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Семья короля Артур

Фотография andy4675 andy4675 24.07 2020

В валлийской легендарной традиции (Мабиногион и пр.):

 

Anlawd (or Amlawdd) Wledic - Igraine (Igerna) and Goleuddydd and sons: Llygatrud Emys and Gwrbothu Hen and Gweir Gwrhyt Ennwir and Gweir Baladir Hir

 

По другой версии мифа, матерью короля Артура была Eigyr, а не Игрейн

 

King Ogrfan Gawr (variation: 'Gogrfan Gawr') - Gwenhwyfar (Guinevere) and Gwenhwyach

 

Также наряду с женой Гвиневир, внебрачную связь король Артур имел с Eleirch, дочерью некоего Iaen - Kyduan (Cydfan) - 4 sons: Amr (Amhar) and Gwydre and Llacheu and Duran

 

Llŷr - Bran - Caradoc - Cadwr - Eudaf - Morfawr - Tudwal - Cynfawr - Custennin - Uthyr

 

Также, отцом короля Артура кроме Утюра из более поздних источников, встречатеся и более ранний Uther (Uther Pendragon) - сыновья: король Arthur and Madog и дочери: Gwyar (sister) и неназываемая по-имени сестра - Eliwlod (Arhur's nephew) and Gwalchmei (сын Gwyar son) and Gwalchmei (Gawain) (son of Arthur's sister) and Medraut (Mordred) (son of Arthur's sister)

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Фотография andy4675 andy4675 24.07 2020

В средневековом Цикле легенд о Рыцарях Круглого стола, кроме сведений Гальфрида Монмутского:

 

Сын короля Артура у Кретьена де ла Труа - Loholt

 

сестра короля Артура Orcades (Morgause), дочь Игрейн и иногда Утера Пендрагона, а иногда корнуольского герцога Gorlois - сыновья Agravain, Gaheris и Gareth

 

Morgan, это дочь матери короля Артура Igerna (Igraine) и корнуольского герцога Gorlois, и от короля Уриена она мать Говейна с Мордредом, а также появившегося нового племянника короля Артура, по-имени Yvain.

 

Родной сестрой Морганы, как по матери, так и по отцу, именуют Elaine of Garlot, мать рыцаря Galeschin

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Фотография Gurga Gurga 27.07 2020

В средневековом Цикле легенд о Рыцарях Круглого стола, кроме сведений Гальфрида Монмутского

Гальфрид Монмутский первый заговорил о семье Артура. Остальные романисты, конечно, тоже внесли свою лепту. Но это уже вторично.

Если считать, что "История королей бриттов" - это фантазии ГМ, то что тут обсуждать? Фантазии есть фантазии.

 

Но!!

ГМ трижды ссылается на некий древний манускрипт, который получил от архидьякона Вальтера.

Если считать, что "История королей бриттов" - это действительно перевод некоего манускрипта, то интересно обсудить в плане, кто был прототипом для персонажа "короля Артура"?

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Фотография andy4675 andy4675 27.07 2020

Какая разница, кто написал о семье Артура первым, кто последним. Выше речь НЕ ОБ ЭТОМ. Гальфрид Монмутский жил в первой половине 12 века. "Мабиногин" - это сборник легенд валлонов составленный на средневаллийском языке. Манускрипты, содержащие тексты включённые в состав "Мабиногион" (это сборник составленный Леди Шарлот Гестт, опубликовавшей его в 1835 - 1844 годах, хотя само название впервые встречается ещё в 1632 году в словаре "Antiquae linguae Britannicae"). Название сборника восходит к циклу текстов легенд, которые называются вкупе "Четыре ветви Мабиноги", но в него Шарлотт Гест включила также ряд текстов, не входивших в составе "Четырёх ветвей Мабиноги". В основном легенды вошедшие в Мабиногион восходят к двум средневековым рукописям - "Белой книге Ридерха" (манускрипт датируется примерно 1400 годом, а составлен он был, как принято считать, для Ридерха (годы жизни: 1325 - 1400)) и "Красной книге из Хергеста" (манускрипт датируется между примерно 1382 и 1410 годами). Однако отдельные легенды из "Мабиногин" сохранились также в рукописях 13 века (например текст легенды "Герейнт и Энид" (это раннее самое упоминание Артура в валлийской рукописи) содержится в древнейшей сохранившейся рукописи на валлийском языке - т. н. "Чёрной книге из Камартена", датируемой около 1250 года). Что касается манускриптов с "Историей" Гальфрида Монмутского, то таких сохранилось сотни, и самые ранние из них (в числе нескольких дюжин) датируется второй половиной и концом 12 века. В отличие от валлийских легенд - которые сохранились в единыственных рукописях, как правило.

 

Средневаллийский язык, использованный в текстах валлийских легенд о Короле Артуре - превалировал в 12-15 веках. По языковым и литературным особенностям текстов "Мабиногиона", считается что они восходят к 12-13 векам (1100 - 1225 годы). По текстуально-содержательным параметрам считается, что ряд текстов восходит к легендам записанным ещё ранее - примерно в 1100 году или даже раньше - во второй половине 11 века (как например текст "Килух и Олвен" - где тоже содержится рассказ об участии в событиях короля Артура и рвцарей Круглого стола). Считается, что валлийские легенды "Мабиногиона" восходят к творчеству кельтско-валлийских поэтов-сочинителей филидов, имена некоторых таких легендарных поэтов сохраняются в тексте (например Талиесин, которого легенда датирует 6 веком - он считается современником королька в Южной Шотландии по-имени Уриен (королевство Регед)).

 

Карта Древнего Уэльса:

 

karta.gif

 

"Мабиногион" на русском:

 

http://www.fbit.ru/f...binogi/home.htm

 

Кроме того, из указанных выше авторов достоин внимания и Кретьен де Труа. Он является младшим СОВРЕМЕННИКОМ Гальфрида Монмутского. Он родился около 1135 года (примерно 35 годами позже Гальфрида) и умер не позднее 1190 года (не более чем 35 годами позднее Гальфрида). Первое произведение Артуровского цикла, "Эрека и Эниду", он, как принято считать, написал около 1170 года. "История королей Британии" - датируется примерно 1136 годом.

 

Из других авторов рыцарских романов о Рыцарях Круглого Стола (Артуровский цикл) важными авторами являлись младшие современники Кретьена де ла Труа - немцы Гартман фон Ауэ (годы жизни примерно 1168 - после 1210 года) и Вольфрам фон Эш (годы жизни примерно 1170 - 1220 годы).

 

Это если говорить о времени - времени составления текстов, времени написания легенд, и времени датировки манускриптов с указанными текстами.

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Фотография andy4675 andy4675 27.07 2020

Валлийские триады (Trioedd Ynys Prydein) упоминают короля Артура. Они сохранились в рукописи "Чёрной книги" (датируется около середины 13 века), в рукописи Peniarth 16 (примерно 1250 - 1275 годы), в рукописи Peniarth 45 (около 1275 года), в "Хронике принцев" или рукописи Peniarth 20 (датируется либо примерно 1330 годом, либо 15 веком) и в рукописи Peniarth MS 54 (конец 15 или 16 век), наряду с уже указанными выше "Белой книгой" и "Красной книгой". Некоторые из них (очевидно, не те, которые связаны с королём Артуром) возводят едва-ли не к 4 веку. Упоминаются в них и исторические персонажи 1 века - вожди бриттских племён Кассивеллаун и Каратак. Но также и герцог Бретани Ален Четвёртый (умер в 1119 году).

 

Например, вот упоминание Мадога, сына Утера (а стало быть - брата короля Артура) в Триадах, в качестве отца одного из рыцарей короля Артура:

 

Eliwlod son of Madog son of Uthur

 

https://web.archive....ts/triads4.html

 

Или сына короля Артура:

 

Llachau son of Arthur

 

https://web.archive....ts/triads2.html

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Фотография Gurga Gurga 30.07 2020

Если Ненний упомянул Артура 5 раз, то Гальфрид Монмутский уже 120 раз. Причем, кроме родственных связей Артура, он дает жизнеописание Вортигерна, а также дает характерные особенности Города Легионов. Этого у Ненния нет.

 

Так на какой же Земле находится Город Легионов?

 

Между прочим, на этой Земле жили аборигены, у которых свой язык, своя письменность, свои обычаи.

 

Гальфрид Монмутский, по его словам, перевел манускрипт с языка аборигенов на латынь. Перевел все, кроме имен-прозвищ. Например, в лексиконе аборигенов есть лексемы:
артыр - небольшое искажение и получаем искомое - Артур
джанавар (džanavar) - небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -  Джине́вера (Guinevere),
эттир - небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -  Утер
ингерина - небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -  Ингрейн
мырылда- небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -    Myrddin – Мерлин
мурдар – небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -  Мордред
эк.з.клибр. - небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -  Экскалибур
мэрген - небольшое искажение и получаем искомое -  Моргана

 

Очевидна технология плагиата: искажения в основном коснулись гласных, в огласовке и перестановке согласных.

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Фотография Gurga Gurga 31.07 2020

Очевидна технология плагиата: искажения в основном коснулись гласных, в огласовке и перестановке согласных.

Пендрагон.

 

Гальфрид Монмутский пояснил\перевел - "голова дракона", пен - (вал.) - голова. 

Но, кельтские диалекты имеют разнообразие:

*kwennos - Протокельтский

pennos - Галльский

pen - Валлийский

penn - Корнский

penn - Бретонский

ceann - Ирландский

ceann - Шотландский гэльский 

kione - Мэнский

 

пенн = кенн

Перевод -   «голова»

 

Т.е., если в "манускрипте" изначально было, что-то вроде "кендеркан" (кендер - титул, кан - титул), то после некоторых манипуляций получился "пен_драгон" - "голова дракона".


Сообщение отредактировал Gurga: 31.07.2020 - 14:45 PM
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Фотография fnool fnool 01.08 2020

Morgan, это дочь матери короля Артура Igerna (Igraine) и корнуольского герцога Gorlois, и от короля Уриена она мать Говейна с Мордредом

 

Так Мордред - племянник или незаконнорожденный сын Артура? Очень важно для его характера.

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Фотография andy4675 andy4675 01.08 2020

О происхождении Мордреда есть несколько версий. В валлийской традиции Мордред никогда не представляется родным сыном короля Артура. Согласно средневаллонскому "Сну Ронаби" (из Красной книги и Мабиногиона) Артур - приёмный отец Мордреда. Согласно Годфриду Монмутскому Мордред - это племянник короля Артура (его мать - сестра короля Артура Анна, в более поздней европейской рыцарской традиции - Morgause или даже Моргана) и её супруга - короля Лота. Согласно Вульгате Цикла о Рыцарях Круглого Стола - он плод случайного (или предумышленного насилия со стороны Артура) инцеста между королём Артуром и его сестрой (которая - сестра Артуру лишь с означенными выше оговорками) Морганой (изначально - с Morgause). А в шотландской работе 14 века "Хроника народа шотландцев" (Иоанн Фордунский) Мордред был и вовсе законным сыном и наследником короля Артура.

 

У Гвалхмая ап Мейлира (валлийца, младшего современника Годфрида Монмутского), при этом, Мордред указан как образец доброго нрава (он говорит о Мадоге, короле Поуис в Уэлльсе, что он имел силу Артура и добрый нрав Мордреда).

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Фотография andy4675 andy4675 01.08 2020

Конечно определённая путаница между Моргауз и Морган (у Кретьена де Труа втречается Морган ла Фей - имя опять встречающееся в Li Romans de Claris et Laris (ок. 1270 г.) и в романе Цикла Круглого Стола от 14 века под названием "Сэр Говейн и Зелёный Рыцарь"; по-испански - La fada Morgana; Фата Моргана ("фея Моргана") - в итальянской версии) наблюдается. Но сыном Морганы Мордред представлен не в средневековом нарративе, а в современном. Каролин Ларрингтон:

 

when she first appears, Morgan is neither Arthur’s sister nor
wicked. Nor, in medieval texts, is she ever Mordred’s mother; this distinction
is reserved for her sister, the Queen of Orkney.
 
In Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of
Monmouth registers Anna as Arthur’s younger sister, married to King Lot
of Orkney, and mother of Gawain and Mordred. Another sister is said by
Geoffrey to be the mother of Hoel of Brittany.8
 
‘The wife King Lot, the mother of Gawain and Mordred, [is] the
most tragic figure of a woman in Arthurian story’, suggests Edmund
Gardner.1
 
The Queen of Orkney remains without a name in the Vulgate Cycle, though
she makes a number of appearances there.
 
О том как Мордред был зачат от короля Артура:
 
The Conception of Mordred
There are three versions of the story of Mordred’s conception: in the Estoire
Merlin, in the Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin and in Malory’s Morte Darthur. This
last is dependent on, but by no means identical to, the Suite’s version. In each
successive version, the liaison between Arthur and his sister becomes more
blameworthy, the Queen of Orkney shoulders more – or at least more equal
amounts – of responsibility for the affair, and the catastrophic consequences
of Mordred’s existence are prophesied by Merlin with increased vehemence.
Chronologically it seems most likely that the section of the Lancelot in which a
hermit reveals to Mordred his terrible destiny and drops riddling hints about
his parentage was composed first; the
Estoire-version of the conception was
subsequently invented to explain and
support the wise man’s prophecy.24 In
the Lancelot scene the hermit declares
that Mordred will cause the downfall
of the Round Table; that ‘the worthiest
man I know, who is your father, will be
killed. And you will die by his hand,
and so the father will die by the son
and the son by the father’, reinforcing
his prophecy by referring to a painting
in a church at Camelot which Arthur
had commissioned to commemorate a
baleful dream he had had. Infuriated
by this shameful intelligence, Mordred
swiftly kills the hermit, preventing him
from communicating a similarly dark
prophecy to Lancelot. Lancelot spies a
letter in the dead man’s hand and secretly
takes it. Reading it later, he learns that Arthur is Mordred’s father and
the Queen of Orkney his mother, though the circumstances of the conception
are not elaborated there.25 By the time Mordred’s moves to usurp the throne
and marry Guenevere have become patent in the Mort Artu, it is clear that
Guenevere already knows Mordred’s parentage and its incestuous implications
if she were to marry him as the barons urge.26 Nowhere in the Lancelot or the
Mort is there discussion of the incestuous aspect of Mordred’s conception, and
there is little interest in the fact that his mother is Arthur’s half-sister; that
his maternal descent guarantees his relationship to Gawain is more crucial.
When Lancelot realizes that Mordred will be the death of Arthur, he reflects
that he would happily have killed Mordred if he could find some pretext, ‘but
he refrained from doing so because of his love for Sir Gawain’.27
The Vulgate Estoire de Merlin gives a brief account of Mordred’s conception
in terms of the kind of ‘bed-trick’ by which Galahad is conceived in the Lancelot,
perhaps originating, as Rosemary Morris suggests, in the circumstances of
Arthur’s own conception, when Uther slept with Ygraine in the guise of her
husband.28 The Estoire de Merlin takes its cue from the brief explanation offered
in the Estoire de Saint Graal, where the narrator notes that Mordred was not, as
people thought, the son of Lot, but had been conceived when the unmarried
Arthur had accidentally lain with his sister, thinking her to be ‘the fair maid
of Ireland’, and that both brother and sister were extremely penitent when
they realized what they had done.29 The Estoire de Merlin thus, as Miranda
Griffin comments, ‘is a text with a lot of explaining to do’.30 The tale of
Mordred’s conception is related after the event; the account is juxtaposed with
the queen’s powerful rhetorical plea to Gawain to ally himself with his uncle;
as noted above, her pregnancy motivates both the vehemence of her attack
on her son and the sudden depth of feeling for her brother. The text explains
that when Arthur was still a squire, he and his foster-family were present
when the barons and sub-kings gathered to choose a new king after the death
of Uther. Lot was accompanied by his wife. The young Arthur fell in love
with her, although the virtuous queen took no notice of the squire’s passion.
One night, Lot went to a midnight conference with his barons, creeping out
of bed without waking his wife. Arthur, sleeping near the door to the king’s
bedchamber, seized the opportunity to slip into the queen’s bed and made love
to her, the queen believing him to be her husband.
The next day, when carving before her at dinner, Arthur swore the queen
to secrecy before revealing his actions of the night before. The queen was
ashamed, but, the text relates, she came to love him when she realized his
descent and his worth, and thus she acts on his behalf in securing the loyalty
of her older sons.31
The Estoire pointedly notes that this was the only time that Arthur and his
sister lay together. The incest is unwitting on either side; Arthur’s behaviour
is cast as the understandable attraction of a young squire to a mature and
gracious lady, a youthful folly which pays off for him in terms of securing
his sister’s covert political support. The queen’s innocence is stressed in this
account, as the text gives us access to her interior thoughts. She tactfully
ignores signs of the young Arthur’s feelings because of her regard for her
husband, makes love with him in the belief that he is her spouse – that
‘she truly thought that he was her husband’ is repeated twice. Her friendly,
even embarrassed, response, much like Dorigen in Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale,
to the young man kneeling before her the next day to carve triggers Arthur’s
confession, cleverly phrased in terms of a boon; the queen promises not to
betray him before she knows what is at stake. She cannot publicly manifest
anger with Arthur; she responds rather with shame, for she has been made
to break her marriage vows. But the effect of her pregnancy and the news
of Arthur’s claim to the throne is to spark a profound love for her brother,
an affection which, whatever its erotic roots, is quickly assimilated to loyal
sisterly love.
The Vulgate Cycle makes no direct reference to the intercourse between
Arthur and his sister as incestuous. Merlin makes no prophecies about the
consequences of Arthur’s desire, merely informing his protégé that one of
Lot’s sons is actually his. Nor does the Estoire recount the portentous dream
to which the hermit alludes later in the Lancelot. Arthur seems guilty of little
more than a youthful error of judgement and is given no reason to try to eliminate
Mordred during the boy’s childhood. Rosemary Morris points out the
missed opportunity for ‘Jocastan horror’ here; since the queen’s conversation
with Gawain follows on Blasine’s revelation of their kinship to Galescalain, the
aftermath of the encounter is ‘robbed of all meaning by its assimilation to the
stereotyped reactions of her sisters’.32
The Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin gives a very different and altogether more
coherent account of Mordred’s conception and birth and their consequences,
though it is notably reticent in its treatment of the queen’s feelings.33 The
narrative is prominently placed at the beginning of the Suite, following on the
coronation of Arthur. The Queen of Orkney comes on a formal visit to court,
accompanied by her four sons; Gawain the eldest is only ten. Both she and
Arthur are ignorant of their kinship; Arthur falls in passionately in love with
her, and before the two-month visit is over they sleep together. The narrator
immediately makes known the consequences of this casual adultery: ‘Thus
the brother knew his sister carnally, and the lady carried the one who later
betrayed and killed his father and put the land to torture and destruction.’34
Just after the queen returns to Orkney, Arthur has the first of the text’s
‘adventures’, the terrifying dream alluded to in the Lancelot. This nightmare,
followed swiftly by Arthur’s encounter with the monstrous Questing Beast,
inaugurates one of the major thematic strands of the tale; as Martha Asher
notes, Arthur’s realm is now defined as ‘the Adventurous Kingdom’ where,
chiefly in consequence of the Grail’s presence within its borders, strange adventures
occur, testing not only the quality of the individual knight, but the
very institution of worldly chivalry.35 The Beast is itself a consequence of
incestuous sibling desire. Although its origins are not revealed until much later
in the cycle, the irruption of dream and monster into Arthur’s settled realm
underline the disruptive consequences of Arthur’s incest.36
Not only does the king plunge irremediably
into sin on account of his
lust, he compounds his crime by attempting
to kill the infant Mordred,
in a classic incest-and-exposure narrative.
When Merlin reveals the truth of
Arthur’s parentage and the incestuous
nature of the connection with the
queen, prophesying that harm will
come to the kingdom from the child,
Arthur decides that it would be best
to kill Mordred at birth. Merlin argues
vigorously against this course, vindicating
prophecy as a narrative device
by raising and refuting the idea of predestination. Mordred is innocent until
he commits a crime; any pre-emptive action against the child on Merlin’s
part would result in him losing his soul – the soul which he owes only to
the promptness of his mother and her confessor Blaise in baptising him at
birth and saving him from the influence of his diabolic sire.37 Nor can Arthur
circumvent Fate, Merlin warns.38 Nevertheless Arthur puts in motion a plan
to take possession of all babies born on May Day and keep them prisoner until
he can decide what to do with them. The ship on which Mordred is dispatched
from Orkney founders and his cradle washes ashore. He is fostered by Nabur,
gaining the notable knight Sagremor as his foster-brother. Warned by Christ
in a dream to do no harm to the children, Arthur accepts Jesus’ challenge
to entrust them to the Saviour’s mercy and sets them adrift in a boat. The
children are rescued by King Orians and raised in the Castle of Boys. The
barons of Logres are justifiably angry when they realize that their children
have been set adrift, and it is only on Merlin’s double assurance that the king
acted to save the kingdom, and that the children have come to no harm that
reconciliation is achieved.39
The queen’s motivations remain mysterious in the Post-Vulgate. Arthur
understandably arouses her enmity when Mordred is lost, and, in contrast
to her tireless efforts to bring about reconciliation in the Estoire, she supports
Lot’s subsequent rebellion. Malory reworks the story to give the queen, whom
he names Morgause, a rather more active role than in the preceding versions.40
Ostensibly she comes to court bearing a message from Lot, but in fact she is
on a spying mission. The deception underlying her arrival at Camelot suggestively
points up both her adulterous behaviour, since she willingly deceives
her husband, and the treachery of the child that results from it. Morgause
certainly exercises more agency in this account: Dorsey Armstrong highlights
Malory’s addition to his Post-Vulgate source: that Arthur and Morgause ‘were
agreed’ to commit adultery.41 Armstrong identifies Morgause as resisting ‘the
exchange of women’, a theme associated with her both at her marriage in
Malory, and, as shown above, in the Estoire when Gawain and his brothers
withhold their mother from their father until he makes peace with Arthur. By
choosing to sleep with Arthur, Morgause acts in accordance with her own desires
for once, but Armstrong’s argument that the Arthurian kingdom is more
threatened by Morgause’s brief affair with her brother than by Guenevere’s
lengthy liaison with Lancelot is unwarranted. The question of Morgause’s
adultery is considered further below.
After Morgause returns home, Arthur has an ominous dream. Merlin mentions
almost casually that the child begotten on the sister ‘shall destroy you
and all the knyghtes of youre realme’. Arthur takes steps to try to thwart
Merlin’s prophecy by ordering that all the male children born on or around
May Day should be cast adrift in a boat.42 Most of the children are killed when
a storm drives the ship on to rocks, but Mordred survives and is fostered until
the age of , when he comes to court.43 To be responsible for a Massacre of
the Innocents in this way is a highly inauspicious start to Arthur’s reign.44 Far
from effecting a reconciliation between the king and the barons – much harder
to bring about than in the Suite de Merlin, since no assurances about the children’s
safety can be given – Merlin finds himself taking the blame. Arthur’s
callousness, as Peter Field notes, is against type for the king’s characterization
in the Morte Darthur; Mordred’s existence is already producing disorder and
evil in the kingdom.45
The sin of Arthur and Morgause in both the Suite and in Malory is chiefly
a consequence of their ignorance about their blood relationship; the slowness
of Ygraine to come forward and claim Arthur as her son is the focus of an
important recognition scene in both texts, where Ygraine reveals that she
had never known what had become of the baby Merlin had taken away.46 As
Elizabeth Archibald shows, the casual liaison of the Merlin has been modified
in the later texts in the direction of current incest stories, such as the Gregory
and Judas tales. Merlin prophesies that the boy will kill his foster-brother, a
motif which occurs in the Judas story, and in a modified form in the Gregory
story. Mordred does indeed kill his foster-brother Sagremor during the last
battle. It is his last act before Arthur runs him through with his lance and he
himself fatally wounds his father; the Post-Vulgate Mort implies that, having
already knocked Mordred unconscious, Arthur might not have killed his son,
had he not revived to commit this outrage on his foster-brother.47
Critical interest in the incest narrative has focused primarily on its
consequences for Arthur; Archibald discusses at length the possible implications
of attaching an incest story to Arthur, perhaps modelled on the incest
motif grafted on to Charlemagne.48 Morris draws attention to the Post-Vulgate
author’s interest in predestination and the assumption that Mordred is not
necessarily wicked, even if he is born of incest.49 Bogdanow argues that the
incest is an important theme of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, employed ‘to heighten
the horror of the final tragedy’; indeed right sibling relations are a recurrent
motif throughout that text.50 Nevertheless, Morris and Archibald are right to
suggest that, though prominent at the beginning of the Post-Vulgate Cycle, the
incest is not a particular focus in the downfall of the kingdom. Archibald’s
conclusions highlight the divergence of the Post-Vulgate and Malorian versions
from the classic incest models, arguing that, unlike these putative predecessors,
‘Mordred’s story is not about a son’s emotional relationship with his
mother, but rather about his political relationship with his father’.51 The Mort
Artu, Post-Vulgate Mort and, especially, Malory, who has no truck with revelatory
hermits or wall paintings, all ignore the implications of incest in their
treatment of Arthur and Mordred’s mutual destruction in the final battle; it
is the double parricide–filicide and the sense of personal and political betrayal
that engage the emotions. Mordred’s mother, as Archibald notes, plays a remarkably
small part in the story.
The incest may have been unwitting, but both Arthur and, in the two later
versions, the Queen of Orkney, were quite aware they were committing adultery,
as David Scott Wilson-Okamura and, most recently, Dorsey Armstrong
have pointed out.52 Both Morris and Victoria Guerin suggest that adultery, as
it were, runs in Arthur’s blood, thanks to the circumstances of his conception.
53 Where in the Post-Vulgate it is the loss of Mordred which earns Arthur
the renewed enmity of both Lot and his sister, in Malory it is Lot’s realization
that he has been cuckolded and that Mordred is not his son which is the cause
of his renewed rebellion.54 Against the political capital that Arthur’s seduction
of his sister provides in the Estoire, his affair in the Post-Vulgate and Malory
has serious short-term as well as long-term consequences. The complications
of bringing Lot to accept Arthur as rightful king are an important focus of
the Estoire, and, as seen above, once that reconciliation is concluded in that
text, Lot and Arthur remain friends until Lot’s death, an event not recorded
in detail in the Vulgate. In the Suite and in Malory, Lot’s second rebellion,
in which he allies himself with Rions, has far-reaching consequences. His
death at the hands of Arthur’s ally Pellinor, a killing which motivates the
blood feud between Lot’s sons and Pellinor’s, is ultimately a major factor in
his queen’s death.55 Armstrong foregrounds the theme of adultery, drawing a
contrast between the virtuous Ygraine – who resists adultery, is duped into
sleeping with Uther and whose reward is the hero, Arthur, as child – and the
sinful Morgause – who agrees to adultery, sleeps with her brother and who
gives birth to the anti-hero Mordred. The contrast is clear in Malory, and to
some extent in the Suite, but the Estoire’s version of the conception shows the
queen behaving much like Ygraine in her innocence of intention. Despite these
considerations, as Maureen Fries comments, it is clear to Merlin that incest
is the crime that engenders the monstrous child destined to bring down the
kingdom; the adultery is a side issue.56 It is not necessary to privilege incest
over adultery, or vice versa, in our understanding of the outcome of the queen
and Arthur’s kexual relationship; in both the Folie Lancelot and the Tristan en
Prose, as Fanni Bogdanow observes, the feud between the sons of Lot and of
Pellinor, a consequence of Lot’s renewed rebellion, is inextricably linked to the
fate of the individual members of both lineages, and to the final catastrophe
of the Arthurian kingdom.57
The queen’s culpability in the conception of Mordred varies according to
the roles she is required to play elsewhere in the individual texts. In the Estoire
her innocence of the intention to commit adultery, her loyalty to her brother
when she realizes the relationship, and her adherence to kinship norms in
urging her sons to join forces with her brother, rather than their father, are
consistent with her role as suffering Christian queen and as willing negotiating
tool between Lot and his offspring. Once the realm is secure and Arthur has
successfully repelled Saxons and Romans, the King and Queen of Orkney fade
out of the Vulgate narrative, leaving the field clear for the exploits of Lancelot
and a younger generation of knights. In the Post-Vulgate Cycle the queen’s
motives are opaque; after Lot’s funeral, where the young Gawain swears an
oath to avenge his father on Pellinor and his sons, she has nothing to do until
she begins her affair with Lamerok, discussed below. Her shadowy role here
recalls her transgressive kexuality in the earlier Gawain texts; her affair with
her brother links her to the numerous sisters across the Post-Vulgate Cycle who
find themselves in problematic relationships with their brothers. As suggested
above, the juxtaposition of the incestuous affair and Arthur’s encounter with
the Questing Beast opens up themes of unnaturalness and monstrosity which
find their fulfilment much later when the Beast’s origins in incest are finally
revealed.58 Similarly, the curious connection of Pellinor and his sons with the
Questing Beast, whom they are fated to pursue, points up the interwoven
strands of illicit kexuality and honour-driven violence which will culminate
in Gaheris’s unnatural and semi-kexualized crime of matricide. When, in the
Suite, Gawain becomes Arthur’s liegeman on the day of the latter’s wedding
with Guenevere, his first thought is to accomplish revenge against Pellinor;
significantly he recruits Gaheris to his discussion of obligation and tactics. In
the Orkney lineage the blood feud will not go away.
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