Medieval Arthurian Legend
Chrétien de Troyes: The Story of the Graal
12th century, Old French.
The eloquent old ladies that Sir Gawain speaks to so courteously that evening are both dead ladies, and one of them is his mother. It is a castle of the dead!
When Sir Gawain enters the hall of a mysterious castle, there are already some clues as to what it might be. The building lies on the other side of a river, a tributary of which is forded by a Perilous Ford across which no knight has ever crossed and lived to tell the tale. The castle itself is reached with the aid of a ferry guided by a ferryman; a ferryman, moreover, who appears to lay claim to all knights who are injured in battle on the side of the river opposite the castle and who then ferries them across; like Charon across the river Styx.
The castle itself is made of marble and has five hundred windows of glass through which can be seen many hundreds of women looking out. There are other instances of astonishing glass or crystal buildings in Medieval literature; their inner spaces may model a region beyond the crystal spheres in a view of the heavenly universe that was accepted at the time. Islands of ladies figure in Old Irish mythology and they almost certainly signify an afterlife.
So our suspicions are aroused. And as you might expect, access to this castle is a truly perilous business. As the ferryman warns Sir Gawain: ‘Take my advice and give this castle a wide berth! To go close to it is to place oneself in great peril!’
Inside the main hall is a bed. It appears to be necessary for a knight to lie upon this bed. Then hundreds of crossbow bolts and longbow arrows are shot into the mattress upon which he is lying. If this does not have its intended effect, a ferocious lion is then let loose. No knight has ever survived this ordeal before. Is there any surprise!
Death is the only possible outcome. Or at least, so we are led to believe. But Sir Gawain survives the hail of arrows, cuts off the lion’s head and is proclaimed the new master of the castle. But soon he hears worrying news. Now inside the castle, he is, he learns, unable to leave. His journey across the river has been one-way only. Perhaps as we may by now have suspected it might be!
However, this news proves to be false. The ferryman has no problem taking Sir Gawain back across the river. And whilst adventuring on the further bank, and as though to emphasize the point, he returns across a Perilous Ford more easily than it takes him to cross it in the first place.
Sir Gawain returns across the other river, the one in front of the enchanted castle, having learned that its true rulers are a trinity of females; mother, daughter and grandmother. But stranger still, he learns from a knight on the other side of the Perilous Ford that the grandmother is King Arthur’s mother, and her daughter is Sir Gawain’s own mother, the wife of King Lot. Astounding, perhaps, because we learn that King Arthur has not had a mother for sixty years and I dare say that Gawain has not had a mother for at least these past twenty years.
- Sir Gawain has not had a mother for twenty years! The eloquent old ladies he speaks to so courteously that evening are both dead ladies, and one of them is his mother. It is a castle of the dead!
But now, because of Sir Gawain's valour, they are all free to leave and can return to the outside world!
