to do something of a medievalist bent for a living, but I’m older now and I’ve “put away childish things.” Ah well, eh? However, that hasn’t stopped me from still liking Arthurian poems and stories. I read all that I could lay my hands on: Chretien du Troyes, Robert de Boron, the Vulgate Cycle, T.H. White. Hell, I even suffered through Mists of Avalon.
Changing my life with a wave of your hand...
And yes, if there’s one thing I like about the Arthurian cycles it’s the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. It’s probably one of literature’s most epic love stories– the legend of the romance between the “verray, parfit gentil knight” and the queen, she who “seemed part of Joyous Spring.” Like Tennyson said, this was a romance for which Lancelot “had given all other bliss, and all his worldly worth for this.” It truly is an epic romance of amazing breadth: a tragedy of knights and kings and queens, of a love that brought down a kingdom.
It’s not all romance and light, of course. If you believe the current assessment of amour courtois– if it did exist at all– it was a literary device that tended to elevate the knight while rendering the woman rather invisible. Great deeds were done in her name mainly to glorify the man’s honor and the woman had very little choice in the matter. Most female heroines in courtly love stories don’t even get to leave the castle while knights massacre whole armies in their name. I happen to believe this particular theory, having read so much of the courtly love literature and I do understand it’s not much fun for the female– it’s not even very romantic if it comes down to it.
That I had loved not as I should, a creature made of clay ... Amour courtois: woman as distant beauty to be worshipped by the unworthy supplicant.
Oddly, I find that from a personal perspective this actually heightens the romance. As both Denis de Rougemont and C.S. Lewis point out, courtly love can be seen as a precursor to religious love because courtly love is portrayed as edifying. Lancelot debases himself and strives for more than self-love and self-centered glory. Chretien du Troyes shows a little of this, with Lancelot meditating on Guinevere and willing to do unknightly deeds for the sake of love, like riding in a cart or losing in a tournament. You see this kind of love best of all in Wolfram von Eschenbach and in Chretien’s Perceval stories: love of Condwiramurs enables Percival to think of love of something higher– love of a woman and a contemplation of this love lets Percival achieve something close to religious ecstasy.
However, most of the Arthurian epics — like the Vulgate Cycle to Chretien du Troyes– note that Lancelot was the worldly hero and his love was a worldly love. In the end, it had the hint of the selfish about it. Lancelot and Guinevere loved each other knowing full well what it would do if discovered, what with all the complex literary subtext of Arthur as “culture king” and Guinevere as “sovereignty” eh? Loving Guinevere would point to Arthur as being weak and the lack of royal children would mean Arthur was literally emasculated– a fisher king. So sadly the Lancelot and Guinevere affair was massively destructive.
I don't care what they say, what do they know about love anyway? I don't suppose this is exactly what Melissa Etheridge had in mind, though. Well, or maybe she did.
This was always Lancelot’s flaw– that he was human and he never achieved the Grail because he had a fatal love. Those who did achieve the Grail were knights like Galahad– and the love he feels is an otherworldly, spiritual love. It’s the kind of love where they contemplate the divine and feel things humans can’t. Basically, it makes them terribly boring and it’s why Galahad is a singularly uncharismatic hero and not very popular these days.
Lancelot and Guinevere, however… now that’s love, right? It’s a human love, with passion and lust and longing. They feel jealousy and rage. He is driven to madness and murder for her and she betrays her duty and her king for him. In the end, Lancelot rides into an army and performs one of his most prodigious acts of prowess by slaying some of the best knights of the Round Table just to rescue Guinevere. There’s also something tragic about how the love affair begins because there is something indescribably tragic about Guinevere: the lonely queen, married to a man who loves his kingdom more than her precisely because he is a good king.
So allow me to be romantic and abandon the theories of amour courtois or textual analysis. There’s something just plain appealing about this incredibly human love affair. Too much was expected of all of these characters, of Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere–they were asked to make a paradise and it failed because they were flawed human beings. The result is a love affair that is epic in every sense of the word: people feeling love and passion against the backdrop of great events. This is far more appealing than saintly Galahad.
Nobody has ever really done this romance justice, not even Thomas Mallory, because I’d like to think that at the end of it all Lancelot and Guinevere didn’t regret what they did. They may have destroyed a kingdom but the whole experiment was doomed to failure anyway. You could always say that Camelot fell as much because of Mordred’s greed or Gawaine’s rage or Arthur’s jealousy. So in the end, I like to imagine that the knight and the queen rode away from the wreckage left by grief and human ambition and shared in the one beautiful thing they had left.
Posted by callitaweasel 
