II

THE ENCHANTRESS, THE KNIGHT AND THE CLERIC:

AUTHORIAL SURROGATES IN ARTHURIAN ROMANCE
Carolyne Larrington

Introduction

The clerics who composed historical works and vernacular romances in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries frequently figured themselves as authors
and as clerks within their texts. Their self-depictions could vary widely,
from the jongleurs (one eponymously named Juglet) in the work of Jean
Renart and Gerbert de Montreuil, to the hermit, chosen by Christ, or the
confessor-priest in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, to the enchantress or magi-
cian, epitomized by Merlin himself. Insular historians, as David Rollo has
argued in Glamorous Sorcery, point up for their varying audiences – the
literate and the not-so-literate – the possibility that their texts include both
fact and fiction, truth and artifice, that fabula, often concealing a deeper
kind of truth, may be at work in such texts as William of Malmes­bury’s
Gesta regum Anglorum or Gerald of Wales’s Topographia and Expugnatio
Hibernica. The clerical historian, Rollo suggests, calls attention to his
artifice by consistently evoking
[a] surrogate author projected as magician and the written medium he
controls designated through a lexicon that collapses the verbal arts with
glamorous sorcery (gramaire/grimoire), performative conjuring (praes-
tigia), intoned spells (incantationes), and drugs capable of seducing,
bewitching, transforming, or curing those to whom they are administered
(medicamenta/medicamina).

In his consideration of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s self-presentation in the

Roman de Troie, and more so in his concluding remarks about Chrétien’s
Cligés, Rollo expands the domain of the author-magician figure from

 J. W. Baldwin, Aristocratic Life in Medieval France: The Romances of Jean Renart and Gerbert
de Montreuil, 1190–1250 (Baltimore, 2000), pp. 21–30.
 D. Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages (Minneapolis and
London, 2000), p. xiii.

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 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

chronicle into twelfth-century romance. Chrétien, he maintains, aims

to enact a generic separation between history and romance in Cligés by
presenting ‘his own artifice as a form of creative necromancy’. Taking
my departure from the arguments of Rollo and Michelle Freeman, and
engaging with the work of Jane Burns and Miranda Griffin on authors and
authority in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, in this essay I explore the author-
magician identification in Arthurian romance in both France and England.
I will analyse magical figures, including Merlin and his enchantress pupils,
who operate as authorial surrogates in using transformation, illusion and
artifice within courtly fiction. They not only stage and direct local narra-
tives in which they figure, but also gesture towards and comment on
deeper truths about chevalerie, critically considered from the standpoint
of clergie. Their clerical affinities vary from text to text; some versions
of the magician are self-conscious wielders of the technology of literacy,
others are closely aligned with an understanding of chivalry originating
in the Church, others again are intent on fabulation and illusion in pursuit
of moral inquiry.

The clerc as Shaper of Chivalry

In her discussion of Cligés Michelle Freeman makes an important distinc-

tion between the matière that Chrétien works with, and his view of his
own achievement in reworking the classical tropes provided by trans-
latio studii. ‘It is my opinion’, Freeman asserts, ‘that clergie is poetically
opposed to chevalerie in the context of what might be called Chrétien’s
patriotism; clergie is what takes place here and quite seriously in France.
Chevalerie, on the other hand, may be ridiculed or criticised in what
follows’. The authors of twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Arthurian
texts, whether named or unnamed, belonged to a newly emergent literate
class within courtly society. Even before the Gregorian reforms were fully
put into effect, Stephen Jaeger argues that the ethical ideals which would
bring about the Prozess der Zivilisation (in Elias’s terms) for the military
elite were in fact ‘native to another social class: the educated members of

 R. Trachsler notes ‘a kind of symbiosis between romance and historiography’ in ‘A Question

of Time: Romance and History’, in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. C. Dover
(Cambridge, 2003), pp. 23–32 (p. 24).
 Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery, p. 169. Rollo’s observations draw on M. Freeman, The Poetics of
‘Translation Studii’ and ‘Conjointure’ (Lexington, KY, 1979), pp. 91–139.
 For a positive estimation of chivalry as evolving to protect Holy Church, see R. Barber, ‘Chivalry,
Cistercianism and the Grail’, in Dover, A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, pp. 3–12 (pp.
5–8). I have argued that Arthurian enchantresses systematically interrogate the parameters and
limitations of chivalry in my recent book, King Arthur’s Enchantresses (London, 2006). In this
essay I expand the argument begun there about the relationship between clerical authors and the
enchantress-figures they create.
 Freeman, The Poetics of ‘Translatio Studii’, p. 40.

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courts, the curiales who served kings, bishops, and secular princes, and
the entire class of men who aspired to that position.’ These curiales were
at first primarily of noble origin. In the twelfth century however, cathedral
schools began to open their doors to talented youths from lower social
classes, as well as the sons of nobility; now that the newly centralized
governments, and even baronial households required literate officials,
curiales performing a whole range of clerical functions, the schools could
be a ladder to social preferment. A good number of the clergie however
were younger sons from the nobility, competing directly with their secular
brothers and cousins for preferment and influence, ‘occupying a space of
potential ideological conflict’. Thus the basis of power for the clerical
élite within a secular court did not lie in noble birth, wealth and military
achievement, nor was it marked by a public and knowable genealogy and
the holding of the right to bear arms. Rather it was rooted in myste-
rious and culturally invisible intellectual attainments, made visible in the
practices of literacy or demonstrated in courtly discourse. The author(s)
of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle was or were most likely clerics with aris-
tocratic backgrounds and an intimate knowledge of the chivalric life in
employment at secular courts; yet their education would have separated
them from the world which they depict.10 Whether they sprang from an
ambitious peasantry or from a high noble background, members of the
clerical class were by virtue of their election of education as a career
fundamentally not, or no longer, knightly. Hence the clerically composed
romances did not merely mirror the values of the chivalric audience
who consumed them, but, as Jaeger suggests, these texts work dynami-
cally both to create and to critique those values, reconfiguring them with
distinctively clerical emphases.11 Since the romances are by definition
about knights and the quest for honour, clerics were excluded as actors
in romance narrative. They could write themselves back into chivalric
discourse only in limited ways: as hermits with recondite interpretative
knowledge, as literate amanuenses, diligently recording the narratives of
Arthur’s court or, in a move which brings into prominence and celebrates
the prized clerical skills of literacy and verbal creativity, as Merlin and
his enchantress-pupils.
Adumbrating Jaeger to some degree, Ad Putter has argued very precisely
that in the case of Chrétien’s poetry and the works of the Gawain-poet,

 C. S. Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness – Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals –
939–1210 (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 4; N. Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische
und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, 2nd edn repr. (Frankfurt, 1979).
 A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1986), p. 216.
 A. Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford, 1995), pp.
197–8.
10 See C. Dover, ‘The Book of Lancelot’, in Dover, A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, pp.
87–93 (p. 87).
11 Jaeger, Origins, p. 209.

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 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

the values promoted in these romances are not exclusively those of cheva-
lerie.12 Both authors aim to inculcate clerical values of courtesy, self-
control, and enthusiasm for learning and for abstract thinking in a secular
context:
The translatio of the traditional bellator and his way of life into an ideal of
the courtly knight who is pacified, well-mannered and diplomatic is perhaps
best regarded as an effort … to adapt a chivalric ideology to the demands
of a changing society, and to make these adaptations attractive.13

These civilizing concepts were not accepted into an understanding of

what constitutes knightliness without a struggle. Jaeger documents cler-
ical opposition to courtly values – Saxo Grammaticus’s denunciation of
the effete manners at the court of Ingeld is a case in point.14 Indeed in a
number of texts – the Lancelot and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in
particular – courtly values tend to be promoted in a distinctively female-
gendered domain, risking accusations of effeminacy.15 But the clear
connection between women and courtesy translates into the requirement
for the knight to cultivate civilized values in order to secure romantic love,
and thus guarantee his ‘heteronormativity’.16 It is a powerful incentive
to the acquisition and display of such talents, as embodied in Lancelot,
Gauvain, and his English counterpart, Gawain; feminized and intellectual
values provide a pay off for the knight in terms of sexual success and
enhanced status within courtly society.

Historians Writing Arthurian Magic

Geoffrey of Monmouth, as Rollo observes, is ‘the first author of the

Insular tradition to embrace magic as the sign of his own power and to
manifest no hesitation in promulgating potentially beguiling fictions …
He precipitated the confusion between historia and fabula that was to
preoccupy authors for the rest of the century’.17 In the Arthurian context,
Geoffrey’s magic is ascribed most markedly to Merlin, whose powers are
deployed on behalf of a succession of kings: Vortigern, Ambrosius and
Uther. For Vortigern, Merlin performs clairvoyance, identifying the cause
of the nightly collapse of Vortigern’s tower, and prophesying the coming
vengeance of the sons of Constantine; for Aurelius Ambrosius, he trans-

12 Putter, Sir Gawain, pp. 188–229.

13 Putter, Sir Gawain, p. 228.
14 Jaeger, Origins, pp. 176–94; Saxo Grammaticus, History of the Danes, Books I–IX, ed. H. Ellis-
Davidson, trans. P. Fisher (Cambridge, 1979–80), pp. 183–95.
15 Jaeger, Origins, p. 191; see also Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 51–73.
16 The phrase is Dorsey Armstrong’s; see D. Armstrong, Gender and the Chivalric Community in
Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (Gainesville, 2003), pp. 17–18.
17 Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery, p. 158.

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ports the stones of the Giants’ Dance to Salisbury Plain, while for Uther
he brings about shape-changing through illusion, creating the fiction that
it is Gorlois who lies with Ygerna on the night Arthur is conceived. Uther
enthusiastically performs the fabula which Merlin constructs for him, both
in his outward appearance and in his elaborately mendacious language:
‘Deceperat namque eam falsa specie quam assumpserat. Deceperat etiam
ficticiis sermonibus, quos ornate componebat’ (He had deceived her by
the disguise which he had taken. He had deceived her, too, by the lying
things that he said to her, things which he planned with great skill).18
Magic thus creates and marks the origin of the Arthurian biography in
insular tradition, though Merlin recedes from the narrative after Arthur’s
conception and magic plays no part in Geoffrey’s account of Arthur’s
polity. It is only at the end of the king’s life that magic reappears, and in
a highly occluded form, in the reference to Arthur’s departure to Avalon to
be healed of his wounds.19 In the generically very different Vita Merlini,
Geoffrey elaborates both Arthur’s final place of rest and the magic that
surrounds him there, a healing magic in the gift of Morgen (as she is
called in this text), entirely distinct from the powers of Merlin. Both
historians and romance-writers operate a dual order of fictionality when
discussing the powers of such magical figures. The uneducated believe
that magic – like the power of literacy – is supernatural in origin. William
of Malmesbury observes of the illiterate: ‘quod soleat populus littera-
torum famam laedere, dicens illum loqui cum daemone quem in aliquo
viderint excellentem opere’ (that the common people tend to slight the
fame of the lettered, saying that anyone they see to excel in a given field
must converse with a demon).20 Gerald of Wales, a historian who deploys
the tropes of magic and fabulation most freely in his work, sceptically
notes that Morgan is believed by ‘fabulosi Britones et eorum cantores’
(fanciful Britons and their poets) to be ‘dea quaedam phantastica’ (some
kind of goddess), deliberately distancing both himself and at least part
of his Latin-literate audience from the truth of this asseveration. Gervase
of Tilbury calls the enchantress ‘Morganda fatata’ (Morgan the fairy) in
a context which notes that the British fancifully (‘fabulose’) believe that
Arthur will return.21 The author of the Vulgate Lancelot is more robust
when he calls attention to the doubled understanding of magic as both
‘real’ and figurative: ‘maintes gens – dont a cel tens avoit molt de foles

18 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. N. Wright,
vol. I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568 (Cambridge, 1984–88), p. 98; History of the Kings of
Britain, trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 207.
19 Historia Regum Brittanie, ed. Wright, p. 132; History of the Kings, trans. Thorpe, p. 261.
20 William of Malmesbury, De Gestis regum Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (London,1887–9), I,
2.167, p.193. Trans. in Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery, p. xii; see also p. 174.
21 Gerald of Wales, Speculum Ecclesiae in Opera Giraldi Cambrensis, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock
and G. F. Warner, 8 vols. (London, 1861–91), IV, ed. J. S. Brewer, pp. 48–9; Gervase of Tilbury,
Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), pp. 428–9.

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 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

par tot le païs – … l’apeloient Morgue la dieuesse’ (many people – there

was no dearth of fools at that time through the countryside – … called her
Morgan the goddess).22 Such beliefs are fit now only for the rustici, the
uneducated who are the butt of clerical contempt.23 Yet Rollo’s observa-
tion that ‘[t]he use of sorcery as a figure for writing attests a recognised
cultural phenomenon, perfectly comprehensible not only to the bilingual,
but also, and more importantly, to the less proficient who supposedly
made this association in the first place’, permeates the act of writing itself
whether in chronicle or romance.24
Insular historians, the first narrators of Arthurian biography, are the first
to deploy the author-magician trope. The trope appears also in romance and
in French tradition; Benoït’s Roman de Troie contains a number of magi-
cian figures, including Medea, the archetype of the learned enchantress
in subsequent romance and an influence on the development of Morgain
la fée.25 Michelle Freeman demonstrates how, in his most self-conscious
work Cligés, Chrétien places the enchantress Thessala at the mid-point of
his romance. Thessala boasts that she herself surpasses Medea in magical
learning before she begins to create the magic potions which enable the
heroine Fenice’s designs. Thessala’s concoction, Freeman argues, operates
as a metaphor for Chrétien’s own creative process: just as Thessala blends,
compounds, thickens and tempers her ingredients, so Chrétien compounds
together motifs, themes and tropes from earlier literature (most notably
the Roman de Troie, the Roman d’Eneas, and above all Béroul’s Tristan)
in a smoothly integrated (conjoint), poetic artifice. Chrétien and Thessala,
suggests Freeman, ‘are the male and female counterparts of one another,
mutually supportive as they reinforce one another’s endeavors in a poeti-
cally constructed conjointure, thanks to which translatio studii is served
and celebrated’.26
The named author-poet – even if we know as little about him as we
do about Chrétien – thus writes himself into his text, exulting in the
creativity and artifice of the enchanter and, in the case of Thessala, the
enchantress. In these romances, the magician creates something, a medi-
camen in the case of Thessala (echoing Geoffrey’s Merlin), or a building:
the elaborate alabaster chamber in which Hector is healed by Broz the
Apulian in the Roman de Troie, noted by Rollo, or the tomb of Camilla
in the Roman d’Eneas, adduced by Freeman.27 Whether architectural

22 Lancelot: roman en prose du XIIIe siècle, ed. A. Micha, 8 vols. (Geneva, 1978–82), I, 275;
Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation, trans. N. J.
Lacy et al., 5 vols. (New York, 1993–6), II, 305, my punctuation, hereafter cited as L-G.
23 Murray, Reason and Society, pp. 237–44.
24 Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery, p. 81.
25 See N. McDonald, Divers folk diversely they seyde: A Study of the Figure of Medea in Medi-
eval Literature (unpublished D.Phil. thesis, Oxford, 1994), pp. 62–89; Larrington, King Arthur’s
Enchantresses, p. 9.
26 Freeman, Poetics of ‘Translatio Studii’, p. 139.
27 Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery, pp. 87–93; Freeman, Poetics of ‘Translatio Studii’, p. 141.

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or pharmaceutical, these creations allude to the art of fiction within the

romance text: a highly wrought, efficacious and aesthetically pleasing
object is brought into existence, symbolizing the text itself and coding its
maker as kin to the author.

Merlin, his Authors and his Scribes

The Arthurian prose romances are less highly wrought and self-consciously
fictive than Chrétien’s poetry; the use of prose in romance, as Richard
Trachsler argues, like the prose of the historiographer signals an orienta-
tion towards the truth as historia.28 Since we know nothing of the actual
authors of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the identification of author and mage
in these texts is, at first sight, less certain; or at least the mage performs
some other function beyond calling attention to the sens, to the artistry of
the text. There is however a plethora of pseudo-authors enacting what Jane
Burns calls the ‘fictions of authority’, foremost among whom is Merlin,
‘the master artificer and fictional paradigm of authorship’.29 Indeed he can
be viewed in the Vulgate Merlin and the Post-Vulgate Suite as a new type
of courtly hero-as-intellectual.30 This Merlin is not the hybrid chevalier-
clerc of the Prophesies de Merlin who will be discussed below, but rather
a representative of the rising clerical élite.31 Jane Burns and Miranda
Griffin have laid bare the differing authorial and narrative personae in the
Lancelot-Grail Cycle, beginning with Christ as the Ur-Author of the livret
delivered to the author of the Estoire del Saint Graal.32 Robert de Boron
is also credited with a role in the authorship of the Estoire; he is said to
have rendered the livret into French. It is he ‘qui ceste estoire tranlata
de latin en romanz après celui saint hermite a cui Nostre Sires la livra
premierement’ (who translated it from Latin into French after Our Lord
first gave it to that holy hermit).33
In the Cycle’s second book Merlin emerges as a remarkable freshly
re-imagined figure: ‘[with] his many faces, Merlin gives the romance
its momentum and even seems to manage the formation of history into

28 See Trachsler, ‘A Question of Time’, pp. 28–9; M. Griffin, The Object and the Cause in the
Vulgate Cycle (Oxford, 2005), pp. 84–8.
29 E. J. Burns, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle (Columbus, 1985), p. 24.
30 B. Lundt, Melusine und Merlin im Mittelalter: Entwürfe und Modelle weiblicher Existenz im
Beziehungs-Diskurs der Geschlechter (Munich, 1991), pp. 190–97.
31 See Murray, Reason and Society, pp. 217–18.
32 Burns, Arthurian Fictions, pp. 16–18; L’Estoire del Saint Graal, ed. J-P. Ponceau, 2 vols. (Paris,
1997), II, 391, 478, 519, 546.
33 Estoire del Saint Graal, ed. Ponceau, II, 391; L-G, I, 112. See Burns, Arthurian Fictions, pp.
35–40; Griffin, The Object, pp. 95–6; and, for a full account of Robert de Boron, F. Bogdanow,
‘Robert de Boron’s Vision of Arthurian History’, in Arthurian Literature XIV, ed. J. Carley and
F. Riddy (1996), pp. 19–52.

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 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

romance’.34 Indeed Merlin takes over the composition of the Merlin

proper from its original narrator; as soon as he is weaned he seizes narra-
tive responsibility for time past, explaining the circumstances of his own
conception and that of the judge who is trying Merlin’s mother on a
charge of fornication.35 Later in the text he is shown dictating the plot of
the Estoire and his own prehistory to his confessor and scriptor Master
Blaise, becoming responsible within the time-frame of the text for the
recording of events in both the distant and the recent past. Moreover, in
his prophecies, Merlin narrates the events of time future.36
The Queste purports to be narrated by Bors, eyewitness to the story’s
climaxes at Corbenic and Sarras, but it is also said to be written down
by assorted scribes and preserved in the library at Salisbury. Finally, so
the text tells us, the story is re-written (meaning, perhaps, translated) by
Walter Map. The text’s suggestion that Map is its author originates in
the Queste, but, in a linking and unifying manoeuvre, Map as ostensible
Queste-author is invoked in the last lines of the Lancelot and and the first
lines of the Mort Artu.37 Though the Queste plays freely with multiple
authorities, translators and narrators, its real composer is reluctant to relin-
quish the fantasy of power as deriving from books. He inscribes interpre-
tative authority in the various hermit figures who appear from time to time
to criticize the practice of worldly chivalry and to decode the allegorical
significance of the adventures the knights experience.38 Magical figures
cannot act as authorial surrogates in the Queste; what appears as magic
there is ascribed to the miraculous, originating in the power of God, or
to the diabolical, but not to the marvellous with its rational, if hidden,
explanation, the domain in which the enchanter operates.
Merlin then is the most substantial author-figure within the Lancelot-
Grail Cycle, his narrative dutifully transcribed by Blaise. When he is
finally imprisoned and silenced, as Griffin notes, his last utterance, his
despairing cry from the tomb itself gives rise to a problematic and illusory
text, the Conte du Brait, or Story of the Cry. This text haunts both the
Lancelot-Grail and Post-Vulgate Cycles as part of the immanent Arthu-
rian narrative (‘li contes del commun’ as it is called early in the Lancelot),
the intertextual universe containing those narratives which have not been

34 A. Combes, ‘The Merlin and its Suite’, in Dover, A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, pp.
75–85 (p. 78).
35 The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, ed. H. O. Sommer, 7 vols. (Washington DC,
1908–16), II, 12–18; L-G, I, 173–5.
36 Vulgate Version, ed. Sommer, II, 73–4; Griffin, The Object, pp. 31–3; Combes, ‘The Merlin’,
pp. 80–3. See also A. Berthelot, Figures et fonction de l’ecrivain au XIIIe siècle (Montreal and
Paris, 1991).
37 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VI, 244; L-G, III, 338; La Queste del saint graal, ed. A. Pauphilet (Paris,
1921), p. 280; L-G, IV, 87; La Mort Artu, ed. J. Frappier, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964), p. 1; L-G, IV,
91. Further on Walter Map, see E. J. Burns, ‘Introduction’, in L-G, I, xxi–xxii.
38 For discussion of the hermit as a new kind of cleric, introduced into vernacular literature by
Chrétien, see Baldwin, Aristocratic Life, pp. 213–34.

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preserved in surviving texts.39 The Brait probably never existed – it was

generated most likely by a scribal error for Brut: ‘a fictitious fiction [that]
acts as a memorial to the possibility of completeness in the Arthurian
canon’ as Griffin comments; yet this tradition signals the status of Merlin
as Ur-author in the universe of Arthurian intertext.40 Once Merlin is
silenced, his role as master-artificer, arch-clerc and shaper of Arthurian
story is dissipated within the Cycle. Blaise too fades from the scene after
Merlin bids him a final farewell, and the narration of the quest to find
Merlin is left to the actors themselves, the knights who take part in the
fruitless search for him and recount their adventures when they return to
Camelot.41 Thus the Lancelot is largely narrated by li contes, the story
itself, reiterated in such phrases as ‘che dist li contes’ (according to the
story) or ‘Chi endroit dist li contes’ (At this point the story recounts), as
Burns and Griffin observe.42 No authorial figure is introjected; Blaise’s
role as scriptor is distributed among numerous nameless clercs and no
one, not even the Dame du Lac, exactly succeeds to Merlin’s intellec-
tual status. The Lancelot was most likely the first of the Lancelot-Grail
Cycle texts to be composed, and consequently the question of how it
figures its author is not closely attended to. In the other works of the
Cycle, which must adapt themselves to the Lancelot if coherence across
the Cycle is to be achieved, authors and transmission processes are given
greater emphasis. Thus the Merlin, probably the final text to be incorpo-
rated into the Cycle, is, as Griffin notes, ‘a text with a lot of explaining
to do’.43 It is the Merlin, as we have seen, which pulls together the fictive
authors within and external to the text, accounting for the acts of compo-
sition, their writing down and even the texts’ supposed translation into
the vernacular.
In the Prophesies de Merlin the sage’s entombment by the Dame du
Lac neither silences Merlin’s prophetic voice nor ends the author’s narra-
tive. Before his imprisonment Merlin employed a series of amanuenses
whose task was to collect and transcribe his prophecies: Master Blaise, his
mother’s confessor, and a certain Master Tholomer, succeeded by Master
Antoine. Once Merlin is incarcerated, the Dame du Lac’s lover, Méliadus,
in a fascinating textual move, assumes the role of go-between, mediating
Merlin’s words to the amanuenses, abandoning, it seems, the life of cheva-

39 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 243; L-G, II, 57 and n. 4. The late medieval Spanish El Baladro del
Sabio Merlin (The Shriek of Merlin the Sage) makes reference to the Brait-tradition in its title, but
it is actually based on an earlier Hispanic translation of the Merlin material in the Post-Vulgate
Roman du Graal. See Baladro del Sabio Merlin, in The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, ed. N. J.
Lacy (New York and London, 1991), p. 31.
40 Griffin, The Object, pp. 91–3 gives a clear account of the Conte de Brait.
41 Vulgate Version, ed. Sommer, II, 458; L-G, I, 420.
42 Burns, Arthurian Fictions, pp. 13, 41–2; Griffin, The Object, p. 104; Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII,
12, L-G, II, 5; Lancelot, ed. Micha VII, 44, L-G, I, 13.
43 M. Griffin, ‘Writing out the Sin: Arthur, Charlemagne and the Spectre of Incest’, Neophilologus
88 (2004), 499–519 (p. 513); see also Griffin, The Object, p. 48.

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lerie for that of clergie and becoming a hybrid ‘chevalier-clerc’.44 Ordi-

nary knights are not permitted to approach Merlin’s tomb; a party who try
to force Méliadus to lead them to the summit of the Quaking Mountain
(‘le montagne qui debatoit’), where Merlin rests, are swallowed up by the
earth.45 Nor can the learned, however clever they may be, displace Méli-
adus from his role; an expedition undertaken by Morgain and her three
enchantress friends to find Merlin fails, and Master Antoine accepts his
place as lowly scribe in the hierarchical transmission of knowledge.46 The
text’s final amanuensis, the Sage Clerc de Gales, importunes Méliadus
to lead him to Merlin so that he may confer directly with the author of
the prophecies he so diligently transcribes.47 However, direct access is
forbidden to him; the closest that the Sage Clerc can come to usurping
the intimate relationship between the Dame’s past and present lovers is a
distant aerial view of Merlin’s tomb. The Sage Clerc is enabled, through
a prophecy from Merlin delivered by Méliadus who is not unsympathetic
to the Clerc’s longings, to locate the stone in which Merlin’s demon father
is imprisoned and, through his knowledge of ‘yngremance’ (necromancy),
he compels the demonic rock to fly with him across the world.48 The
sequence marvellously embodies clerical fantasies of unmediated knowl-
edge and power. Preserved from mortal harm by the prayers of Perceval,
the Sage Clerc loses all his hair to the burning ether, but he views all the
heavens and the earth before finally he hovers over Merlin’s mountain-top,
unable to approach closer. The stone returns him unharmed to Camelot
where the Clerc now accepts his role as amanuensis with good grace.49
The contest between knight and cleric for the monopoly of knowledge
and the mediation of authority and authorship is at stake in this section
of the Prophesies; it is highly suggestive that it is a hybrid figure who
succeeds in retaining privileged access to prophetic secrets, and that the
Clerc, however ingenious and sage he may be, is firmly relegated to the
amanuensis role. The chevalier successfully assimilates himself to the
world of knowledge inhabited by Merlin, the Dame and the Clerc. Yet

44 See Prophécies de Merlin, ed. L. A. Paton, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1926), I, 183–5;
Prophesies de Merlin (Codex Bodmer 116), ed. A. Berthelot (Cologny-Genève, 1992), pp. 107–
11. For discussion of Méliadus’s singular role see N. Koble, ‘Le chevalier au tombeau: pèlerinages
à la tombe prophétique dans le Prophesies de Merlin de Richart d’Irlande’, in Le Monde et l’Autre
Monde: Actes du colloque arthurien de Rennes (8–9 mars 2001), ed. D. Hüe and C. Ferlampin-
Acher (Orléans, 2002), pp. 223–37.
45 Prophécies, ed. Paton, I, 218; Prophesies, ed. Berthelot, pp. 129–30. Translations my own. On the
dual meaning of ‘debatoit’ see Koble, ‘Le chevalier au tombeau’, p. 228: the Quaking Mountain
is also shaken by ‘la résonance de la voix prophétique qui émane du tombeau’ (the resonance of
the prophetic voice emanating from the tomb).
46 Prophesies, ed. Berthelot, pp. 376–7.
47 Prophécies, ed. Paton, I, 208; Prophesies, ed. Berthelot, p. 123.
48 Prophécies, ed. Paton, I, 231–40; see Prophesies, ed. Berthelot, pp. 134–6 for the Sage Clerc’s
adventures on the flying stone; cf. Koble, ‘Le chevalier au tombeau’, pp. 227–9.
49 For discussion of the scribes of Merlin, see Prophécies, ed. Paton, II, 301–27; for the role of the
Sage Clerc in particular, Prophécies, ed. Paton, II, 316–20.

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 ENCHANTRESS, KNIGHT AND CLERIC

the competition between knight and clerk is resolved in mutual affection

and co-operation: ‘lors li [the Sage Clerc] vint a recontre Melyadus et
l’embracha mout, dont il fissent mout grant joie et grant leece li uns a
l’autre’ (then he came to meet Méliadus and embraced him warmly, for
they gained great joy and delight from each other).50 The cleric, however
brave and adventurous he may be, cannot in this later thirteenth-century
work exclude the knight from the process of authorship and transmission,
but he can demand that he fulfil his appointed function: ‘Melyadus …
s’en ala a la roce Mierlin pour obeir al Sage Clerc’ (Méliadus … went
away to Merlin’s rock to obey the Sage Clerc).51 The Prophesies thus
splits and complicates the authorial role; prophet, knight and amanuensis
work together to bring into being a text imagined as ‘oscillant entre ces
trois figures de clergie’ (oscillating between these three figures of clergie),
reinscribing a chivalric identity into the process of creating a text.52

From Enchanter to Enchantress

Could the courtly-clerical authors of Arthurian romance perform the

gender leap from male to female, making enchantresses equal with male
magicians as authorial surrogates? Roberta Krueger asserts, ‘[if] profes-
sional differences distance the clerk from the chivalric ideals of male
nobles, his gender separates him more acutely from the feminine culture
of noblewomen’; but I suggest that the enchantress-figures of later Arthu-
rian romance both could and did offer a potential site of identification
for their authors, providing a position from which, under cover of the
feminine, some of the excesses and contradictions of knightliness can
be interrogated.53 Benoît deploys the university-educated Medea as a
dynamic figure in the Roman de Troie; Thessala, as Freeman argues, has
already emerged in Cligés as an authorial substitute in her magical crea-
tivity. Once Merlin disappears early in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, it is his
pupils the enchantresses who come to embody the creative use of literacy,
the powers of artifice and, very often, of making things happen. Just as
Chaucer’s Pandarus doubles the fictive narrator of Troilus in taking the
action forward and ultimately propelling the lovers into one another’s
arms, so Morgain la fée, in particular, sets up not one, but two major
works of enchantment: the Val sans Retour and the plot(s) of Sir Gawain

50 Prophesies, ed. Berthelot, p. 138.

51 Prophesies, ed. Berthelot, p. 138.
52 Koble, ‘Le Chevalier au tombeau’, p. 237.
53 R. L. Krueger, ‘Desire, Meaning and the Female Reader: The Problem in Chrétien’s Charrete’, in
The Passing of Arthur: New Essays in Arthurian Tradition, ed. C. Baswell and W. Sharpe (New
York, 1988), pp. 31–51, reprinted in Lancelot and Guinevere: A Casebook, ed. L. J. Walters (New
York and London, 2002), pp. 229–245 (p. 232).

53
 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

and the Green Knight.54 These are intended to interrogate the fit between
the chivalric pressure for aventure and virtù and the civilized values of
courtesy, elegant conversation, emotional intimacy (affabilitas, amicitia)
and probity, ME trawþe, the capacity to be truthful. So too the Dame du
Lac creates the ideal knight in her life’s work, Lancelot, training him in
an idealized version of knighthood which, as her celebrated lecture on
chivalry makes clear, has a marked clerical inflection.55 Viviane, in her
various forms, most notably perhaps in Malory’s Nynyve, also works to
inculcate a feminized and courtly set of values into Arthur’s homosocial
and hypermasculine court.56
Just as sorcery operates as a figure for literacy in twelfth-century
texts, so, conversely in the Arthurian universe, literacy becomes an index
and a necessary precondition of sorcery. In the Merlin Morgain acquires
literacy when her husband sends her to a convent after her marriage. For
her knowledge (‘clergie’), understanding of medicine (‘fisique’), and her
‘sens’ (intelligence), she gains the by-name la fée.57 Thus she is already
a ‘boine clergesse’ (a good female clerk), when she meets Merlin and
begins to learn the techniques of magic, ‘maintes merueilles … dast-
renomie & dingremance’ (many wonders in astrology and necromancy).58
In the Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin she is already acquainted with the
‘set ars’ (seven arts) of the medieval university curriculum when she
meet Merlin at Lot’s funeral. Merlin initiates Morgain into ‘la scienche
d’ingromanchie et l’art’ (the science and art of necromancy), but her fear
of Merlin’s fol amor causes her to break off her study.59
Bookishness is endemic in enchantresses. In the Prophesies de Merlin,
Morgain is depicted as consulting her compendium of spells in a magic
contest against another of Merlin’s pupils, the Dame d’Avalon.60 Books
underpin the power of Gamille, the enchantress of the Saxon Rock, ‘car
par ses livres feroit elle corre une aigue contre-mont’ (for with her books
she could make water flow uphill). When Kay burns the books contained
in her chests Gamille flings herself from the Rock and is seriously, perhaps
fatally injured, for ‘elle amast miels a avoir perdu tels iiii castiaus que
sez livres’ (she would rather have lost any four castles than her books).61

54 See Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 51–73 for detailed discussion of these adven-
tures.
55 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 247–58; L-G, II, 58–61.
56 Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 97–121; G. Heng, ‘Enchanted Ground: The Femi-
nine Subtext in Malory’, in Arthurian Women, ed. T. S. Fenster (New York, 1996), pp. 97–113
and now A. Kaufman, ‘The Law of the Lake: Malory’s Sovereign Lady’, Arthuriana 17.3 (2007),
56–73.
57 Merlin: roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. A. Micha (Geneva, 1979), p. 72; L-G, I, 208.
58 Vulgate Version, ed. Sommer, II, 254; L-G, I, 307.
59 La Suite du Roman de Merlin, ed. G. Roussineau, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1996), I, 119–20.
60 Prophesies de Merlin, ed. Berthelot, p. 341.
61 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VIII, 481–2; L-G, II, 236; see also E. Kennedy, Lancelot and the Grail
(Oxford, 1986), p. 140.

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 ENCHANTRESS, KNIGHT AND CLERIC

Viviane in the Merlin is already literate at the age of twelve when she first
encounters the enchanter; she diligently records in writing the first spell
Merlin imparts to her. In the Lancelot Ninianne writes down everything
Merlin teaches her and uses script as a talisman, inscribing two magic
words, ‘ii nons de conjuremens’, on her loins so that Merlin cannot have
sex with her.62
Beyond exercising their literacy skills (they frequently write letters in
the Prophesies de Merlin) the enchantresses fictionalize, creating artifice
and illusion. They stage and direct complex inscenations, often inscribed
in the romance landscape.63 The Dame du Lac maintains an elaborate
disguise for her realm, a body of water which conceals her estate and its
manors. In some texts (e.g. the Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin) the illusion
of the lake is established by Merlin; the Lancelot does not elaborate on
its origin, but it is clear here that the Lake’s magic is controlled, if not
originally generated, by the Dame and her agents.64 Beneath the lake she
arranges for Lancelot’s education and that of his cousins, taking care that
he is equipped for a knightly career (in contradistinction to the defective
education provided to Lancelot’s literary relative, Lanzelet, who cannot
learn to ride in his sea-fairy abode).65 The sentimental maternal feelings
with which the Dame is credited, primarily for Lancelot, but also for his
cousins Lionel and Bors, are balanced in the enfances-narrative with a
striking emphasis on the younger boys’ affection for their tutors, Lambegue
and Pharian. The warmth of this relationship contrasts with the cruelty
and inflexibility of Lancelot’s tutor, who has no intuitive understanding of
courtliness. Lambegue and Pharian are knights, yet they too function as
hybrid clerc-nobles, operating in the domain of the clerical author. Thus,
although the romance’s audience does not witness any actual learning
taking place, the author seizes the opportunity to delineate the tutor-
pupil relationship as an intimate and highly valued one, emphasizing the
importance of the clerical role in the formation of young chevaliers. So
when the first of the tutors arrives at the Dame’s manor, Lancelot emerges
from his room to find a delighted little Bors announcing gleefully, and to
Lionel’s chagrin, that his tutor has come for him:

62 Vulgate Version, ed. Sommer, II, 211–12; L-G, I, 282–3; Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 42; Vulgate
Version, ed. Sommer, III, 22; my translation. On Viviane’s learning, see further Larrington, King
Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 14–17; 100–110.
63 Among these inscenations should be included the settings chosen by Vivien / Viviane / the damoi-
selle cacheresse for the entombment of Merlin; see Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp.
97–121.
64 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 44; L-G, II, 12.
65 The MHG Lanzelet, composed by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, dates from around 1200–04. See
N. McLelland, Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet: Narrative Style and Entertainment, Arthurian
Studies 46 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 27. On Lanzelet’s enfances see M. Meyer, ‘Das defizitäre
Wunder – Die Feenjugend des Helden’, in Das Wunderbare in der arthurischen Literatur: Prob-
leme und Perspektiven, ed. F. Wolfzettel (Tübingen, 2003), pp. 95–112.

55
 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

Mais li premerains de tous cheus qui l’aperchut, che fu Bohors qui el giron
son maistre gisoit, si cort maintenant a li et dist ‘Sire veés chi mon maistre
qui venus est!’
(But the first person in the crowd to notice him was Bors, who was sitting
in his tutor’s lap. Bors ran up to him and said, ‘My lord, look! My tutor
has come!’)66

The Dame devises the artifice and splendour of Lancelot’s entry into
Camelot. He is superbly equipped and clothed from head to foot in eye-
catching, symbolic silver-white, with a horse to match. En route for
Camelot she busies herself with further instruction in courtly mores: ‘li
aprent et enseigne comment il se contendra a la court le roi Artu et as
autres u il vendra’ (teaching him to behave at the court of Arthur and at
the others he would come to).67 The Dame’s foreknowledge is concealed
from the audience, but, as is made clear in subsequent plot developments,
it determines the timing of Lancelot’s arrival at the court. He is to be
knighted on the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, not only
because that is an auspicious day, but because a speedy knighting will
position him to undertake the adventure of the Dame de Nohaut, which
in turn leads to the complex series of events at Dolorous Garde.
For however much she may fabulate, the enchantress has access to
historia, the knowledge of what has happened in the past or is happening
elsewhere in li contes. Like the clerc-author and indeed like Merlin, she
strictly rations the dissemination of this information, declaring what she
knows only when it suits her, and often delivering it in small increments,
teaching and testing those who question her. Thus the Dame du Lac
conceals the truth of Lancelot’s origins from him, consistently lying to
him about his ancestry. From the calculated timing of Lancelot’s knight-
hood, noted above, and the mise-en-scène of the Dolorous Garde it is
clear that the Dame knows in advance the plot of Lancelot’s initial adven-
ture. Indeed the climax of Lancelot’s ordeal is largely directed by her
agent Saraïde, who controls the flow of information to Lancelot, marking
the successive movements of the narrative by the provision of a series
of shields with an escalating magical effect. Although her interventions
make Lancelot uncomfortable – ‘Ha, damoisele, houni m’avés, qui les
me ferés vaincre sans point de ma proeche’ (Ha, my lady, you shame me
if you make me win without using my prowess at all) – he cannot refuse
them.68 Once Lancelot has lifted the metal slab with its prophetic inscrip-
tion, ‘qu’il seit bien lire, car maint jor avoit apris’ (which he knew well
how to read, for he had studied many a day), the text approvingly notes,

66 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 189; L-G, II, 45.

67 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 265; L-G, II, 63.
68 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 329; my translation. For reservations about the use of magical objects,
see E. H. Cooper, ‘Magic that does not work’, Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976), 131–46.

56
 ENCHANTRESS, KNIGHT AND CLERIC

he discovers his name and ancestry on the tomb he is destined to occupy.69

The damsel, who has prophesied the revelation from information given
her by the Dame, confirms it with her own reading. The agents of the Lake
then withdraw for the time being, leaving Lancelot to a less-coherent and
less-stage-managed set of adventures before the castle’s former lord is
vanquished and the final enchantments lifted. The Dame has not neces-
sarily devised the adventures which Lancelot must undergo; she does not
author them in that sense, but ‘bien savoit par son sort, que maintes fois
avoit jetee’ (she knows from her frequent casting of lots) how li contes is
destined to unfold and she works to facilitate its development.70
The Dame aligns herself most clearly with clergie and its perspec-
tives when she offers her interpretation of the nature of knighthood to the
aspirant Lancelot.71 Hers is a religiously orthodox and clerically inflected
position, placing relatively little emphasis on the physical demands of
knighthood, ‘de grignor force de cors et de menbres’ (stronger bodies and
better limbs), which Lancelot identifies as essential. Rather, she suggests,
chivalry demands spiritual qualities, ‘les vertus del cuer qui a chent double
sont plus legieres a avoir que cheles del cors ne sont’ (the powers of the
heart, which are a hundred times easier to have than the powers of the
body).72 Physical strength is genetically transmitted, says the Dame, but
‘les vertus del cuer’ (the powers of the heart) can be acquired by anyone.
She obfuscates the question of rank in listing the essential attributes of the
knight: to be courteous, gracious, compassionate, generous and helpful.
‘Chevaliers fu establis outreement por Sainte Eglize garandir, car ele ne
se doit revanchier par armes’ (above all, knighthood was established to
defend the Holy Church, for the Church cannot take up arms to avenge
herself), she states.73 Next, in a typical clerical move, the Dame performs
an elaborate allegorical reading of the knight’s appurtenances as having
dual secular and religious symbolic functions. This assimilation of chiv-
alry to Christianity, as Putter notes of Abelard and Alain of Lille, exem-
plifies ‘the semiotization of chivalry’, in Vance’s phrase, strengthening
the case for regarding the Dame as an authorial surrogate.74 Her address
to Lancelot culminates in a list of great soldiers of God largely drawn
from I Maccabees, and of post-Incarnation knights, headed by Joseph of
Arimathea and culminating in the unheroic-sounding Helain the Fat.75
In the course of her entirely clerical account of knighthood the Dame
also performs authorial and compositorial work, integrating virtuous Old

69 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 332; my translation.

70 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 244; L-G, II, 58.
71 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 247–58; L-G, II, 58–61.
72 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 247–8; L-G, II, 58–9.
73 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 250; L-G, II, 59.
74 Putter, Sir Gawain, pp. 223–4; E. Vance, ‘Chrétien’s Yvain and the Ideologies of Change and
Exchange’, Yale French Studies 70 (1986), 42–62 (p. 47). (Cited from Putter.)
75 Lancelot, ed. Micha, VII, 255; L-G, II, 60.

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 CAROLYNE LARRINGTON

Testament military figures with the heroes of the Estoire and binding the
Lancelot more closely to the preceding works in the Cycle.
Demonstrating the affinities between the Dame du Lac and her clerical
creator is made less problematic by the unqualified support that the Dame
shows for chevalerie, albeit a version which is heavily inflected in its
initial exposition by clerical interests. Arguing that Morgain also operates
as an authorial surrogate is more risky perhaps, yet, later in the Lancelot,
and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Morgain fabulates freely, setting
up complex plots which challenge the very basis of chivalry, plots whose
illusions and fabulations bring into relief some deeper truths.76 In the
episode of the Val sans Retour she creates a locus amoenus, a semi-para-
disal landscape of lush grass, clear springs, temperate weather, well-
appointed pavilions and even a chapel, placed on the Valley’s boundaries
to service the inhabitants’ spiritual needs. Here
il avoient de boivre et de mengier quanques il lor estoit mestiers a lor
devise et si avoient deduit de pres et de tables et d’eschés et dances et
karoles tote jor et deduis de vieles et de harpes et d’autres estrumens.
(there was no lack of food and drink, and there were outdoor sports and
backgammon and chess; there were dances and carols all day long and the
delights of fiddles and harps and other instruments.)

And, the narrator adds, ‘assés i avoit de tiels chevaliers qui molt estoient
a aise et de tiels i avoit qui trop avoient anui’ (there were many knights
who were very much at ease there, and there were also those who suffered
greatly).77 The Valley is, as I have suggested elsewhere, a place where
women’s values rule, and where women’s needs are attended to; the activi-
ties available to the captive knights do not absolutely promulgate clerical
priorities in religious terms, but they contribute to the civilizing process,
enhancing the knights’ skills in conversation, wit, affability and recrea-
tional activities.78 From the perspective of the majority of the Valley’s
captives and for many of the text’s audience, the paradisal aspects of the
Val are a dangerous delusion; while the knights are constrained by the
rule of women, their honour and reputation in the public arena of chivalry
come under threat.
Lancelot’s triumph at the Val is brought about by the exercise of pure
chevalerie, fuelled by his fidelity to Guinevere and his undaunted courage,
the disposition which in the Conte de la Charrete is pertinently contrasted
with Gauvain’s dedication to Reason rather than Love. While Lancelot is
exceptional in his courage and immoderate in his passion, Gauvain acts
rationally throughout the romance. Putter argues cogently that, not just in

76 See Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 60–8, where I argue that Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight is dependent on the Val sans Retour episode in the Lancelot.
77 Lancelot, ed. Micha, I, 278–9; L-G, II, 305–06.
78 Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 51–8.

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 ENCHANTRESS, KNIGHT AND CLERIC

Chrétien’s poetry, but also in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gauvain
approaches the clerical ideal of knightliness, calm, courteous, intelligent
and thoughtful.79 The interrogation of the Val sans Retour is ostensibly
into the fit between women’s desires and male socialization which values
competitiveness, not directly into the fit between clergie and chevalerie.
But Morgain’s enchantment-making lays bare a crucial chivalric failing:
the captive knights’ lack of fidelity to their ladies. This is a deficit in
the essential courtly value of probitas, of integrity and promise-keeping.
Personal truthfulness is an essential quality, as the emphasis on trawþe in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight indicates; it has ramifications both in
religious life and in the secular.
Morgain shares her fellow-clerc Chrétien’s interest in translatio studii,
seen most markedly during the third captivity of Lancelot when he creates
the Salle aux Images.80 Morgain has commissioned a man to paint a mural
of ‘l’estoire d’Eneas, coment il s’anfoui de Troie’ (the story of Aeneas
and how he had fled from Troy); the enchantress seeks to recreate in
her private space the Ur-narrative of romance history, and the transfer
of civilization from Troy to the Latin state. Whether the mural follows
the programme of the Temple of Glass in Chaucer’s House of Fame,
thus continuing with the encounter of Aeneas and Dido, and his impe-
rial adventures as in Vergil and Ovid, or whether the Aeneas episode is
intended to introduce a history of Britain, via Geoffrey and Wace, is a
matter for speculation. Learned it undoubtedly is, though the rendition of
the tale in images rather than as retold text suggests a simplification, even
a vernacularization, of the Latin historiae of Vergil or of Geoffrey.
Lancelot’s reading of the historia of Aeneas from the barred window
of his chamber inspires him to compose a visual vernacular romance with
himself as hero; just as Chrétien self-consciously appropriates classical
tropes in a fictionalized and vernacular form, so clergie challenges chev-
alerie to reproduce and recontextualize itself in new forms.81 Lancelot
begins to compose a kind of autobiography; like the poems of Chrétien it
is also the narrative of a single knight’s chivalric formation, showing
conment sa dame del Lac l’anvoia a cort por estre chevalier nouvel et
conment il vint a Kamaalot et conment il fu esbahiz de la grant biauté
sa dame, quant il la vit premierement et conment il ala fere secors a la
damoisele de Noant.

79 Putter, Sir Gawain, pp. 202–09.

80 Lancelot, ed. Micha, V, 52–4; L-G, III, 218–19.
81 Lancelot may have provided his pictures with captions. When Arthur is shown the paintings by
Morgain in the Mort Artu, the illustrator of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS français 112 (3), fol.
193v clearly shows the paintings with text beneath. See Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses,
p. 44; La Mort le roi Artu: roman du XIIIe siècle, ed. J. Frappier, 3rd edn (Geneva, 1964), pp.
55–66; L-G, IV, 105–8.

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(how his Lady of the Lake sent him to court to become a knight, and how
he came to Camelot and was overwhelmed by the great beauty of his lady,
when first he saw her, and how he went to rescue the lady of Nohaut.)82

As Lancelot’s understanding of his own history, and perhaps of

romance narrative in general develops, the story-line of the murals aban-
dons the Chrétien model for a technique more like the entrelacement of
the Lancelot itself: ‘Aprés portraist de jor en jor toute l’estoire ne mie de
lui seulement, mes des autres, si com li contes a devisé’ (Next he painted
his story day by day, not only his own, but that of the others as well, as
the tale has related).83 Critics have noted the extraordinary mise-en-abyme
effect of Lancelot’s renarration of his life to date. Donald Maddox shows
how such ‘specular encounters’ are both analeptic, here looking back
over Lancelot’s and the Lancelot’s narrative, and proleptic, ‘anticipating
the fiction’s futurity’, in this case the final revelation of the paintings to
Arthur in the Mort Artu.84 Lancelot is facilitated by Morgain’s distant
patronage (she encourages Lancelot’s creativity by keeping him prisoner
and supplies him with painting materials). Importantly, she registers the
conversion of knight into intellectual, a conversion which she attributes
to Lancelot’s act of narration as stimulated by the power of love:
‘Par foi, merveilles poez veoir de cest chevalier qui tant est soltis et an
chevalerie et an toutes choses. Voirement feroit Amors del plus dur home
soutif et angingneux.’
(‘Upon my word you are witness to a miracle in this knight, who is so
skilled in chivalry and all things. Truly love can make the dullest of knights
artful and clever.’)85

Morgain and her damsel stimulate a kind of clergie (‘soutif et anging-

neux’) in the chevalier here, causing him to enact the history of the
French vernacular romance, in its move from Trojan history through
knightly autobiography to interlace romance. Elsewhere her talents for
devising scenarios are put to opportunist use in the Accolon Episode,
recounted in the Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin and in Malory. Resolving
to do away with her husband and brother, and set her lover and herself
on the throne, Morgain composes a kind of romance inflected by Breton
lai and its fairy-mistress motif. She arranges for a hart to draw husband,
brother and lover away from their companions while hunting, attracts the
men to a sumptuous barge where they are wined and dined by beautiful

82 Lancelot, ed. Micha, V, 52; L-G, III, 218.

83 Lancelot, ed. Micha, V, 54; L-G, III, 219.
84 See D. Maddox, ‘Generic Intertextuality in Arthurian Literature: the Specular Encounter’, in Text
and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. N. J. Lacy (New York and London, 1996), pp.
3–24 (p. 15), and K. Halász, ‘The Representation of Time and its Models in the Prose Romance’,
in Lacy, Text and Intertext, pp. 175–86 (pp. 175–76).
85 Lancelot, ed. Micha, V, 53; L-G, III, 218.

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women, and then spirits her lover away, so that he awakens in a meadow
by a fountain in the heart of the forest. Accolon recognizes immediately
the genre of tale that he is involved in, even if he fails to spot the author-
ship of his beloved, complaining that he and his companions have been
‘trahis et enchantés’ (betrayed and enchanted) and, after a substantial and
disturbing misogynist diatribe, he concludes that the beautiful women
were ‘fantosmes ou dyables’ (an illusion or a devil).86 Morgain’s setup is
promising, but the story comes to a different conclusion from that which
she had anticipated, with the intervention of another literate lady, the
Damoisele del Lac, a rather different figure in the Post-Vulgate Suite from
the Dame in the Lancelot, but one who has direct information from Merlin
about Morgain’s plot, and who is determined to thwart it. Once Accolon
is dead, the plot discovered and Morgain’s plans frustrated, she reverts
to the behaviour of another literary archetype: like Medea she makes a
poisoned garment and sends it to Arthur. Once again the Damoisele del
Lac reads the situation acutely and saves Arthur from being consumed by
the fatal cloak.87
Morgain is thus an ambiguous and troubling figure in thirteenth-century
romance. Her learning is deployed in the Val sans Retour to interrogate
the ways in which the power of the oath, the primary bond between nobles
in a still largely oral culture, can be compromised when sworn between
men and women, and to plead for a space for the exercise of courtoisie.
In Lancelot’s third captivity her clerkly affinities are demonstrated in her
ability to facilitate, read and correctly interpret the narrative of her pris-
oner. She reiterates her reading for Arthur when he views the picture-
cycle in the Mort Artu, supplementing the wall-narrative with glossing of
her own, emphasizing the key role of Galeholt:
‘einsi comme la portreture que vos veez ici le devise … il proia tant la reïne
qu’ele s’otroia del tout a Lancelot et si le sesi de s’amor par un besier.’
(‘as you see by the painting before you … he implored the queen until she
yielded to Lancelot and granted her love to him with a kiss.’)88

Elsewhere in the episode her powers are those of patroness-commis-

sioner of the Aeneas-mural, rather than those of an author, a more orthodox
gender role for a great lady. In the Post-Vulgate Suite her affinity with the
romance’s author as fabulator is destroyed when her plot against Arthur
fails. Her failure is underscored by her retreat to the castle of Tugan deep
in the forest where she neither reads nor writes the future of the Arthurian
realm, but merely preserves, within a series of enclosures – ivory box
and tomb – Merlin’s prophecy of Arthur’s death and the identity of his

86 La Suite, ed. Roussineau, I, 316–17; L-G, IV, 256.

87 La Suite, ed. Roussineau, I, 389; L-G, IV, 276.
88 Mort Artu, ed. Frappier, p. 63; L-G, IV, 107.

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killer, and the circumstances of Gauvain’s death also. By the dead hand
of Merlin (whose textual and interpretative activity is very marked in the
Post-Vulgate Suite), Morgain is deliberately excluded from the roles of
both reader and author, and her efficacy is consequently impaired in her
later appearances in the Post-Vulgate Cycle.89
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem which, as both Marjorie
Rigby and I have suggested, counts the Val sans Retour episode as one of
its most important intertexts, Morgan is revealed near the end of the poem
as its plot-maker, its ‘only begetter’ as Kittredge designates her.90 Morgan
is responsible for the bewitchment of the Green Knight, the Beheading
Game, and, since the outcome of the Beheading Game depends crucially
on Gawain’s performance in the Exchange of Winnings and the Tempta-
tion Game – despite Bertilak’s apparently spontaneous suggestion of the
exchange of the day’s gains – Morgan must also have authored this.91
Many have seen the motivations which Bertilak adduces for Morgan as
inadequate, but in the context of her appearances in the Lancelot, her
inquiry into the nature of chivalry and her animosity towards Guenevere
are sufficiently well-motivated to satisfy an audience familiar with the
Lancelot-Grail tradition.92
Not only does Morgan design the complex interlocking games of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, she is specified as responsible for the
creation of the Green Knight himself: ‘[h]o wayned me vpon þis wyse’
(she changed me into this form).93 More ambitious in her fabrication than
Thessala and her drugs or Benoît and his architecture, she brings into
being that strange hybrid figure, half-man, half-giant, bearing tokens of
aggression and of Christmas merrymaking; an unreadable figure who is
‘oueral enker-grene’ (completely bright green) (line 150). The court do not
know how to read or interpret him, as their embarrassingly long silence
at his challenge shows; their astonishment when he picks up his head and
continues to talk betrays an unfamiliarity with the motifs of romance,
that genre which seems to be the customary reading at Hautdesert.94 The
Green Knight remains an enigma, departing from the text ‘whiderwarde-
so-euer he wolde’ (line 2478), leaving behind him a sense that he has not

89 La Suite, ed. Roussineau, II, 365–6; L-G, IV, 269; Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, p.
38.
90 G. L. Kittredge, A Study of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Cambridge, MA, 1916), p. 133;
M. Rigby, ‘ “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and the Vulgate “Lancelot” ’, MLR 78 (1983),
257–66; Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses, pp. 62–8.
91 See A. C. Spearing, The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 180–91.
92 For bibliographies of critical comment on Morgan’s role in the poem and on connections between
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Lancelot, see Larrington, King Arthur’s Enchantresses,
p. 210.
93 All quotations from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, 2nd
edn rev. N. Davis (Oxford, 1967), here line 2456. Further references within text.
94 See J. Finlayson, ‘The Expectations of Romance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Genre 12
(1979), 1–24 (p. 17); M. V. Guerin, The Fall of Kings and Princes: Structure and Destruction in
Arthurian Tragedy (Stanford, 1995), pp. 207–8.

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been fully accounted for; his mysterious advent and transformed shape
seem to signal an occulted significance in excess of his function within
the plot, particularly if compared with his more straightforward counter-
parts in the poem’s analogues.95
Morgan is the poem’s only literate and educated figure; her biography
as summarized by Bertilak notes her ‘koyntyse of clergye, bi craftes wel
lerned’ (her cleverness in learning, well educated in magic crafts) and the
‘maystrés’ (abilities, authority) she acquired from Merlin, ‘þat conable
klerk’ (that excellent cleric) (lines 2447–8). Her knowledge endows
her with extraordinary power: she has ‘myʒt’ over the Green Knight,
her nickname is ‘Morgne þe goddes’, and she can tame the arrogance
of any, including, temporarily, the ‘surquidré’ of the Round Table (lines
2446–57), who are stunned into an ineffectual silence by the appearance
of her bright-green emissary. Intellectual attainments are translated into
ingenious plotting with the aim, not simply of embarrassing the court of
Camelot (despite the hoped-for side effect of frightening Guenevere to
death), but of interrogating how one of chivalry’s foremost practitioners
will react when faced with the twin challenges of sex and death, and
discovering whether the feminine, flexible qualities of the girdle can
unsettle the chivalric fixities manifested in the Pentangle.96
As many critics have noted, Morgan’s agent Bertilak seems in his final
scene with Gawain to arrogate clerical authority to himself, absolving
Gawain of the sin of withholding the girdle, an act construed by Gawain
as coveityse and apparently insufficiently dealt with in his confession of
the previous day.97 Now Gawain, says Bertilak, ‘hatz þe penaunce apert,
of þe poynt of myn egge’ (has had his penance openly from the tip of my
blade) (line 2392) and is now, as he was not previously, ‘asoyled … surely
and sette … so clene/ As domezday schulde haf ben diʒt on þe morn’
(surely … absolved and put in … as clean a state as if judgement day
had been appointed for the next day) (lines 1883–4). Gawain’s pentangle
device is already heavily inflected by clerical values: pité, clannes, and an
understanding of cortaysye which comprehends the civilized behaviours
discussed by Jaeger and Putter. Although Gawain fails to put his trust in

95 See M. Twomey, ‘Morgan le Fay at Hautdesert’, in On Arthurian Women: Essays in Memory of

Maureen Fries, ed. B. Wheeler and F. Tolhurst (Dallas, 2001), pp. 103–119. For the analogues,
see E. Brewer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Sources and Analogues, 2nd edn (Woodbridge,
1992).
96 See G. Heng, ‘Feminine Knots and the Other Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, PMLA 106
(1991), 500–14; S. Fisher, ‘Taken Men and Token Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’,
in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual
Criticism, ed. S. Fisher and J. E. Halley (Knoxville, TN, 1989), pp. 71–105.
97 J. Wasserman and L. Purdon, ‘Sir Guido and the Green Light: Confession in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight and Inferno XXVII’, Neophilologus 84 (2000), 647–66 give a full bibliography of
the debate about Gawain’s confession (pp. 662–3). See also D. Aers, ‘Christianity for Courtly
Subjects: Reflections on the Gawain-poet’, in A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, ed. D. Brewer
and J. Gibson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 91–101.

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its rigidity, preferring the flexible equivocation of the girdle, the pentangle
values are acquitted in Gawain’s trial.98 The tensions between cortaysye
and clannes – the nexus which Morgan and her avatar, the Lady, assume
to be the point where Gawain should be particularly vulnerable, given his
reputation in thirteenth-century French romance – are safely negotiated.
In the final scene with Bertilak Gawain is vindicated, by the account
of Morgan’s agent, as being an almost perfect example of a clericalized
chevalier. He has been confronted by a feminized, perhaps an over-femi-
nized, challenge in the domain of cortaysye, a challenge which seeks to
establish the parameters of the new kind of knightliness, and which, like
the Adventure of the Val sans Retour, has called into question the relation-
ship between probitas, trawþe and the treatment of women in chivalry,
and he has achieved a qualified victory.99

Conclusion

Magical, learned and literate figures, from Geoffrey’s Merlin, via Benoît’s
Medea, Thessala, and the versions of Merlin who move through the
Lancelot-Grail Cycle, to the figures of the Dame du Lac and Morgain
la fée, operate as authorial surrogates in medieval historiography and
romance. Like the clerical authors of these works, they deploy a substan-
tial power not only to create illusion, often in pursuit of a hidden and
deeper truth, but also to make things happen: to bring about the concep-
tion of Arthur, to complete the education and training of Lancelot and
to demonstrate the need for the integration of feminine values into the
hyper-masculine world of chivalry. Modern assumptions about clerical
misogyny have blinded us to the close alignment between values gendered
female and clerical values within the courtly context. Similarly, anxie-
ties about the diabolic provenance of certain types of magic (debated at
length in the Prophesies de Merlin) have dissuaded readers and scholars
from including the two most influential enchantresses of the Arthurian
world within the ranks of authorial representatives. The Dame du Lac’s
support for chivalry is unproblematic. She presents it to Lancelot in exclu-
sively clerical terms whilst modestly disclaiming real expertise in the
area; her attention to the importance of courtliness in her tutorials en
route for Camelot, and her knowledge of substantial parts of Lancelot’s
history in advance, make her an uncontentious candidate for inclusion
among the authorial surrogates. In the chronology of the Lancelot-Grail
Cycle in its final form, she takes over from Merlin, imprisoned by Vivien,
as the author of Lancelot’s enfances-narrative, and although her gender

98 On the slippery symbolic value of the girdle see R. Hanna III, ‘Unlocking What’s Locked:
Gawain’s Green Girdle’, Viator 14 (2000), 289–302.
99 Cf. Jaeger, Origins, pp. 250–53 for the importance of triuwe in Wolfram von Eschenbach.

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prevents her from assuming the authorizing role which Merlin occupies
or from dictating the history of the Arthurian polity and of the Grail to
Master Blaise, the Prophesies de Merlin partially remedy that deficiency
by producing the hybrid chevalier-clerc Méliadus to mediate Merlin’s
prophetic voice.
Morgain studies long and hard with Merlin to achieve her status as
‘boine clergesse’ (a good female clerk). In the Lancelot in particular she
shows herself to be a skilled artificer, whose supreme magical feat, the Val
sans Retour, interrogates chivalry and courtesy, truthfulness and fidelity.
The enquiry continues for seventeen years, until Lancelot, the creation
of her fellow-enchantress, brings it to an end. Later Morgain appropri-
ates the supreme clerical activity of translatio studii, inscribing it in her
female and privatized domain, enacting – or re-enacting – ­ Chrétien’s
triumphant recasting of classical story in vernacular form. In so doing,
Morgain enables Lancelot to reinvent the romance genre within which he
finds himself, becoming, if only temporarily, a clerc-storyteller whose
subject is all Arthurian chivalry in its glory and its shame. In Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight Morgan’s clerical status is highlighted and her
power emphasized at the very moment at which her agent concedes the
qualified victory achieved by Gawain over sexual desire and the fear of
death. Cortaysye, deployed with intelligence and wit, has proved itself
worthy of its place in the Pentangle’s system of values. The Arthurian
world loses Merlin, its Ur-author who already knows its historia, and who
employs creativity, illusion, and, in the tradition of prophetic inscription
and dictation to Master Blaise, textuality to further his ends. But Merlin’s
disappearance is his pupils’ opportunity; seizing the advantages offered
by intellectual attainment and magical knowledge in the chivalric world
they demonstrate the insufficency of the quest for personal honour and
glory if it is unmediated by the clerically endorsed values of probity,
gentleness and courtesy.

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