"Godspeed", by Edmund Leighton (1853-1922). Image from Wikipedia.
So, in the last part of our story, Lancelot and Guinevere had been caught in the act of maybe just possibly canoodling. Bloodshed resulted, with many knights being killed, including friends and Knights of the Round Table.
Sir Gawain, whose brothers were killed, swears revenge on Lancelot.
When we re-join our story, most of the other knights have come in on Sir Gawain's side. King Arhtur's hands are tied, and though he wants desperately to avoid a civil war, his knights press him to fight.
Leading a great army, King Arthur rides up to Lancelot's castle in the north of the country, where Lancelot and Guinevere have taken refuge along with an army of knights loyal to them. Sir Gawain, still enraged over the death of his brothers, leads King Arthur's men in an assault on the castle walls. Bitter, Lord of the Rings-style siege the castle stuff goes down for a long time, and many men of valour are killed.
The siege of the castle goes on long enough that word reaches the Pope himself, who issues a bill that the fighting must end immediately. It does.
Lancelot, with Guinevere and his surviving loyal knights, then scurries off to his native France. Arthur and Gawain and their army follow close behind, and another seige is about to go down, when...
Gawain comes forward and challenges Lancelot to come down and fight, man to man, to the death.
Whoever wins this combat wins the battle, and the loser's army will stand down.
What will Lancelot do? He's not even sure he loves this woman anymore, or if he ever did, and he wonders if this whole thing was a big mistake. He's tired of killing. He's racked with guilt. But Sir Gawain wants his head, and won't stop until one of them is dead on the battlefield.
What will he do?
(tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion...)
4 comments:
this is like the Trojan War/the Illiad right?
so exciting, I'm on the edge of my seat.
Cool, I'm looking forward to it too!
heh. thanks.
it's only sort of like the illiad, i think, in the whole helen/guinevere overlap. maybe that's a pretty key detail, but beyond that the plot itself doesn't really mirror the illiad.
i would imagine that malory would have at least been familiar with the illiad, being an educated 12th century cleric as he was. but he might not have actually read it, since books were fairly scarce in those days.
maybe he knew it second hand, either through someone else's use of it in a text, or just as part of the general social dialog of educated men in his day.
anyway, that detail about helen/guinevere IS pretty important. i'm going to say that that's his creation to some degree, though. other Arthurian legends before and after him don't quite frame it like that.
just like how the Odyssey and the Illiad were used without end in the Greek dramas, endlessly re-interpreted, so were the Arthurian myths in early British lit.
and then, weirdly, they completely fell out of fashion between the early 1500's and the late 1800's, with pre-Raphealites like Edmund Leighton, who did the painting i used above, began using them again.
i feel like Tennyson might have more than a loose connection to the pre-Raphaelites, though I'm not sure.
Your writing here begs a screenplay style format or dialogue, I like it, kind've digesting it like a shakespeare and then giving it to us straight or perhaps with a spin. Can't wait for episode 3!
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