this revelation seems to him merely abstract. Or perhaps he feels unworthy of such a heritage, despite his extraordinary accomplishments. The Prose Lancelot offers no speculations. What is clear is that when he turns once again toward King Arthur’s court, the White Knight, who might be recognized, takes on a new persona as the Red Knight, whose valiant performance on the battlefield will be surpassed on a subsequent occasion by the even more impressive Black Knight. No one imagines a connection between the Lady’s beautiful youth dressed in white and this warrior on whom King Arthur’s very survival has come to depend.
Before Lancelot’s return, King Arthur was challenged by Galehaut, Lord of the Distant Isles, a realm almost as mysterious as the domain where Lancelot had spent his childhood. Galehaut’s mother, we are told, was a giantess, and we learn, from another thirteenth-century source, that his father imposed such cruel customs on visitors as to make his son prefer a life of exile. Galehaut’s ambition was nothing less than conquest of the world, and so far he had known nothing but success. By the time he sent his challenge to Arthur, he had conquered twenty-eight kingdoms, whose rulers, recognizing his inherent nobility, had then become his devoted allies.
Such was Galehaut’s sense of personal honor that he broke off his first engagement with King Arthur, whose forces were so weak that he seemed an unworthy opponent. That they had not been immediately overthrown was due solely to the presence of a stranger, identified only as the Red Knight. Arthur was given a truce to increase the strength of his army, but the Red Knight had disappeared. Without him, there seemed to be no hope of defeating Galehaut. When the fighting resumed, a year later, both armies were larger than before. Again an unknown knight, this time in black armor, fought for Arthur, and prevented a total rout on the first day. This time he had the assistance of Galehaut himself.
The Lord of the Distant Isles had seen countless great warriors in battle, but in Lancelot he witnessed something completely unprecedented. Men of both armies had described him as “winning the war all by himself.” Now the last of Lancelot’s horses had been killed under him, and he stood “like a battle flag on the field,” surrounded by dead and wounded knights, yet seeming himself invincible; those who would have attacked him, alone and on foot as he was, drew back. The sight, for Galehaut, had the force of a revelation. The whole course of his life turned around at that moment; no kingdom, he thought, would be worth the death of such a knight.
Lancelot, being mortal, might well have died that day, had Galehaut not supplied him with horses and ordered his men not to attack when the knight was on foot. We do not know what Galehaut intended by inviting Lancelot to his camp after the battle, but presumably it had to do with his desire to give expression to his admiration. He might have wondered how closely the Black Knight was attached to King Arthur. We also do not know the nature of Galehaut’s reaction when he discovered that the valiant helmeted warrior, once disarmed, was also a paragon of manly beauty. What is certain, however, is that he did not hesitate to grant Lancelot’s wish that he surrender to Arthur; moreover, he would have done so immediately, without staging a dramatic renunciation of victory only after having proven his might in battle. But any plan desired by Lancelot was a plan that Galehaut was prepared to execute, and Lancelot wanted King Arthur not only saved from defeat but saved through his intervention. Henceforth, Arthur would owe his realm to the Black Knight. And Galehaut would have yielded all the grand ambitions of his life in exchange for having Lancelot as his companion.
To Guenevere the young knight responded as both fearless warrior and timid lover. She, however, perceived nothing of either. Seeing the disguised black-armored defender, she would scarcely have remembered the youth dressed in white whom she once dismissed with a kind but meaningless word; and later she was more amused than impressed on learning that, when Lancelot conquered Dolorous Guard, and then held back the huge armies of Galehaut, the memory of that word loomed large as his inspiration. A simple mistake! She can hardly be faulted for being what she was: a queen, experienced in the world, perhaps disenchanted, the most beautiful of women, of whom it was said she ennobled all who came into her presence. If the king had loved her once, little of that was left but ceremony, and now affairs of the heart seemed to her an inconsequential game. Thus, having accepted Lancelot’s love in the tale’s remarkable scene of avowal, she could assign the Lady of Malehaut to his friend, simply to make a foursome, and to have a confidante. Fear and sorrow would eventually change her, but, almost always, she would let herself be ruled by expediency.
If King Arthur could be said to do the same, it was in his instinctive refusal to perceive Lancelot as a threat to his marriage. No doubt he relied on Lancelot too much: Lancelot the greatest warrior in the world, Lancelot who made the peace with Galehaut, Lancelot who could defend his realm from endless threats of invasion. Arthur only thought to draw him closer to his court, to keep him there as a knight of the Round Table. One could say that he was credulous, or, convinced of his own greatness, could not imagine a rival for the queen’s love. He himself, however, was easily and frequently seduced. He was also given to hasty, and damaging, decisions. When he had a last chance to save his kingdom, he lost it out of pride, or perhaps out of dignity. There was dignity, at least, in his final moments, and ambiguity as well. Whether the king has foreseen it or not, the hand that rises from the lake to seize his sword Excalibur will place it in Lancelot’s grave, suggesting that the weapon always identified with Arthur more truly belongs to the younger warrior. Arthur himself is borne away by his half-sister Morgan. Her appearance at this point is darkly disturbing, for she has been, throughout the romance, an agent of evil, attempting to use Lancelot in order to destroy the queen. Now she takes possession of Arthur, who goes with her willingly; his mortal wounds will perhaps be healed in Avalon. Whatever we may think of this alliance, it could hardly surprise the Lady of the Lake. For her it can only be a final justification of her enmity.
The trajectory of the fictional King Arthur reproduces that of the early Britons when the chaos of Saxon invasions gave way to a time of peace and confidence, only to be reduced to chaos again, and finally defeat. When Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father, died, his son was too young to dominate the kingdom. The barons fought for the kingship, and there was no safety for anyone, anywhere. With Merlin’s help, Arthur prevailed. The kingdom was powerful, its borders secure, and King Arthur’s court became a source of reliable justice.
At the time of our story, this is no longer true. Lancelot provides a kind of last hope, a vision of a knight as knights were imagined to be. But he alone cannot defend the realm against an enemy as powerful as Galehaut. And Galehaut, deflected from his conquest by his love of Lancelot, then spurred by that very love to satisfy Lancelot’s yearning for the queen, makes possible the adultery that will eventually destroy the court of Arthur from within.
After King Arthur, as the Lady of Malehaut says in the end to Guenevere, the kingdom is even worse off than it was when Uther died, since Arthur leaves neither son nor heir. Excalibur lies magically in the grave with Lancelot, the grave he shares with Galehaut, and of all the participants in the drama, only one, the Lady of the Lake, remains undiminished.
Lancelot is the book that Paolo and Francesca have been reading in the fifth canto of the Inferno when they yield to their love. Dante mentions Galehaut in passing as the intermediary between Lancelot and the queen, and Boccaccio, moved by the great lord’s generosity, uses his name as the subtitle of his Decameron (“Il Principe Galeotto”). But in later imaginings of the Arthurian saga itself, Galehaut, for all his prominence in the original narrative, was rapidly marginalized and even eclipsed. The greatest retelling in English, the fifteenth-century work of Thomas Malory, reduced the character to one of no significance, leaving Guenevere without a rival for Lancelot’s affections, and subsequent novels, plays, poems – now films as well –
