Revisiting Lancelot

Sir Lancelot, Melissa A. Benson

Is it just me, or is Lancelot kind of boring?

Because really, you can only hear "best knight in the world" so many times before you get sick of both the phrase and the person it describes. From his intro to his elegantly repenting death, Lancelot is so perfect it's disgusting. He usurps the stories the second he appears; his arrival at Camelot signals the transition from "exploits of Arthur the warrior king" to "loosely connected vignettes mostly centering on this new French guy." There's no enemy who can face him, and no woman who can avoid falling head over heels the second she sees his exquisite yet manly face. He does exactly one thing wrong in his entire life, and even that had a certain inevitability to it: of course the world's most beautiful woman is going to fall for the best knight.

It's even written into the legends that Lancelot nauseates his fellow knights, who understandably don't get the joke the seventeenth time Monsieur Perfect knocks them out of their saddles. (While in disguise. And then rides away like tournaments are beneath him, when he obviously cares enough to joust in them.) Let's not forget how easy it was for Mordred to gather a band of disaffected knights to surprise him in Guinevere's chamber. Dude did not have a huge fan club.

So here's the thing. If we accept that it's very easy to get bored with Lancelot, the question that never gets asked is: why?

Sort of redundant, yes? Didn't I just answer it?

The Sword of Lancelot, Howard David Johnson

Well, yes and no. Take a step back from the stories. Look at them as plot alone. Lancelot is incredible. Remember what I said a few paragraphs above about how no enemy can face him? No enemy can face him. He goes up against knights who make careers of killing for fun, and he routinely destroys them. He does unspeakable things to ideas like "hopeless situation" and "no way out." When the woman he loves is in danger, he morphs into this amazing cross between James Bond and Superman, traveling incognito, busting up everything but his beloved during the rescue, and fighting the abductor with one hand tied behind his back because honor demands it. And he still splits this guy's head open. There is a reason this man is described as the best knight in the world. And it is because he is the best knight in the world.

One could argue that if it weren't for everyone else's insistence on his perfection, Lancelot would be seen not as irreparably fallen and kind of bland, but as the badass to end all badasses. I'd bet on him versus anyone. Batman? Please. Darth Vader? Don't make me laugh. Lancelot could take out Jaws if he wanted to. Without even using a boat.

Gawain and the Green Knight, David Hitchcock

Look at Gawain, another badass from the same cycle, and another owner of the "best in show" title (before Lancelot came along, that is). No sissy perfection for Gawain. He runs headlong into danger, carried away by his impulses, and he too wins more than should be humanly possible. But he (and his authors) aren't nearly as obsessed with his perfection as Lancelot. Sure, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" takes valuable time out of the quest shenanigans to explain why his pentangle shield is the most sacred thing ever, but it's really just ironic foreshadowing of Gawain's ultimate failure. He carries the perfect shield, but the knight it guards is only human.

Sound familiar? Perfect knight, fatal weakness, inevitable fall... It's the same story as Lancelot's ill-fated romance with Guinevere. On the outside, he is all that a knight should be; inside, he knows himself to be unworthy.

The difference between them, though, is that Gawain moves on. Humiliated and angry with himself, he tells all of Camelot about his disgrace. But Arthur, demonstrating exactly why he's awesome, gently reminds Gawain of his many accomplishments over the course of the quest, not least of which is the fact that the Green Knight honored him enough to leave him alive. Arthur takes it a step further by declaring that Gawain's green garter, until now a badge of shame, will be regarded by all as a symbol of Gawain's honor and courage in revealing his own weakness.

For obvious reasons, Lancelot cannot do the same. But that's a cop-out, because of course Arthur isn't stupid and already knows about Guinevere. Gawain's declaration allows him to get his failure off his chest, and in fact helps him reclaim the honor he thought he had lost; Lancelot's unwillingness to jeopardize that very same appearance of honor dooms him to cling to his sin. With no expiation, it festers, becoming the central facet of his character, while Gawain is able to grow beyond his misdeed.

So in addition to being the biggest badass at the Round Table, Lancelot's also got the most emotional turmoil of anyone (except maybe Arthur). Constantly aware of the hypocrisy on which his life is built, hating himself but loving Guinevere more, he has the most fascinating inner life of all the knights. He is a man desperate for perfection who can't help clinging to his one flaw. And he knows it the whole time. He is never allowed a moment to forget the contradiction of himself. He wrestles with it every single day, and always comes back with the same answer: he is not strong enough to reject what is at once the best and worst thing in his life.

He's not just a badass. He's a relatable badass.

Lancelot of the Lake, Delphine Gache

Everyone knows about the struggle to succeed; everyone understands the unexpected roadblocks that get in the way; everyone knows how bitter failure tastes. Lancelot's story is the story of every time we couldn't make something better. He is universal and human like no other character in the entire cycle.

I think it's time we reclaimed Lancelot. It's not going to be easy; his character forms around the very thing that holds him back. But we can definitely start celebrating his feats of arms as the ridiculously awesome career that they are. We can see the good as well as the sinful in his love for Guinevere; it's hard to do justice to the man when we keep dismissing and belittling the passion for which he sacrificed his soul. And instead of complaining about how boring he is, we - and I include myself here - can instead start asking why, for hundreds and hundreds of years, we've kept coming back to his story and finding things in it that touch our hearts.

Queen of Hearts

Legends love problematic queens. Semiramis, Helen of Troy, the endless range of evil stepmothers - their ranks are some of the largest out there. You can see why: the dramatic potential of a woman who stands for an entire country and doesn't do her job by it is fantastic. On one hand, the queen is a powerful symbol; on the other, she's also an imperfect person. And for my money, no problematic queen is more interesting than Guinevere.

The Accolade, Edmund Blair Leighton

For one thing, she embodies that dramatic potential better than anyone else. The other problematic queens really aren't very good at the queen thing. Helen may look great on Menelaus' arm at public festivals, but she also openly and drastically shucks her duty. Semiramis drags Babylon into a war because a hot king turned her down. The jealous stepmother of "The Six Swans" robs her country of every single one of its heirs, just because they're not her kids. Not only are these women troubling, they can't even do their actual job properly.

Not Guinevere. Regardless of what she does behind Arthur's back, she is acknowledged in every version as a paragon among queens for her performance of her duties. She does the arm candy thing at every tournament and Pentecost feast Arthur throws. She hosts Maying parties and leads court excursions. She even (in an ironically Anglo-Saxon move, given who the historical Arthur's enemies were) offers the cup to his knights when they gather. (We'll ignore that one time the cup was poisoned and she was accused of murder. That's not the point.) Guinevere knows what none of the other queens do: her title is a role. She has lines to memorize and marks to hit, and she nails them all, every single time. Even the writers who don't like her (ahem, Tennyson) freely concede that publicly she is everything and more that a queen should be.

Sir Launcelot and the Queen Talked Sadly Together,
Arthur Dixon

Her failures, unlike her fellows', are private and behind the scenes. And also incredibly, heartbreakingly human. It's hard to forgive her for her betrayal of Arthur, but it's also hard to hate her just because she fell in love. And it's not as if (like Helen, say) she jumped headlong into Lancelot's arms. There are versions I've read where their love remains unconsummated, and even unspoken, up through the Grail Quest. Again: this is a woman who knows her duty. She bottles up her passion, confides in no one, and goes the hell on with her life, her job, and her marriage, as best she can and as long as she can. There's no outside divine influence, no heedless snap decision, not even any base motives. She just loves a man she must not love, and she fights it as hard as she can.

But not hard enough. Guinevere is a problematic queen for a reason.

When at last she begins her affair with Lancelot, writer after writer leaps on those problems. The perfect queen who betrays her duty, her husband, and her kingdom presents a stunning piece of hypocrisy. It doesn't help that Guinevere is actually a crucial piece of the lasting legend of Camelot. Arthur the lawgiver creates a kingdom, but it's Guinevere who brings civilization. Arthur only gets the Round Table because it's part of his wife's dowry. Without Guinevere, Camelot would lack its most potent symbol, as well as much of its courtly appeal and chivalric code. So for one of the true backbones of the realm to break faith with its highest aspirations is an act that undermines not only Guinevere personally, but the entire kingdom she represents.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Michael Manomivibul

And Guinevere's character becomes the mirror for that hypocrisy. From the wise and gracious hostess handing out elegant atonement to young Gawain at her wedding feast, she becomes a shrew of the first order, constantly doubting and questioning Lancelot's love. She can never just talk things out like a normal person; instead she picks fights, deliberately choosing her words to wound. Only honest people make clean breasts of their problems; Guinevere's deception bars her emotionally from taking the straightforward and more honorable road. Worse, she sometimes engages in petty jealousy, in a way highly uncharacteristic of the charmer and politician she would have to be in order to foster harmony and civilization.

In one sense, of course she can't be sensible and thoughtful; she is too symbolic a figure not to be identified first and foremost with her position, and her betrayal is too great not to exploit symbolically in literature. But the transformation of Guinevere from angel to harridan is also much too simple. If she's so obnoxious, why did Arthur fall for her? Why does her court mostly like her? There's got to be something else going on, something not symbolic but human.

La Belle Iseult (also called
Queen Guinevere), William Morris

Enter perhaps the oddest knight in shining armor ever: William Morris.*

A would-be painter and a revolutionary craftsman, Morris wrote the first work to present Guinevere not as a symbol of a decaying realm built on a dream and a lie, but as a human woman caught between passion and duty. The Defence of Guenevere imagines her at her trial before Arthur's knights, speaking on her own behalf with eloquence, dignity, and full awareness of herself. Brilliantly, her "defence" rests on that very thing nearly all earlier Arthurian chronicles deny her: total emotional honesty. Having at last found love, she demands to know if she "must...give up forever...that which I deemed would ever round me move, glorifying all things; for a little word, scarce ever meant at all, must I now prove stone-cold for ever?" She describes her agony of conscience, the anguish of love, the delight at its fulfillment and the shame she feels at that delight. She is, at last, open and honest and entirely sympathetic.

Guinevere, Meredith Dillman

But even at her best, she can't win. Because despite her eloquence, and despite the real torment of her soul, she is still a woman both wronged and wronging. Guinevere's archetypal appeal and human fascination are both tied directly to her dual nature: perfection and destruction, love and betrayal, honor and shame. No matter how sympathetic and understandable her motives are, what draws us to her are the contradictions that break Camelot. She is the greatest problematic queen in all of legend: problematic because we understand her and cannot absolve her.

*(Morris, of course, had personal experience with a problematic woman torn between love and duty: his own wife, Jane, one of the great muses of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It's not hard to see where Morris could have drawn from life; but it is moving that he, the cuckolded husband, can summon such vast sympathy for the adulterous wife.)

Chivalry in Skirts

Arthurian legend has no shortage of uppity women. From Guinevere to Nimue to Morgan le Fay, the legends abound with damsels and ladies who know their own minds, set their own goals, and aren't afraid to admit their ambitions. Unfortunately, most of them get absolutely squashed. Whether by outside interference or their own backfiring machinations, scarcely a go-getting Arthurian lady gets what she came for.

So it stands to reason that when one of them does, she is vividly remembered.

Linette, the razor-tongued sister of Lady Lionors, is unique among the ladies of Arthuriana not only because she gets everything she set out to get, but because she is one of the only successful cases of character development in the legends. So many characters spring to life already equipped with their defining personality traits: Lancelot is noble and has a guilt complex, Mordred is evil and scheming, Merlin is wise, Guinevere is beautiful and capricious. We see Arthur develop in the early going from impulsive youth to mature and just king, but he's pretty much the only one.

Sir Gareth and Lady Lynette, Arthur Rackham

Besides Linette. We first meet her when she demands a champion from the king while refusing to give her name, the name of her sister (for whom she's requesting said champion), or even the common courtesy due to another person. When Gareth, incognito as a kitchen boy, calls in the favors Arthur owes him and claims her quest as his, she spits out a few choice insults and rides in high dudgeon from the court. Undaunted, Gareth catches up; equally unfazed, Linette proceeds to blister the air for days with details of his idiocy, his inadequacy, and his incapability to survive a poke, let alone a series of one-on-one combats. There is literally no reason at all to like her.

And then she gets her wake-up call. The second of four knights that Gareth trounces is a real gentleman, inviting his ex-foe and his companions to dinner. Linette does her usual awful shtick; unlike Gareth (who handles his crappy damsel with true chivalry), the defeated knight calls her on it. And suddenly Linette realizes she's been a complete hag to the one man who was willing to help her sister.

For comparison: Lancelot gets a similar wake-up call on the Grail Quest, when his sinful love for Guinevere bars him even from seeing the Grail. He gets the message loud and clear. He is the greatest earthly knight in the world; he knows just how badly he failed. And when he gets back to Camelot, he promptly forgets all about it.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Frank Dicksee

Not Linette. The very next day she apologizes to Gareth. When he fights his next foe, she acts as his own personal cheerleading squad; it's her cry of support that energizes him when he was ready to give up. The most atrociously snobby character in Arthuriana becomes, in the space of a few paragraphs, one of the most endearingly human: she recognizes her fault and takes every possible step to amend it. Some versions (Tennyson's among them) even end with Gareth marrying Linette, rather than her beautiful and anonymous sister to whose rescue he rode.

So what gives? Why does Linette get off with a scolding, while other ambitious women get utterly broken? Morgan le Fay is foiled, exposed, and vilified. Guinevere is disgraced and often portrayed as a jealous shrew. The Lady of the Lake gets her head chopped off by Balin, who offers a deeply insufficient excuse: "She was a witch!" Geraint's wife Enid, as haughty and outspoken as Linette, is mocked by her neighbors, verbally abused by her husband, and threatened with rape on multiple occasions. In

The Lady Lyonors, Katharine Cameron

contrast, Linette's only real peers are Lady Ragnell, who also takes her fate into her own hands and is amply rewarded, and her own sister Lionors, who concocts a scheme to expose Gareth's identity before she'll marry him. Unlike her sister, Lionors' uppityness is very subversive; Linette wears her heart on her sleeve, while Lionors hides her quick wits behind a frigid courtly mask and bids to control her own life behind the scenes. Neither sister suffers in any material way for daring to shape their destinies.

The answer to their mysterious get-out-of-jail-free cards lies in their circumstances. The women punished for their ambition all have men to speak for them. Guinevere's duty is to be true to Arthur; Morgan is actually married, and supposed to be subordinate to her husband, when she concocts her deadliest plots against her brother; Enid's troubles stem from her flouting of her owed obedience to husband and father. Even the Lady of the Lake uses Merlin as intercessor with Arthur; her death is the end result of the one time she came on her own. Their downfalls come about because they disregard the rules of the world they live in.

Erec and Enide, Rowland Wheelwright

But the social order and the chivalric code have utterly failed all the successful uppity ladies. Linette and Lionors are trapped by a pack of rogue knights no one challenges; Ragnell's own brother has turned against her. No one speaks for them; no one is coming to their rescue. Lacking any socially-expected champion, these women have to stand up for themselves in order to survive. In extremis, it's not only okay to own your fate - it's actually celebrated.

In that sense, Linette and her fellows are actually playing the roles of knights-errant, filling in the gaps of an idealistic system put into practice by flawed human beings. They know exactly what's due to them, they know why they're not getting it, and they possess the wit and courage to get it for themselves when the system fails. They operate within that system, fixing it as best they can, and upholding the very social order they seem, at first glance, to subvert.

Someone get these girls a couple of chairs at the Round Table.

The Course of True Love

Reading a legendary love story is a bit like flipping a coin. Heads, they survive; tails, they die miserably. For all that people like hearing about a young couple in love, they sure do have a lot of stories that end in tears and heartbreak. And for that certain subsection of these tales - the star-crossed lovers - everything they do to fix their situation just ends up drawing the noose even tighter around their necks.

Deirdre and Naisi, Breogan

Take Deirdre and Naisi, the great tragic lovers of Irish mythology. The cards were stacked against them from the start; poor Deirdre wasn't even a day old before druids prophesied the bloodshed that would result from her incredible beauty. Locked up away from the world, promised to a king with a yen for a trophy wife, Deirdre decides that she deserves a say in her own fate and promptly falls in love with the equally-gorgeous Naisi. Like any knight in shining armor worth his salt, he throws caution to the winds and elopes with her. So far, so good, right?

Well, there's that king. He's not happy about this interloper. And he's also not above using treachery, magic, and plain old pettiness to avenge his wounded pride. By the time the story's done, Naisi and his brothers have been murdered, and Deirdre - who tried belatedly to warn them of the dangers of hanging out with her - has died of a broken heart, but only after having been married for a year to King Backstabber. And the worst part is that they go into danger knowing that they could die. Deirdre's ominous dreams, the warnings of Naisi's brothers, even the prophecy that started the whole shebang are all openly discussed and perfectly interpreted. They know exactly what faces them, and they still can't change their fates.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Herbert James Draper

For that very reason, Lancelot and Guinevere fight tooth and nail against their forbidden passion. They too can see with perfect clarity the chaos that it could bring: the destruction of the Round Table, the death of Arthur's dream, the confusion and anarchy of civil war. Lancelot, sworn to be Guinevere's knight from the moment they meet, goes out questing again and again to remove himself from temptation. (Of course, lesser temptations present themselves all the time, but the strength of his love for Guinevere - unacknowledged, unconsummated, and for all he knows unreciprocated - lets him steer clear.) Guinevere wrestles her demons in silence, molding herself into a perfect queen and Arthur's mainstay. But when they finally give in and become lovers, all their good work goes for naught. Just as their secret passion tormented them earlier, now their betrayal of Arthur cuts them both. Tons of versions (Tennyson most notably) turn Guinevere into a jealous shrew, quarreling with Lancelot over the strength of his love at any opportunity. And it's their affair that provides the crack through which Camelot is broken open - again, the very outcome the lovers foresaw and dreaded, come about directly through their own actions.

In comparison, the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd seem positively peaceful. They don't cause any wars; there's no blood shed on their behalf; they don't even die. But it's still tricky to get more star-crossed than them. They're total workaholics - her cloth and his cows are the best in the world - until she gets wistful about the fact that her crazy work schedule means she'll never have time to fall in love. Her father, the Sky King, brings the two of them together, and it's love at first sight, which means they both take an indefinite vacation from weaving and tending the herd. From being exemplars, they become a cautionary tale, and the Sky King goes to the opposite extreme: he puts a river between them and forbids them ever to cross it. Only when his daughter begs him to let her see her beloved again does he allow them to meet for one day out of every year, and then only if there are enough magpies to make a bridge for her to cross the river. No magpies, no reunion. And it's really hard to blame either lover for this bittersweet end to their story. Yes, if the Weaving Princess had just been satisfied with a life chained to her loom, or if the lovers had only acted in moderation, none of this would have been necessary. But you can't fault them for wanting to fall in love, or for being carried away by a grand passion. Unlike Deirdre and Naisi, who walk with open eyes toward their fate, the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd get blindsided by every twist in their path. Their actions still create their lousy situation, but much less deliberately.

Romeo and Juliet, Frank Dicksee

We probably don't even need to discuss Romeo and Juliet. But you can't mention impulsive star-crossed lovers and not talk about them. They get married the day after they meet, and separated the following morning. They concoct wild schemes of escape and reunion. And their own unwillingness to move "wisely and slow," as Friar Laurence urges, leads to their horribly early deaths. Juliet prefers a faked death to coming clean to her (admittedly terrifying) parents; Romeo can't even wait a day after hearing of it before making rash plans to kill himself. Given how early and often these two threaten suicide, it's a miracle they make it through Act Four still alive.

But here's the catch. Even though pretty much everyone can agree that each pair of lovers creates their own problems, no story ever takes them to task for the impulsiveness and recklessness that leads them to separation and/or death. Deirdre and Naisi are fulfilling a prophesied fate; Lancelot and Guinevere are used as pawns by Mordred; the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd are perhaps most sympathetic because they're most human, stumbling through life with no foreshadowing and reacting to things as they happen. And Romeo and Juliet get romanticized to a ludicrous extent. They were incredibly lucky that the greatest poet of the English language made their story famous. Without Shakespeare's exquisite words, they'd be a couple of innocently moronic teenagers who made their bed and now have to lie in it. As it is, they're the English byword for true love, with countless silly songs using their names as shorthand. (No, Taylor Swift wasn't the first one to misread the play. She's just the most obvious.)

So even when the lovers themselves contribute materially to their own destruction, they're not really blamed. Storytellers may be trying to hammer home a moral about rash impulse, but even they fall under the spell of an all-consuming love. It's an easy thing to do. Two people who sacrifice everything, including themselves, for each other, is an incredibly attractive story. In fact, the lovers who make that sacrifice get immortalized far more readily than those who don't. Prince Charming and his princess of choice have a zillion iterations; Romeo and Juliet are unique, and instantly recognizable. It's as if the making of that sacrifice elevates a particular love above all the other couples who, for all we know, would have given their lives for each other just as readily. But it wasn't asked of them, and so they're not the celebrated ones.

Romeo and Juliet, Joseph Wright

It's much easier to swoon than to question. Rationality has no place in a tale of grand passion and high stakes. But there's probably a reason that those lovers die young and wildly. They don't just make their fates; they make their world. The rules they live by are not the rules that the rest of us cleave to. Theirs is an all-or-nothing world (with the exception of the Weaving Princess and the Cowherd, who get dragged out of that world and forced into a compromise that tortures them eternally). We swoon because we admire their absolute conviction, their refusal to have only some when they want all. But while theirs may be a world that two people can live in, it's not one that fits well with the rest of us. In their refusal to surrender to outside demands, these lovers lay down an ultimatum to themselves. And if they are to hold true to each other and their wild and reckless love - which is what their world is built around - they must follow through.

She's Got a Great Personality

Beautiful princesses are one of the classic staples of great fairy tales, right up there with fire-breathing dragons and evil magicians. The landscape of legend would be unrecognizable without Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Helen of Troy, to name just a few. But after a while you start to roll your eyes and wonder if any female in all of myth who's not a stepsister is anything less than a stunning beauty. Worse - a stunning beauty whose entire value rests on her looks, not on anything she says or does or thinks or is.

Luckily, there's another kind of heroine. She's much more obscure than her good-looking cousins, but she's there. She goes by names like Tatterhood, Lady Ragnell, or Penelope. In her stories, it's made explicit that she has nowhere near the beauty that's expected of a heroine. Tatterhood's twin sister is everything a princess should be; Tatterhood takes hilarious joy in subverting all those expectations, smacking goblins over the head, riding around on a goat, and negotiating her marriage by her own damn self. Penelope is Odysseus' consolation prize for ending his courtship of Helen of Troy and concocting the Oath of the Horse, sworn by all of Helen's remaining suitors. "Sorry you won't get the hottie of the century. But hey, she's got a cousin who's obviously not getting fawned over by scads of suitors. How about you marry her instead and take her off our hands?"

The Loathly Lady, Juan Wijngaard

Lady Ragnell, of course, is hideous beyond description. (Not that that's ever stopped writers from describing how physically painful it is to look at her, or artists from showing us in stomach-churning detail.)

So what gives? Why are these oddballs heroines? Why match an unattractive or even downright hideous woman with some poor dope who has little to no choice in the matter? What are these women's redeeming qualities?

Well, they tend to be far more self-sufficient than your average swooning princess. Penelope is a perfect match for wily Odysseus: when suitors finally flock to her (although drawn more by the lure of marrying a crown than by her beauty),

Penelope and the Suitors, John William Waterhouse

she holds them off for ten years without ever offering the deadly insult that would turn them and their military force against herself, her son, and her throne. She even outwits her husband, forcing him to reveal himself with a well-timed lie about their bed. Lady Ragnell, cursed into ugliness, doesn't lock herself in some tower and wait for a brave knight to save her; she masterminds her own rescue, tricking her way into marriage with the one knight whose sense and goodwill can break her curse. (Not to mention that she saves King Arthur's life while she's at it.) Tatterhood is just a badass. I can't do justice to her in a sentence or two. Read for yourself. (But see also, above, re: goblins and goat.)

There's a very obvious, and very uncomfortable, lesson here. Beautiful girls don't need brains; plain girls, who can't coast on their looks, are the only ones who need to be able to think. But in multiple cases, that lesson is subverted by the twist ending to these stories of unlovely

"My Lord?", Juan Wijngaard

heroines. Both Tatterhood and Lady Ragnell transform into beauties at the moment of the happy ending, to the shocked delight of their respective husbands. Lady Ragnell's comes as a relief on many counts: for her, since her spell is broken; for Gawain, since he's now married to a beautiful as well as intelligent woman; and for the audience, since we really didn't want to see Gawain the awesome shackled to a hag. Tatterhood's transformation is especially noteworthy. She's not under any curse. She herself wields the magic that changes her into a beauty. She looks the way she does because she chooses to. Whatever face she wears, it's one that she creates for herself. The message is subtler than "plain girls need brains," but it's actually much more interesting to deal with a heroine who shapes her own notion of beauty and worthiness.

Odysseus and Penelope Reunited, N.C. Wyeth

And Penelope's marked lack of a transformation is nothing short of heartwarming. Odysseus gets a magical face-lift thanks to Athena, who restores to him all the beauty of his youth when he arrives at last in Ithaca. But Penelope, who's now twenty years older than when Odysseus went to Troy, gets no such divine gift. She's as careworn as she was five minutes before he came back. She doesn't get to erase those years from her body. And Odysseus, who has slept with nymphs and flirted with a princess, returns to her arms with joy. For him, physical beauty is irrelevant; it's Penelope herself that he loves, her cleverness, her personality, her determination. Their reunion is both physical (as in, old as she is, he still desires her) and intellectual (they use the afterglow to catch each other up on their lives and plan for the future). Theirs is the most satisfyingly depicted marriage in all of Greek mythology, precisely because it's based on a connection deeper than that of a young prince and a beautiful princess. Penelope doesn't need to pretend to a beauty she never had in order to entrance her husband.

So why aren't there more of these heroines? Mostly because they're too complex. Fairy tales run on archetypes. Everyone already knows what you mean when you say "the beautiful princess." If you're telling the story of Tatterhood, you have to take time out to explain about her weirdness. If you create a marriage like that of Odysseus and Penelope, the characters have to be real enough to support its complications; you have to tell an epic, not a five-minute

Tatterhood, Lisa Hunt

bedtime story. But the comparative lack of non-beauties does emphasize the trend-buckers. Among all the Andromedas, Ledas, and Semeles, Penelope stands out. The Round Table seats one hundred and fifty knights; Lady Ragnell is among the few knight's wives who gets named. (Another one, Linette, is equally famous for her lack of conformity to the expectations of a damsel in distress.) Tatterhood, alas, is obscure in comparison to other fairy tales, but she's not easily forgotten.

And maybe the scarcity of non-beauties lets the chosen few shine a bit brighter. After all, the independent non-beauty too can become an archetype: the shrewish unpleasant scold who lives to plague the poor hero's life, a la Kate in "The Taming of the Shrew" or the greedy fisherman's wife who makes him use up all of the wish fish's goodwill. But this kind of heroine never got so popular that she became ubiquitous and boring. Her low level of exposure let her stay stubborn, strong and awesome. She's always there, if we know where to look.

Too Much of Water

Oh, dear. It looks like you've got a tragic heroine on your hands. Well, there's only one thing to do with her: get her to the nearest body of water and dump her in.

Ophelia, John Everett Millais

It's really astounding how many tragic heroines die by water. You'd think there was a handbook or something. Elaine, Ophelia, Hero, Helle - their deaths are all intimately associated with water. Helle's is particularly egregious, as the only purpose she serves in her entire story is to fall off the Ram with the Golden Fleece while he's flying over an ocean. Her brother, also riding the Ram, survives to found a royal line, but his sister just drops into the sea like someone cued her. She exists to drown. I smell a thematic necessity.

The Lady of Shalott, John William Waterhouse

It's fairly obvious at first glance why water, of all four traditional elements, is so closely identified with women. Shakespeare spells it out when Laertes mourns his sister. "Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia," he chokes out upon hearing of her death, "and therefore I forbid my tears." Women cry; tears are water; water is a woman's element. That makes it especially appropriate for heroines foiled in love, like Ophelia and Elaine; death by water is as good as a signed confession of love. "I drowned in the tears I shed for my lover." The Lady of Shalott dispenses even with Elaine's farewell letter; she only needs to drift down to Camelot on the river for everyone to understand that she has died for love. The symbolism of a woman in water is universal.

Hero, William Henry Rinehart

And then there's the nature of these women's characters. Water-deaths are generally performed by women who lack control of their lives. Ophelia is hounded from pillar to post by father, brother, lover and king, until her suicide becomes her only act of agency in the entire play. Hero is first aggressively wooed by Leander, then sits in her tower and lights a lamp and waits for him to swim to shore. The several Elaines in Arthurian legend make it murky which, precisely, is the one who dies for love of Lancelot, but in some versions she's not even the spunky rapist who gives birth to Galahad; in these, she tends his wound, gets summarily rejected, pines for him, and expires right after demurely stage-managing her own death to give it the proper emotional punch. And the Lady of Shalott (who I differentiate from all the zillion Elaines because, after all, Tennyson never names her, and "Shalott" is not "Astolat") is the saddest of them all, locked in her tower by the whispered threat of a curse, and doomed to death in the very moment she truly experiences life. These are women more acted upon than acting, for whom the cool calm of a watery death seems fitting.

The Death of Dido, Peter Paul Rubens

Compare them to, say, Dido, another suicide for love. But she dies by fire, and therein lies all the difference. Dido is fire; she's passionate, headstrong, determined, and impulsive. She's not the kind of woman who could float from Carthage to Rome with a passive-aggressive scroll of farewell in her languid dead hands. There is nothing passive about her. When she goes out, she makes damn sure that everyone in the vicinity knows about it. She even goes the extra mile and stabs herself on her own funeral pyre, proving her courage and her recklessness - and starting the bitter feud of Rome and Carthage at the same time. All that makes her far more intimidating than an Elaine or an Ophelia. Dido, the suicide by fire, is a dangerous femme fatale. In comparison, the other tragic heroines are far easier to swallow. They don't wreak havoc; they don't die in a grand operatic manner; they have the decency to shuffle off quietly and modestly, without causing too much fuss and drama for their menfolk. Water is acceptable; fire is, well, fire. And sensible women, even tragic heroines, don't play with fire.

Ophelia, Fernando Vazquez

But, as always, there's more to the story. Water isn't just smooth and serene. Its depths are invisible and ominous; the calm surface covers the roiling underneath. In the same way that fire provides a key to Dido's character, water tells us everything we need to know about what's really going on in the heads of the drowned heroines. These aren't emo girls who feel the need to proclaim their heartbreak at the top of their lungs. They keep everything inside, undercover, out of sight - but it doesn't mean it's not there. Sometimes it breaks free, as in Ophelia's madness; sometimes it provides a poignant emphasis to the heroine's tragic fate, like the Lady of Shalott "singing in her song" as she dies. And sometimes it drives a quiet, secretive girl like Hero to the drastic act of flinging herself out of her tower.

The water suicides make it too easy for us to take them, as we take their element, at surface value. Drama queens like Dido get all the attention, while the Ophelias and Elaines sit quietly by, holding their emotions in. But those emotions are still there. They ruffle the surface. And they offer some answers to the mysteries of these heroines.

The Problem With Gawain

I have a problem. It's very serious. Ladies and gentlemen, I confess to you all that I am a Gawainaholic.

You wouldn't think it would really be a problem. Gawain's one of the shining stars of Camelot. He has more adventures than anyone but Lancelot, and his pedigree is better than that French interloper's, anyway. His marriage to Lady Ragnell is one of the great love stories of the whole cycle, and unlike most of the others it even has a happy ending. He's there at the beginning, and he lasts almost until the bitter end.

Sir Gawaine Finds the Beautiful Lady, Howard Pyle

But while those are among the many reasons why I love Gawain, there are also the inevitable issues of character continuity in a story cycle tweaked over centuries with no initial canon. The interpretation of my favorite knight's character runs the gamut from dreamy ideal knight to dimwitted oaf to bloody avenger. It's very hard to reconcile the bold idealist of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" with the end of Malory, when Gawain pursues vengeance against Lancelot even when it costs his life and the security of Arthur's rule. Even allowing for the inevitable jading of a youth as he matures, that is a huge change in personality from the kid who's heartbroken when he fails to do the right thing. Later variations of the Loathly Lady story even impose a random separation between Gawain and Ragnell, where she leaves him after a certain number of years because she "must." (There is no truly official Arthurian canon - even Malory wrote long after the legends had mutated beyond any original form - so I ignore this nonsense utterly. In my Arthuriana, Gawain and Ragnell live happily ever after forever.)

It's pretty easy to see where this change happens. The instant Lancelot comes on the scene, everyone else gets massively downgraded. It makes sense, of course; the greatest knight in the world is going to trounce everyone else in everything, be it chivalry, honor, or feats of arms. He's the greatest for a reason. But Gawain takes the brunt of that hit. He doesn't just lose prestige at court, he loses character depth. The day before Lancelot arrived, he was upstanding, honorable, valiant, and badass. By the next morning, he becomes crass, boastful, and kind of an idiot.

Hey, French troubadours! I'll still like your character even if he's not the only nice guy in the bunch. I PROMISE, OKAY?

Orkney Princes, LilyBotanica

It's also no coincidence that in his later, less glorious years, Gawain is deeply identified with the rest of his siblings, the bold and problematic Orkney princes. The children of the traitorous Morgause and Lot turn out very flawed (with the exception of Gareth, who of course is Lancelot's best friend and of course gets accidentally killed, which provides the reason for Gawain's loss of reason at the end of his life). Agravain is generally seen as all bad, mainly because he hangs out with Mordred, who's also in a way part of the Orkney brood. Gareth is a sweetheart, Gawain often a blustering bruiser, Gaheris a nonentity who can go either way. But despite their many good points (not least of which is their loyalty to Arthur), the Orkney princes are instrumental in the downfall of Camelot. Gaheris (or on occasion Agravain) ropes his brothers into a blood feud with their mother's lover, which results in the death of Lamorak and the exiling of a few of the Orkney princes. Gareth's death at rage-blinded Lancelot's hands shatters what goodwill is

The Joust, Mariusz Kozik

left, driving Gawain to an obsessive quest for revenge that pits Arthur against Lancelot, sends Guinevere to a nunnery, and leaves Britain undefended when Mordred makes his move. You'd think we'd have heard something about Gawain's intensely close relationships with his brothers before - you know, a touching farewell when he heads off to face the Green Knight, or a bawdy commiseration as he prepares to marry hideous Lady Ragnell - but no. Gawain is a lone wolf when heroic. And all his less-than-heroic deeds tie directly back to the demands of his family when they do decide to pop up.

The Green Knight, Julek Heller

I blame a lot of Gawain's character deterioration on the troubadours who wanted to puff up Lancelot. With the exception of the doomed love for his queen, Lancelot just acquired wholesale most of Gawain's heroic traits: the solitude on a quest for honor, the widely acknowledged superiority of strength and will, even the reputation for heedless acts of courage. But that's not fair to Lancelot, who's very much a character in his own right.

It's much more interesting to look at Gawain as the embodiment of Camelot, in microcosm. At first, young and on his own, he achieves incredible glory through his own bravery and resolve. He basks in the glow of his accomplishments without resting on his laurels, building a reputation for honor as his fame spreads. And it's through the direct intervention of familial ties, that the seeds are sown for his downfall.

I don't know about you guys, but that sounds a lot like Arthur, and the course of Camelot itself, to me.

Not that it's intentional. I don't think the storytellers shaped Gawain's tale like this on purpose. It's far more likely that they realized they'd forgotten about their initial Best Knight and pulled him back in for the climax, disregarding his early characterization. But I also don't think it's an accident that Gawain is destroyed by his devotion to his family, just as Arthur (and Camelot by extension) is destroyed by his son's betrayal. At its core, the Death of Arthur is a dysfunctional family drama played out on a world stage. As Arthur's nephew, Gawain is implicated in that drama and doomed by it.

It all comes down to family. The youthful idealism of the beginning is broken by the betrayal of kin at the end. It holds true for every member of Arthur's family. But Gawain, who has a place with the heroes as well as with the villains, is the only one whose life mirrors the trajectory of Arthur's kingdom.

The King's Evolution

What happened to King Arthur? One minute he's a young warrior king who can pull swords out of rocks and anvils, the next he's stuck shuffling papers in some keep while his wife dallies with his best friend. That is one serious midlife crisis.

And it happens very abruptly, too. The first quarter, at least, of any Arthurian cycle revolves around the once and future king himself: his conception, his fostering, his coming-of-age via sword trick, his defeat of the rival kings, his marriage to Guinevere, and his creation of the Round Table knights.

The Sword in the Stone, Rodney Matthews

Then all of a sudden it's about the knights, each one getting a day in the limelight. Gawain, Percival, Balin and Balan, Kay, Gareth, and of course Lancelot, each with his own quests, successes and failures, which they dutifully report on back at Camelot. Where Arthur's

King Arthur, Winchester
Round Table

sitting, presiding over feasts and refusing to eat until he sees marvels and all that jazz. Kind of a comedown for a vigorous young king whose early career puts everyone else's to shame.

There's a lot going on in the transition from fighter to lawgiver, from active participant to benevolent presence in the wings. The first factor in play was probably the difficulty legends have with making a legislator a warrior. The archetypal "wise leader" is rarely found making corpses on a battlefield. We remember Hammurabi as the first lawgiver in history, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was a Mesopotamian emperor, which by definition means he kicked ass like nobody's business. Nestor, spouting smart advice Agamemnon rarely heeds, is old and ill suited to hack up Trojans. Ptah, the Egyptian god of creation, also presides over handicrafts, products of peaceful times; Maat, who represents balance and justice, is a woman. Nobody wants their legal system in the hands of a berserker. So for Arthur to take the place he himself has prepared - that of lawgiver to the masses, bringer of peace to a troubled land - he has to become inactive. He can't represent good government while also taking the lead in all quests that come to Camelot. And once it becomes clear that Guinevere will never give him a son, it's all the more important that the king protect his life and not go gallivanting after every Questing Beast and white hart that turns up.

The White Hart, Arthur Rackham

There's also the nature of the mythos itself. Arthurian legend as we know it is a hodgepodge of individual stories collected under one great umbrella. That umbrella is Arthur and his law-forged peace, which wasn't even in some of the stories in their original forms. Latecomers to the mythos - Merlin, Lancelot, Galahad, Tristan and Isolde - are the active and heroic centers of their own stories. There's simply no way to inject Arthur into a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers, especially given its similarity to his own marriage, except to say, "Well, it was happening in Arthur's reign." Merlin's exploits become a prequel and a foreshadowing of Arthur's greater glory; Lancelot can fight for the honor of Queen Guinevere as easily as for any other woman. But their stories are their own. Arthur's peace can bring them all together and give us a tapestry of courtly life, possible only in peace. Without Arthur, they'd be disconnected and blurring together; but his inclusion, although important for the unification of the mythos, is in name only.

And then there's the whole question of courtly love. Let's face it: the husband never comes off well in those stories. It's actually a miracle that Arthur survives his bout with courtly love with an even greater reputation as a friend, lover and king. It would be so easy to turn him into a

Lancelot Brings Guenevere to Arthur, Henry Justice Ford

Mark of Cornwall, obsessed with proving his wife's guilt and stabbing his friend in the back. Instead, facing a scenario tailor-made to break a great man, Arthur proves his greatness of spirit by acknowledging Lancelot and Guinevere's pain at their betrayal of him. He may be the only cuckold in legend with depth. But he's never going to be the hero of this story. That part is always going to go to Lancelot, to the flashy young wooer in love with a woman above his station. The whole notion of courtly love was invented so that character could seem heroic rather than lecherous. Lancelot is a creation of courtly love; the structure of the story requires that he be the hero. It's a testament to the appeal of Arthur as benevolent ruler that the worst he suffers is passivity, rather than character assassination.

So in terms of the mythos' requirements, Arthur has to be deactivated. You could argue that his

time with Merlin is his apprenticeship in learning how to rule from a throne rather than a battlefield, and that Merlin only leaves when Arthur finally learns. But that doesn't mean we have to forget that teenage Arthur led an army against several northern kings and defeated them all to prove his right to the throne, or that his earliest appearances in Welsh legend are all as a great war-leader, or that in the twilight of his reign he still personally led troops to Brittany.

The Two Crowns, Frank Dicksee

We tend to simplify Arthur. He makes it easy for us; he takes so easily to the mantle of lawgiver that we give him no other plaudits. But he's a much more complicated figure than that. He's a gifted warrior who deliberately retreats from the field of glory to concentrate on day-to-day administration. He's a devoted husband and friend who sacrifices his peace of mind to protect the hearts and consciences of the people he loves. He steps back to give other people time to shine, becoming forgotten even in his own story cycle until the end. He's a leader, in every sense of the word. And he shouldn't be put in a neat little box. He's too interesting for that.

Not Like It's Important

Why does everyone ignore the prophet?

The Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David

Plenty of legends come equipped with a voice of either doom or reason, laying out the future in five easy steps, free of charge. Soothsayers, hedge witches, fortune tellers: if you're living in a legend, there's almost always a prophet of some sort lurking around the next corner. What's better, their prophecy will come true.

But if you're living in a legend, it's all but required that you ignore it.

Cassandra wailed of doom for Troy for ten years, to no avail. Moses pulled off an astounding number of miracles while Pharaoh just scoffed. Merlin, taking it perhaps farther than any other prophet, foresaw the exact manner of his own death and still fell into Nimue's trap. Once, okay, you ignore portents of ruin and hope for the best. But when they come true, it would make sense to listen next time.

Moses and Aaron Before Pharaoh, Robert Leinweber

And these prophets in particular had excellent track records. Arthur has no excuse for ignoring Merlin's warning; when the brain behind your throne tells you something, you'd better pay attention. Moses turned the only source of water in a desert kingdom to blood on, essentially, a dare. That alone should have made Pharaoh sit up and take notice. Cassandra had been foreseeing all manner of unpleasant things for years, although her case is particularly cruel. Because she refused a randy god's booty call, no one was ever going to be able to believe her.

Ignoring the prophet creates not only a crushing loss in-story, but a particularly frustrating read. While characters blunder on down the plot road, the readers are left scowling and upset with their heroes, who just can't seem to clean the wax out of their ears long enough to hear the crucial tidbit. "Why didn't you just not marry Guinevere?" I've wanted to yell. "Why can't they just give Helen back? Why don't you let his freaking people go?" Like the prophets, we see it coming a mile away. Watching doom draw closer and closer is agonizing, especially when it's coming for people we've grown to care about.

King Arthur and Merlin at the Lake, W. Otway Cannell

And that's exactly the point of including a prophet. It's a fantastic writer's tool for creating narrative tension. We want to assume that Camelot would always stand; once Merlin tells us that it will fall through the illicit passion of the Queen and her champion, we're on the lookout for every hint the story lets fall. Lancelot's arrival is doubly portentous because we already know what he brings to Camelot. The ten plagues would be completely anticlimactic without Pharaoh ignoring the prophet; Moses would never truly prove his strength as an individual rather than a mouthpiece for God, and God wouldn't be able to demonstrate his complete dominance over the gods and people of Egypt. (Not to mention that if the story ran on common sense rather than escalating tension, there'd probably be only one plague and no Red Sea miracle.) Cassandra's prophecies of doom add even more poignancy to the fact that most of the major characters in the Iliad are vividly aware of what will happen when they die. Hector's speech to Andromache about how he most fears her falling into enemy hands as a slave is extra heartbreaking because we know, even if he doesn't, that his worst fear will come horribly true.

No one listens to the prophet because he's not in the story for the characters. He's there for us. The prophet exists to make us nervous, to remind us that happiness is transitory, to let us know what to watch out for. A prophet can't teach his or her fellow characters anything; it's too late for them, their story's already set in stone. The people who can learn from a prophet are the readers for whom he or she is the surrogate within the story, the more detached observer who can tell how things will play out.