Arthurian Journeys: Lancelot and Sir Gawain
Characters in the great medieval poems are markedly lacking in psychological nuance, as we saw from our review of the Lais of Marie de France. And the reasons for this are clear. The metaphysical paradigm in which the medieval mind operated placed god firmly at the centre of the universe and man in its periphery. Human reason was considered, at best, flawed, at worst, dangerous, and in any case subservient to divine revelation. Man was deemed, in most if not all respects, epistemologically helpless, and ever-reliant on the logos, or Christ, to illuminate his otherwise barren mind.
It can hardly be surprising, then, that the work of the medieval author – and the medieval composer and painter, for that matter – seems disinclined from a thorough exploration of the inner workings of the human mind. Characters are presented in black-or-white terms, as all-good or all-bad – more like stock figures than flesh-and-blood humans. They are valued, by the writer, more for what they symbolise than for what they are: valour, courage, love, good and evil.
And yet, to say that the medieval artist was completely indifferent to the intricacies of the human condition would evidently be going too far. Entire literary projects, in fact, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, were devoted to this very task. An appreciation for humanity, its triumphs and foibles, its struggles and sorrows, is as prevalent during this era as it is in any other; what changes here is the mode of presentation.
Where in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the novelist would insert reflective breaks in the narrative to shed light on the protagonist’s inner journey, for the medieval author, plot was all-supreme. Partly for the reasons explained above, partly because poetry was then as much a performed as a written mode of artistic expression, requiring an unfettered flow of action to avoid boring the audience, there is scarcely a serious introspective interlude to be found anywhere in the literature of the period.
And so the medieval author, wanting to incorporate psychoanalytic insights in her work, would have little choice but to weave them into its narrative structure. And she would do this by means of that archetypal medieval literary device: allegory.
Medieval literature is rife with it. In fact it can be said, with little exaggeration, that all major works of the era are allegorical to one extent or another. From the one-to-one correspondences between signifier and signified in Langland’s Piers Ploughman and Dante’s Divine Comedy, to Marie de France’s redemption-through-love in Guigemar, levels of medieval imagery range from outrageously blatant to more subtlety symbolic, and are almost never absent altogether.
Of the more subtle variety are two Arthurian tales: Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green. Though they were written two-hundred years apart, they present interesting parallels. Both depict valiant struggles of their protagonists toward a final goal that are, at once, literal, heroic quests and also psychological journeys toward inner healing and growth. And both depict their characters’ journeys as punctured by perils that are to be taken both literally and symbolically, as the inner demons we all wrestle with.
Lancelot, The Knight of the Cart
In Chrétien de Troyes’ twelfth-century Arthurian romance, Lancelot, a stout-hearted but immature young knight, is called upon to go on a quest to rescue Queen Guinevere, whom King Arthur has rather gullibly been duped into handing over to the deceitful Maleagant.
Guinevere is kept in a kingdom “from which no foreigner returns”, and already, from this enigmatic description, we intuit the symbolism of the journey Lancelot is about to embark on. The land toward which he’s headed is that inner realm into which one delves in times of crisis, and in which all important self-transformation takes place; the dark and chaotic place in one’s soul where one is either made or broken, and from which one never emerges the same.
Initially, Lancelot sets off with Gawain, another, more experienced Arthurian knight. They learn that, in order to access this mysterious, far-off kingdom, one of two paths must be taken, the water bridge and the sword bridge, the latter being the more perilous:
One is called the water-bridge, because the bridge is under water, and there is the same amount of water beneath it as above it, so that the bridge is exactly in the middle; and it is only a foot and a half in width and in thickness. This choice is certainly to be avoided, and yet it is the less dangerous of the two. In addition there are a number of other obstacles of which I will say nothing. The other bridge is still more impracticable and much more perilous, never having been crossed by man. It is just like a sharp sword, and therefore all the people call it 'the sword-bridge'.
Lancelot leaves Gawain to choose which path he prefers, and the King’s nephew tellingly choses the easier one, the path of the water bridge, while Lancelot, whose inner demons and need for growth are stronger, choses the more arduous. Here, the rather Nietzschean implication is clear: suffering is the only path toward self-actualisation, and Lancelot must walk headfirst toward it if he is to become the most valiant version of himself.
Lancelot and Gawain thus part ways and, alone and miserable, Lancelot looses himself in his desperate reflections. But in true Medieval style, Troyes turns down this opportunity for explicit psychoanalysis, and remains rather elliptical in regard to what these reflections precisely are:
Then each one goes his own way, and he of the cart is occupied with deep reflections, like one who has no strength or defence against love which holds him in its sway. His thoughts are such that he totally forgets himself, and he knows not whether he is alive or dead, forgetting even his own name, not knowing whether he is armed or not, or whither he is going or whence he came.
A knight Lancelot encounters then warns Lancelot of the bad road ahead:
To-morrow you will reach a place where you will have trouble: it is called 'the stony passage'. Shall I tell you how bad a place it is to pass? Only one horse can go through at a time; even two men could not pass abreast, and the passage is well guarded and defended. You will meet with resistance as soon as you arrive. You will sustain many a blow of sword and lance, and will have to return full measure before you succeed in passing through.
As Lancelot discovers, the trials he must endure in order to obtain his goal are numerous. Further ahead, he is asked by a damsel to cut off the head of a knight he has just fought. In return, the people gift him with horses and guide him to the infamous sword bridge.
When he finally gets there, he sees that the water below is in torrential flow:
At the end of this very difficult bridge they dismount from their steeds and gaze at the wicked-looking stream, which is as swift and raging, as black and turgid, as fierce and terrible as if it were the devil's stream; and it is so dangerous and bottomless that anything failing into it would be as completely lost as if it fell into the salt sea.
And his companion warns him of two lions waiting on the other sad that will gladly rip him from limb to limb were he to get within mauling distance:
Suppose that you once get across (but that cannot possibly come to pass, any more than one could hold in the winds and forbid them to blow, or keep the birds from singing, or re-enter one's mother's womb and be born again—all of which is as impossible as to empty the sea of its water); but even supposing that you got across, can you think and suppose that those two fierce lions that are chained on the other side will not kill you, and suck the blood from your veins, and eat your flesh and then gnaw your bones?
When he finally enters the castle in which Guinevere is held captive, Lancelot is told that Guinevere is confined, “so that no mortal man has access to her.” But, seeing Lancelot’s valour, the lord of the house, who also happens to be the abductor’s father, and is so well disposed toward him that he grants him all of which he is in need.
The ease with which Lancelot’s prize is finally conceded needn’t seem anti-climactic; by the time Lancelot arrives at his final destination, the hard work has been already been done. He has, in a sense, already won – much like a player has already earned his performance by thorough rehearsals even before walking onto the concert stage. The lord who, intuiting the toils Lancelot has undergone, evaluates his valour, represents our inner conscience; the voice inside us that notes everything we do and to whom we can never lie about who we are. Lancelot has made it to the castle, and this is proof enough that he has suffered and grown.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
A similarly allegorical journey of self-discovery is to be found in the anonymous fourteenth-century Arthurian epic, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The story opens in King Arthur’s court, where, in celebration of the New Year, courtiers are exchanging gifts and waiting for the feast to start. Among them is Gawain (yes – the same Gawain of de Troyes’ tale). Suddenly, there unexpectedly arrives a terrifying intruder:
...there came in at the hall door one terrible to behold, of stature greater than any on earth; from neck to loin so strong and thickly made, and with limbs so long and so great that he seemed even as a giant. And yet he was but a man, only the mightiest that might mount a steed; broad of chest and shoulders and slender of waist, and all his features of like fashion; but men marvelled much at his colour, for he rode even as a knight, yet was green all over.
This Green Knight challenges anyone to deal him a blow with his own axe, on the condition that he be permitted to return the ‘favour’ a year later to the day. At first, King Arthur accepts the challenge, but Gawain, knowing he is in far greater need of inner work than the King, insists on taking his place:
“…I think it not seemly when such challenges be made in your hall that ye yourself should undertake it, while there are many bold knights who sit beside ye, none are there, methinks, of readier will under heaven, or more valiant in open field. I am the weakest, I wot, and the feeblest of wit, and it will be the less loss of my life if ye seek sooth.”
When Gawain beheads the Green Knight, his foe doesn’t falter, and picks up his head and walks away. Gawain is thereby held to the mysterious knight’s challenge, and must meet him, in a year’s time, in his dwelling place, the Green Chapel.
The Green Knight, here, quite clearly, represents the monster we all have inside us, the one who chides and taunts us, setting us up for disaster with impossible standards, but also goading us toward personal growth. When he picks up his head, Gawain is torn apart, the way we all are when our childish illusions about ourselves have been shattered. He understands that his inner demons cannot be vanquished so easily, and the journey toward maturity will be a much more arduous one that he’d imagined.
When he embarks on his quest, he does so perforce alone. Like Lancelot, he has no loyal travel companion. To make matters worse, no one he comes across along the way is able to tell him where he needs to go:
And ever he asked, as he fared, of all whom he met, if they had heard any tidings of a Green Knight in the country thereabout, or of a Green Chapel? And all answered him, Nay, never in their lives had they seen any man of such a hue.
This is Gawain’s Kierkegaardian path toward selfhood, which his must walk “without encountering a single traveller” (Fear and Trembling) - or at least, no traveller who can help him in any meaningful way.
Like Lancelot, he finds all manner of obstacle and adversary hell-bent to thwart him:
Sometimes he fought with dragons and wolves; sometimes with wild men that dwelt in the rocks; another while with bulls, and bears, and wild boars, or with giants of the high moorland that drew near to him. Had he not been a doughty knight, enduring, and of well-proved valour, and a servant of God, doubtless he had been slain, for he was oft in danger of death.
Gawain’s journey toward inner strength is, at the same time, a striving for enlightenment. In reading the above passage and noting the obstacles Gawain encounters, one recalls the words of Nietzsche:
“What is difficult (for the spirit)?...is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads?” (Thus spoke Zarathustra, Part I)
Gawain’s “toads and frogs” (or in his specific case, bulls, bears and boars) are the uncomfortable realities he must delve inside himself to wrestle with, to avoid ‘repulsing’, because they are the very path to self-knowledge he seeks. More than the face-off itself with Green Knight that awaits him, this here is where the growth is found, along the way.
Later, he spurns the advances of the fair Lady Bertilak, in whose Castle her husband has offered him repose on the day before his encounter with the Green Knight. She visits him three times while the Lord is away, but Gawain forbears, not because she is the wife of his host, nor less because she doesn’t delight him, but because an affair, at this juncture, would distract him from his quest:
So they talked of many matters till mid-morn was past, and ever the lady made as though she loved him, and the knight turned her speech aside. For though she were the brightest of maidens, yet had he forborne to shew her love for the danger that awaited him, and the blow that must be given without delay.
The lady is a symbol of temptation, as women had been since the tale of the Fall, and his resistance represents his commitment to his inner project of self-growth. In his wisdom, Gawain understands that he cannot find love before he has found himself.
When he eventually meets the Green Knight, the latter reveals himself to be Lord Bertilak, who was testing him all along. The blow the lord deals to the back of Gawain’s neck leaves but a scratch and the knight is allowed to go free. In getting this far, Gawain has already done enough, and the lord praises his valour:
…in sooth I think thou art the most faultless knight that ever trode earth. As a pearl among white peas is of more worth than they, so is Gawain, i’ faith, by other knights.
Again, we see a conclusion that could be construed as anti-climactic. As in Lancelot, there is no nail-biting face-off between hero and foe. And this is precisely the point both de Troyes and the Gawain poet are trying make. The journey, not the goal, was the focus all along; the journey inward, toward growth and maturity.
