En la marche de Gaule

The tenuousness of difference in general permeates the cycle through the conte’s meandering voice. Throughout, the dynamics of narration and authorship unsettle truth claims and keep the narrative on the edge of ambivalence. At different moments, the conte ascribes the text we read to three mortal authors: a hermit named Nascien, Robert de Boron, and Walter Map. Numerous other figures also intervene in the process. The Estoire del saint graal (hereafter Estoire) actually presents Christ as its ultimate author, while the Merlin substitutes Merlin and his stenographer Blaise. The Lancelot diffuses authorial identity further as knights become the narrators of their own stories; the Mort amplifies this effect almost exponentially with a cadre of anonymous court historians. The cycle thus constructs an elaborate image of authorship and translation that displays the bounds of truth while also ensuring that their limits can never be measured. Like Geoffrey’s claim to translate a Briton source, the prose cycle’s representations of translators enhance narrative authority and authenticates their inaccessible sources. Yet the circularity of the translation claims also deconstructs the possibility of authoritative narration.³¹ Thus while the prose medium and its succession of authors guarantee the conte’s truth, the multiplicity of the guarantees keeps truth elusive.

The hermit who writes (at least) the Estoire opens the cycle under divine authorization: he writes the estoire’s nobility (“hauteche”) and dominion (“signourie”) on the Lord’s orders (“par le commandement du grant Maistre”) (1). This claim combines feudal discourse (evident in Wace’s history) with the pious discourse of prayer (evident in Laʒamon’s history). The combination identifies an audience of believers, capable of extending dominion throughout Christendom through attentive reading. Indeed, the narrator sends greetings and salvation (“mande . . . salus”) to a Christian audience of men and women (“a tous cheus e a toutes cheles ki ont lor creanche en la sainte, glorieuse Trinité”). The gendering of the audience identifies its (at least) dual subjectivity, anticipating and enclosing divergent receptions (nonetheless unified under Christianity). The narrator’s imagination of female readers is unique in the tradition: Wace does not foreclose the possibility when he addresses whoever wants to hear (“ki”), but neither does he directly address women; Geoffrey, Laʒamon, Robert, and the author of the Gesta regum Britanniae (see chapter 7) all address specifically male readers. From the first lines, then, the narrative mirrors the implications of prose by embracing differences within resemblances.

The narrator goes on to express the dangers of translation when he explains why the author’s name is withheld: in addition to fearing the envious and incredulous, he wants to avoid blame if anything evil is introduced into the book “par effachement ou par le vice des escrivens qui apriés le translataissent d’un lieu en autre” (by erasure or by the vice of writers who translate it later from one place to another” (1). Christ contradicts this fear when he explains to the hermit in a vision: “nule oevre ne puet estre maufaite qui par moi soit commenchie” (no work can be done badly which is begun by me) (21). Later, the narrator again warns that lies should not enter the divinely inspired book:

car chil seroit de trop foursené hardement plains qui oseroit ajouster mençoingne en si haute chose com est la sainte estoire que li vrais Cruchefis escrist de la soie propre main. (257)

[For he would be really far out of his mind who would dare add lies to such a noble thing as the holy estoire that the true Crucified wrote with his own hand.]

This legitimation itself is rather outrageous (“forsené”), since Christological writing has no orthodox basis.³² To incorporate this heterodoxy within the bounds of truth, the narrator explains that Christ also wrote two other texts: the Pater Nostre and the judgment of a woman caught in adultery (258). The rarity of Christological writing, he reasons, enhances the Estoire’s value; anyone who claims that Christ wrote anything else has no divine authority and is a liar (258–59). These statements assert an absolute boundary between truth and lies, dismissing the contingencies of the hermit’s own translation. Yet, as Rupert Pickens points out, the hermit identifies himself as a sinner with a limited understanding of divine communication (99–103). Through the hermit’s own admissions, then, doubt shadows the transmission of Christ’s truth from the beginning.

Later, it becomes clear that Christ’s book has been translated into Latin, and then into French by Robert de Boron (391, 478) (who actually was responsible for grail romances in the early thirteenth century). As the hermit’s own writing fades into oblivion, the narrator (who seems to be neither the hermit nor Robert) lends Robert credibility by saying that he translated on orders from the Church (478). The narrator goes on to note agreements between Robert’s French translation and his own source (of what origin?). The most important corroboration arises from the lineage of King Loth and his ancestor Perron: the narrator reports that Robert also tells the true story of Perron’s Christian conversion, but that the “Estoire del Brut” says nothing of him (546). Supposing that this is because the “Estoire del Brut”’s translator did not know the “Estoire del seint Graal,” the narrator concludes that the translator acquitted himself by either lying or equivocating with the phrase “Einsint le dient alcunes genz” (so say some people) (546). The narrator seems to refer here to a version of the Roman de Brut, by Wace or someone else, while clearly positing the Estoire’s superior historicity. Elsewhere, the narrator declares this “Estoire des estoires” completely free of mere hearsay (unlike the contes of lesser narrators) (249). These kinds of cross-references control against translators’ “vices” and assert the reliability of the narrator’s historical knowledge.

In the Merlin, the narrator names the hermit Nascien, identifying him as an Arthurian knight who later became a priest and received divine vision (222). Nascien became a saintly hermit indeed, living from the Merlin’s events in the fifth century until receiving his vision in the eighth (as reported in the Estoire). The faithfulness of Nascien’s transmission becomes immediately suspect, as both chronologically improbable and tainted by Arthurian interests. Tellingly, the narrator identifies Nascien as the Estoire’s hermit just as he loses his horse to Rion; he only survives the battle through Merlin’s enchantments (223). Autobiography—nearly cut short—quite literally threatens historiography, both of which are rescued by the equivocal value of Merlin’s magic.

Nascien and Robert de Boron both lend doubtful authority to the Estoire and the Merlin. Similarly, in the Queste and the Mort the name of Walter Map patrols the shifting borders of dubious truth. At the end of the Queste, Walter appears (like Robert) as the translator of a Latin source (280). By the beginning of the Mort, Walter has put the “Aventures del Seint Graal” in writing “assez soufisanment si com li sembloit” (fairly sufficiently as it seemed to him) (1). King Henry, however, disagrees and asks for the story of the death of the knights already mentioned. Having narrated those events to their conclusion, the narrator defines the final limit of truth and narration:

Si se test ore atant mestre Gautiers Map de l’Estoire de Lancelot, car bien a tout mené a fin selonc les choses qui en avindrent, et fenist ci son livre si outreement que aprés ce n’en porroit nus riens conter qui n’en mentist de toutes choses. (263)

[Now here Master Walter Map stops talking about the Estoire de Lancelot, for he has surely brought everything to the end according to the things that happened there, and he finishes here his book categorically, so that after this no one could recount anything about it who didn’t lie about every bit of it.]

Like the hermit who withholds his name to preserve his reputation from lying translators, this narrator secures a similar immunity by defining continuation as a lie: the narrative presents itself as immutably bounded. Map’s discourse in the Mort thus establishes the limits of narrative as coextensive with the truth of the events.³³ As a boundary mechanism, the assertion of terminal authorship puts the narrator “out of bounds,” in the mobile subjectivity of the syntactic seam (“si se test ore atant”).

The use of Map as a figure for immutable truth, however, ensures instability. The attribution itself must be spurious because Map and Henry II both died well before the cycle’s composition. Map, moreover, earned a reputation as an expert liar, according to Hue de Rotelande (380). The Mort thus appeals ironically to a notorious liar as guarantor of narrative truth.³⁴ The attribution of the apparently pro-Cistercian Queste to Map is especially ironic, since Map inveighed against both the Cistercians and the Templars in his De nugis curialium.³⁵ In a final irony, the text whose continuation Map’s narrative voice forecloses extends a story that had already been told sufficiently (“soufisanment”) in Map’s own judgment. Subsequent redactors manipulate the fiction further by recasting Map as one of Arthur’s court historiographers.³⁶ The vision of Map as a court stenographer also lends itself to ironic play, since he is most famous for comparing courtly life to Hell itself. Finally, Map’s name casts the pall of Anglo-Welsh ambivalence across the French cycle, for he identifies himself as a son of the Welsh March, and he enjoyed a prebend on the Severn.³⁷

While the use of Map’s name and reputation may be properly facetious (facetus), as he himself may have appreciated, it is not entirely gratuitous. Map’s reputation was probably well known in Champagne, where he had visited the comital court in the late twelfth century.³⁸ Moreover, he was also known for progressive views of vernacular writing: Gerald of Wales cites a letter from the eloquent Map (“eloquio clarus”) as he expresses the hope that someone will translate his Expugnatio Hibernica into French, noting that Walter is more widely known than Gerald because he has spoken in the common language (“communi idiomate”) (5:410–11). As his translator, Map would bring Gerald a deservedly broader reputation. Gerald seeks, in other words, someone to enact precisely the role attributed to Map in the prose cycle. Gerald and Map, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, are sons of border culture, practiced in the various arts of translation and bound to transient subjectivities. Their itineraries mirror in some ways the social dilemma of a French aristocracy caught between the prestige of the royal court and submission to it. Map’s authorship thus casts the cycle into a familiar indeterminacy, identifying it as the textual product of ambivalent desires.

The mobility and multiplicity of authority in the prose cycle sustains the vast geographical itineraries of its characters. The overall conception of space in the cycle foregrounds border concepts, from the frequency of the verb marchir to the many realms that are in fact marches to the river Marcoise.³⁹ Even the Trinity is presented as a boundary mystery.⁴⁰ An omnipresent limitation and invitation, the border orders morality as well as topography, as supernatural islands and wild forests provide the proving grounds of spiritual faith.⁴¹ The Estoire itself begins in one of the most barren (“sauvage”) places in Britain (2). Throughout the cycle, enchanted architectural spaces (like ships and castles) replicate the moralized topography of barren islands, endless seas, and deserted forests. While the cycle amplifies the Historia’s boundary dynamics, it departs significantly from its geographical itineraries. In place of the Trojans’ voyage from Greece to Britain to exile in Wales and Brittany, the prose cycle follows the Hebrews from Jerusalem to Camelot and east again to Sarras. Across continents and millennia, then, the cycle superimposes the absolute value of spiritual space over the equivocal value of colonizing settlement.

The episodes prior to Britain’s settlement, like those in the Historia, establish the relationships that govern the future of history. This pre-Insular landscape represents an urban, eastern geography as Joseph follows the course of the Euphrates from Arimathea to Jerusalem and then Sarras.⁴² In the thirteenth century, Jerusalem harbored not only sacred religious origins but also Champenois royalty: Henry of Champagne occupied Jerusalem’s throne from 1192 to 1197, and his daughters posed a rival claim to the county (forcefully prosecuted after 1213 by Erard de Brienne).⁴³ The redactors double this contentious site with one removed from the literal map (like Troy): Sarras. With the Estoire, Sarras is also under Champenois authority: the city’s lord Evelach learns that he was born in Meaux (where Arthur fights his last battle, “entre Champaigne et Borgoigne”).⁴⁴ The Euphrates, navigable path from Jerusalem to Sarras, thus provides an aquatic conduit from Hebrew origins to the Arthurian future. The fulfillment of this journey resides symbolically in the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric: half of the handle is made from the bone of a “cortenaus,” a fish found only in the Euphrates (Queste 202–3). When Galahad journeys to Sarras, “cortenaus” at his side, he returns the narrative to its sacred origins. From the shadows of both Jerusalem and Sarras, then, the redactors dismiss Troy for a sacralized version of expansionist settlement that never in fact leaves home.

Joseph, like Brutus, leaves his native city and receives prophetic promises about a future insular dominion, “la terre qui pramise est a lor oirs” (the land that is promised to [his] heirs) (Estoire 402). The miraculous navigation of Joseph’s followers across the Channel judges their moral standing as heirs: the chaste (that is, those who have suspended genealogical continuity for God) transcend the natural laws of aquatic boundaries (416–17):

Josephés passa le lignaige Joseph, son pere, outre mer jusqu’en la Bloie Bretaigne, qui ore a a non Engletere, et si les passa sans aviron et sans gouvernal, et onques n’i ot voile ke le geron de sa chemise sans plus. (23)

[Josephé went with the lineage of Joseph, his father, across the sea to Blue Britain, which now has the name England, and they crossed without oar and without rudder and there was never any sail except the flap of his shirt, nothing more.]

In accordance with this moralized navigation, the Insular descriptio that greets them at the shore allegorizes the landscape:

[T]ot autresi come mescreance et malvese loi i est fermement tenue, autresi covient il qe la lois Jesucrist, qui est buene et droite et seinte a la vie perdurable, i soit plantee et enracinee et cele autre loi desertee et ostee qui ore i est coutivee et tenue. (418–19)

[Just as disbelief and bad law are firmly held there, so it is appropriate that the law of Jesus Christ, which is good and right and holy to eternal life, be planted there and rooted and that other law deserted and removed which is now cultivated and held.]

This myth of Insular conversion describes the passage of religious dominion in agricultural terms. The land is not empty (of people, crops, or religion), but badly cultivated; with proper care, its sterile crops can be uprooted in favor of spiritual fruits. Joseph, first guardian of the Grail, thus takes Brutus’s place as the founder of Britain’s civilization.⁴⁵ The island’s conversion, however, is no less a colonization than Brutus’s. The conquering vocabulary that describes Sarras’s earlier conversion, for example, could have been lifted from Wace: “En tel maniere com vous avés oï fu li regnes de Sarras conquis et gaaigniés au serviche del glorieus non Jhesucrist” (In such a way as you have heard was the realm of Sarras conquered and gained to the service of the glorious name of Jesus Christ) (163). In Britain, Joseph and his clan occupy all of the island’s regions through systematic conversion: North Wales, Wales, Land of the Giants, Scotland, Orcanie, and Ireland; these events penetrate the Lancelot, anchoring all origins to Insular conversion.⁴⁶ Colonizing settlement thus proceeds morally, claiming Insular soil for Christian dominion.

Like the major regions, the island’s cities convert to the Christian empire. Camelot noticeably displaces London (perceptively described in the “short” Lancelot as “en la marche de toutes les terres” [in the border of all lands] [3:114]). Originally a center of Sarrasin strength (Estoire 479), Camelot becomes the symbolic and political center of a Christianized Loegria. Once converted, knights continuously arrive and depart from Camelot’s court, and Josephé builds Saint Stephen’s church there (484). And when Lancelot goes into exile, he sends his shield there (Mort 162): the local people treat it like a relic; it contains the last vestiges of the sacred Hebraic lineage at the center of the realm. Moreover, although Galahad completes the Grail quest in Sarras, Bohort returns to Camelot (Mort 1), the East’s Arthurian double. Both cities in fact begin as powerful Sarrasin capitals, later claimed by forceful Christian expansionism.

The converted cities and regions map a spiritual hierarchy that endures until Arthur. Every region is ruled by descendants of Joseph’s original Hebraic clan, and the narrative frequently traces their dominion to the Arthurian era. Scotland and Land Out of Bounds (“Terre Forraine”) occupy the top of the spiritual order. Both Joseph and Josephé are buried in Scotland; God honors Josephé’s corpse by ending a famine, “et fu veritez provee et les estoires meesmes d’Escoce le tesmoignent” (and it was a proven truth and the estoires of Scotland themselves witness it) (555–57). Land Out of Bounds joins the spiritual order when Alain (Helein), keeper of the Grail, leaves Galefort to settle some “terre gaste” with his “lingnage” (558). When they arrive in Land Out of Bounds, they find it well populated: “il avoit plenté de nice gent qui pou savoient, fors seulement de terres coutiver” (there were plenty of ignorant people who knew little, except only the cultivation of land) (559). Given this agricultural knowledge, “gaste” clearly refers to the unconverted rather than to the agriculturally barren. Here, Alain builds the castle of Corbenic and establishes the Grail’s domain and honor (“anor”) as territory Out of Bounds. The redactors strategically sanctify feudal vocabulary here, turning colonial settlement into a divine adventure (later, Arthur dreams of pious souls who have “conquestee” the house of God [Mort 225]). When Varlan subsequently strikes Lambor with Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric, Land Out of Bounds becomes “gaste” in both the spiritual and agricultural senses: God turns it and Wales into Wasted Land (“Terre Gaste”), where nothing is gained (“gaaigniees”):

qe de grant tens les terres as laboreors ne furent gaaigniees, ne n’i croissoit ne blé ne autre chose, ne li arbre n’i portoient fruit, ne es eves ne troivoit l’en poison se molt petit non. (566)

[so that for a long time the lands were not cultivated [gaaigniees] by laborers: neither wheat nor any other thing grew, nor did the trees bear fruit, nor did one find fish in the waters, except very small ones.]

Lancelot links this desolate Land Out of Bounds with Galehot’s Sorelois in Arthurian opposition when he calls upon both for help against Arthur; knights of Wasted Land and Sorelois also fight on the same side of a tournament (Mort 111, 137). Direct challenges to Arthur’s authority thus originate repeatedly from the most sacred sites of original settlement, Scotland and Wasted Land.

Sorelois harbors resistance to the Arthurian order not only through its association with Land Out of Bounds, but through its rival imperial ambitions. Not far from Arthur’s land—between Wales and the Foreign Islands, along the borders of a French realm and the Humber, closed off by the impassable Assume River⁴⁷—Sorelois comprises a colonial locus amoenus:

la plus delitable terre qui fust sor les illes de mer de Bertaigne et la plus aaisie de boines rivieres et de boines forés et de plentiveuses terres. (Lancelot 8:128)

[the most delightful land that was on the sea-islands of Britain, and the most replete with good rivers and good forests and plentiful lands.]

Just as Sorelois fulfills the role of desirable (“delitable”) land, Galehot echoes Brutus in that he does not receive it in inheritance but gains it (“gaaignie”) by force (8:128). Although no indigenous peoples disrupt his confident settlement, Galehot comes to exemplify colonial ambivalence. Not only does he give up his conquered territory for love of Lancelot (submitting to Arthur even though he has the force to conquer him), he is a giant and is vividly remembered as “Son of the Giantess” on his tombstone (8:1, 2:212). As a giant possessed by extreme homosocial desire, Galehot embodies the force of ambivalence generated by colonial ambition. In one sense, he represents the native’s seductive return to the scene of colonization. His territorial losses and death presage the consequences of even the most insulated conquests—and the fate of Arthurians who fail to inhabit the spiritual landscape.

As Sorelois’s Assume suggests, Britain’s rivers reinforce the regional divisions of Insular order. The Severn traces the limit of the Saxons during Arthur’s early wars, and he fights Rion along the Thames.⁴⁸ More dramatically, the regions north of the Humber all challenge both Christian and Arthurian authority. Like Hamo in the Historia, a group of drowning Heathens first put the northern river on the map (Estoire 443). The aquatic border thus again contains resistance, marking a place of coercive contact. Later, the river traces a new line of resistance when Lancelot takes control of Dolorous Guard (renamed Joyous Guard) on the Humber’s banks (Lancelot 7:312–419); he later takes Guenivere there after rescuing her from the stake (Mort 126).⁴⁹ Since Lancelot holds this land from no one,⁵⁰ it occupies an autonomous base of counterhegemony like Sorelois. Lancelot himself mirrors Galehot’s ambivalence, in his love of Guenivere and Galehot as well as in his refusal to assume any kingship (most pointedly when he casts off the crown that appears on his head during the enchanted dance and leaps out of the chair “por ce que signe de roi senefioit” [because it signified the sign of a king] [Lancelot 4:287]). The conflicts engendered by Lancelot’s equivocations ultimately lead to his exile from Loegria (in terms that recall Cadwallader in the Historia) (Mort 163–64). The navigable Channel, which begins as a moral boundary (dividing the chaste from the sinful), ends here as an ethical one (dividing the loyal from the traitorous).

Architectural monuments often replicate these equivocal topographical relationships. The Tower of Marvels, for example, also commemorates the death of the Heathens who drown in the Humber. Simultaneously, the tower stands for the marvels to come in Arthur’s time (initiated by the stroke of the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric) (Estoire 444). Moreover, the narrator prophesies that Lancelot will destroy the tower in his pursuit of Mordred’s sons after Arthur’s death (445). The tower thus immures a complete history of border events, directly bound to Christian and Arthurian coercion. And as in the Historia, the ashes of Vortigern’s tower signify the frailty of dominion (Merlin 23–36); the narrator in fact excises Hengist’s castle, the one monument of durable dominion (“ie ne vous doi mie retraire daugis ne de ses afaires” [I need not tell you anything about Hengist or his affairs]) (Merlin 22–23). In the Lancelot, Galehot’s castle performs a full cycle of failed dominion: designed for his imperial coronation (1:9), it represents the architecture of domination; when it crumbles in his dreams (1:11), colonial desire tumbles to a fragmented death. The tower and the castle thus both progress toward postcolonial rubble. For aristocratic castle builders, their demise depicts the desirable fall of royal dominion, along with the frightening failure of dominion per se: the prose cycle provides no assurances that do not undo themselves.

Against these fragile structures stand the great stones of Ireland. The Merlin narrator extracts them from history by never naming them, never mentioning giants or their history, and forgetting the Irish entirely. Instead, the stones sign the completion of Merlin’s dominion over Uther, just before he explains his absolute mastery of historical knowledge (derived from the Devil) and future prophecy (derived from God). In fact, bringing the stones to Britain is entirely Merlin’s idea, and he moves them without help from anyone; no one even sees them arrive (52–53). Once in Salisbury, Merlin suggests raising the stones because “eles seroient plus beles droites que gisans” (they would be prettier upright than lying down) (53). The aesthetics of romance judgment thus evacuate history from the monument. The narrator mentions twice that the stones still stand at Salisbury, suggesting Merlin’s enduring dominion. Indeed, at Salisbury, the site of Arthur’s battle with Mordred, Merlin has also left stone inscriptions that proscribe the imperial disaster long before its inception (Mort 228–29). All of Salisbury’s stones thus purvey Merlin’s divine and diabolical dominion over Insular knowledge.

Immediately after setting up the stones, Merlin once again performs his mastery of both Uther and Britain with the project of the Round Table. Unlike Wace’s and Laʒamon’s tables, this architectural innovation encompasses an overtly spiritual authority. Merlin alone conceives the idea of the table, its exegesis, its construction, and the election of its fifty knights (Merlin 53–55). According to him, it completes a trinity that includes the Table of the Last Supper and Joseph’s Grail Table. It thus occupies a spiritual order that coincides with political dominion. The object itself is never described: “merlins sen ala & fist faire la table & ce quil sot quil y couenoit” (Merlin left and had the table made and what he knew was appropriate for it) (55). Thus, just as the stones arrive unseen, the table takes shape without witnesses. Merlin concludes the episode by instructing Uther to hold feasts three times per year (56) and to keep them as honorably as he can “por lonor de ceste table” (for the honor of this table) (58). The table, then, constitutes a whole realm of signification, the seated knights merely decorative place holders who make visible its one empty seat. Indeed, throughout the cycle, narrators and characters repeatedly describe the Round Table as owning knights, suffering losses when they die, and increasing its prestige when they triumph. During the final battle between Arthur and Mordred, for example, Yvain exclaims: “Ha! Table Reonde, tant abessera hui vostre hautesce!” (Ha! Round Table, so far will your nobility fall today) (Mort 235).

The Round Table’s principal design feature is not physical but emotional: Merlin promises that once the knights are seated they will never wish to return to their own lands (Merlin 55). Indeed, at the end of eight days, they declare that they have no wish to leave, and instead will have their wives and children brought to the court (55). They explain further that they feel too close to each other to be separated: “nous entramons tant ou plus comme fiex doit amer son pere” (we love each other as much as or more than a son must love his father) (55). The Round Table thus substitutes filial love for ethnic and regional attachments, all for the greater glory of the king and God. In this sense, the table exerts a centripetal force, reversing what Bloch has called the “geographic dispersion characteristic of the Wasteland.”⁵¹ This reversal is, of course, ideologically advantageous only from the perspective of the imperial center. From any other perspective, the Round Table usurps local authority. Thus, while it stabilizes the Arthurian community by purging violent tendencies and weakening both lineage and vassalage,⁵² it threatens the stability of all other communities. It serves imperial interests by effacing ethnic, genealogical, and geographic differences.

When a recluse explains the Round Table’s origins to Perceval in the Queste, she conjoins its spiritual and imperialist dimensions even more overtly than Merlin:

Car en ce qu’ele est apelee Table Reonde est entendue la reondece del monde et la circonstance des planetes et des elemenz el firmament; et es circonstances dou firmament voit len les estoiles et mainte autre chose; dont len puet dire que en la Table Reonde est li mondes senefiez a droit. Car vos poez veoir que de toutes terres ou chevalerie repere, soit de crestienté ou de paiennie, viennent a la Table Reonde li chevalier. (76)

[For in that it is called Round Table is understood the roundness of the world and the circumference of the planets and the elements of the firmament, and in the circumference of the firmament one sees the stars and many other things, therefore one can rightfully say that in the Round Table is signified the world. For you can see that from all the lands where chivalry resides, either of Christendom or of Pagandom, the knights come to the Round Table.]

The recluse here casts the table as a symbol of the entire cosmos, capable of dismissing even the seemingly immutable difference between Christians and Pagans. Moreover, she goes on to equate membership at the Round Table with superlative territorial conquest:

[I]l s’en tienent a plus boneuré que s’il avoient tout le monde gaangnié, et bien voit len que il en lessent lor peres et lor meres et lor fames et lor enfanz. (77)

[They [the knights] hold themselves more happy than if they had gained the whole world, and one can well see that for it they leave their fathers and their mothers and their wives and their children.]

Unlike the familial in-gathering described in the Merlin, in this more aggressive vision the Round Table incarnates an antifamily policy (the recluse goes on to criticize Perceval for abandoning his mother). Membership strengthens the Arthurian empire through an idealized chivalric fraternity, but leaves all other lines sterile. The Round Table, then, affirms the success of a centripetal ideology that threatens aristocratic autonomy, while the cycle as a whole (somewhat) reassuringly demonstrates its ultimate failure.

Secure dominion in the prose cycle is thus fundamentally spiritual: Britain is settled by conversion, not giant wrestling. As in contemporary Welsh and English histories, then, religious identity rather than political dominion forms the most important geographical boundaries. Alongside the hegemony of the island’s original Christian settlement, the narrative cycle also maintains exemplary spaces of colonial counterhegemony (like Sorelois and Joyous Guard). The heroes of this colonial landscape, Galehot and Lancelot, challenge the Arthurian order—which also attracts them. Meanwhile, the Arthurian realm itself, Logres (the only Insular designation to appear consistently throughout all parts of the cycle) fuses with its capital city, Logres, displacing the origins of both Bretaigne and Engleterre. Aristocratic readers, then, encounter an Insular geography fraught with paradox, providing no grounds for stable political dominion (royal or otherwise). This vision unsettles the idea of dominion per se, sustaining aristocratic fantasies as well as nightmares. In a world where the most durable monuments have no history, anything is possible.

In turning from Troy to Jerusalem, the Arthurian cycle also turns from Trojans to Hebrews. Indeed, the blood of Joseph’s Hebraic clan flows in the veins of every major hero except Arthur himself. This ambitious new family tree overrides ethnic and regional origins as it fulfills desires for transcendent genealogy. Simultaneously, the cycle exposes the weaknesses of genealogical legitimation by portraying the many forces that threaten filiation: incest, adultery, fratricide, infertility, chastity, castration, and so on. These disruptions, which lurk around the Historia’s edges, become here the very vehicles of history. In one way or another, each engages the dynamics of resemblance and difference that structure border identity. By exposing these processes, the cycle deconstructs genealogical legitimation, once again obviating stable grounds of identification.

The Estoire establishes desires for absolute genealogical memory by coyly referring to, but not describing, the hermit-narrator’s family history. When the hermit quotes the first line of the book he receives from God, “Chi est le commenchemens de ton lignaige” (Here is the beginning of your lineage) (6), we do not read over his shoulder as he learns his ancestors’ exploits. When he then expresses his elation at this unexpected history, the one thing he most wanted to know (6), the narrative introduces a knowledge gap that exposes readers’ desires to know. While the divine book fulfills the hermit’s dream of absolute genealogical knowledge, the Estoire itself points out that most people lack this knowledge. Subsequently, however, the Estoire satisfies readers’ frustrated genealogical desire by prophesying the future of the Hebrew lineage. After learning Evelach’s family history along with him (98–100), readers discover the full Hebrew history (from the biblical David to the Arthurian Galahad) when Nascien receives a letter during a vision (402). Oriented toward the future, the “brief” fulfills the deepest genealogical desire (expressed by Solomon in the Queste when he wants to know the end of this same family line). Unlike the hermit, however, this Nascien quotes the “branche” in full; he then performs his own fertile relation to genealogy by holding the “brief” to his chest, like a mother with a child (403–4). Indeed, the brief itself never mentions the mothers: the genealogy proceeds through the same agnatic reasoning that structures Geoffrey’s Historia. Yet Galahad must trace his link to David through his paternal grandmother Helen (just as Henry II must go through Maud to reach the English). The Hebrew line thus maintains its identity by overlooking gender differences to focus solely on the continuity of male resemblance.

The memory of these Hebrew origins also structures the Lancelot and the Queste, as Lancelot and Galahad are repeatedly related to David and allegories of the nine generations between Joseph and Galahad abound. The Lancelot, as Emmanuèle Baumgartner notes, establishes Lancelot’s origin in Perceval’s territory by pointing out that the first Galahad converted Wales.⁵³ The Estoire itself specifies some of the intervening marriages, so that Lancelot’s heritage also includes Irish and Gaulish blood (572). The branches of Lancelot’s lineage thus cover the island as well as the Continent (casting him further into the border). Lancelot’s tenuous relation to Arthurian service intimates that the spreading limbs of Hebrew lineage harbor Arthurian animosity: he holds no lands from Arthur, he betrays the king with his love for Guenivere, and he outmaneuvers Arthur militarily.⁵⁴ Meanwhile, Galahad’s very existence condemns the Arthurian court’s spiritual poverty, and his success in the Grail quest occurs at the expense of the mass of Arthurian knights. The family tree that sprouts from the Hebrews thus nourishes everything that contributes to Arthur’s destruction.

The lateral branches of the Hebrew tree also disrupt the security of Arthurian dominion by promulgating superlative chivalry. The powerful family of Orcanie, for example, descends from Galahad of the Faraway Islands (“Lointaignes Illes”) (Estoire 412–13). Following the pattern set by Perron of Jerusalem, who converts Orcanie and marries the indigenous daughter (546), each successive son marries a woman from a different ethnic group. Gawain and his brothers thus have Hebrew, Irish, Saxon, Welsh, and Briton blood (547). The descendants of this exogamous strategy erase ethnic differences, while silently preserving the shadows of genealogical and religious contamination. The narrator reminds readers, however, that only the origin counts:

Einsi poez veoir que par droite generacion oissi cil Gauveins, que l’en tint a si buen chevalier, del lingnage Joseph de Abarimacie; et si ne le cuidierent mie moutes genz. (548)

[Thus you can see that by direct generation this Gawain, whom people held as such a good knight, issued from the lineage of Joseph of Arimathea—even if many people didn’t believe it.]

By noting the incredible nature of this genealogical claim, the narrator exposes the labor of grafting all the greatest Arthurian knights onto the Hebrew family tree. Even the Welsh descend from Galahad, the first Christian king of Wales (Lancelot 2:33), whose marriage to the indigenous daughter eventually produces Yvain:

celui meesmes Yvein qui puis fist mainte proece au tens lo roi Artur et fu compainz de la Table Reonde et morut es plaignes de Salesbieres, en la grant bataille qui fu entre Mordret et lo roi Artur, la ou Mordret fu ocis et li rois Artus navrez a mort. (Estoire 552)

[this same Yvain who later did much prowess in the time of Arthur and was a companion of the Round Table and died at the plain of Salisbury in the great battle that was between Mordred and King Arthur, there where Mordred was killed and King Arthur wounded to death.]

By summarizing Arthur’s ruin within Yvain’s sacralized genealogy, the redactor underscores once again that all good chivalry returns to Joseph and to Jerusalem.

The Hebrew line thus combines superlative chivalry, exemplary Christianity, and divinely guarded ethnicity. This collocation ensures durable and sanctified genealogical memory, materialized in the Grail. Since the Grail-keepers cultivate chastity, the object itself conveys vital spiritual continuity. This continuity, paradoxically, depends on genealogical discontinuity: no biological relation legitimates the Grail’s transmission from Josephé to Alain, since Josephé devotes himself to chastity (Estoire 559). Since spiritual perfection forecloses genealogical production, the products of spiritual insemination (semence) do not proceed linearly: they pose a basic challenge to genealogical time.⁵⁵ The knights who later seek the Grail must precisely evade a genealogical relation with time by refusing to engage the sexual drama of difference and near-resemblance.

Within the Grail line, castration also disrupts filiation. Several generations after Alain, Pellehan guards the Grail, “qui fu mehaigniez des dous cuisses en une bataille de Rome” (who was maimed in both thighs in a Roman battle) (Estoire 566). The description suggests that the Maimed King has lost his reproductive abilities while pursuing imperial ambitions. The Queste offers an alternate explanation of the Maimed King’s wound, linking it to spiritual transgression: a lance strikes him between the thighs when he tries to draw the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric (209). The Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric and the Grail both symbolize fertile transmission in the place of biological reproduction;⁵⁶ at the same time, both disrupt reproduction through castration and chastity. This paradox engenders ambivalence toward both spiritual and imperial dominion.

Where the Grail line maintains itself by refusing sexual encounters, the Arthurian line disintegrates through failed or illicit sexual reproduction—infertility, adultery, incest, and sodomy. Arthur himself is born in enchanted adultery, raised as an orphan (in a dramatic departure from the Historia, where questions of paternity never arise), fails to produce an heir with Guenivere, and generates Mordred incestuously with his sister. Arthur touches irregular intercourse again when he adopts the sword Marmiadoise, heir to a Greek history that includes Tydeus, a fratricide from Calidonia who befriends Oedipus’s son and brother Etiocles (Merlin 230). The bone of the Calidonian serpent that forms half the hilt of the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric keeps this Greek history moving through the cycle and against Arthur. Incest also shadows the adulterous Lancelot, along with his Grail relatives.⁵⁷ Gender difference itself equivocates in Lancelot’s feminization and the homosocial erotics of his relationship with Galehot; “de ceste chose ne covient pas tesmoing avoir” (of this thing, it is not fitting to have witness).⁵⁸ Arthur and Lancelot thus ominously perform genealogical anxiety: their every action subverts linear filiation.

Throughout the cycle, genealogy remains anxiously unstable, as “fictions of difference” displace scandalous semblances.⁵⁹ By mobilizing failed and tangled lineages in the midst of linear genealogical fantasies, the prose cycle occupies an edge of ambivalence. In the edge, the cycle draws ideological power from Christian Hebrews while undermining temporality. Specifically, in Champagne, where families did not generally develop genealogical histories, this “roman familial”⁶⁰ can be read as a vast meditation on the powers and dangers of genealogical legitimation because it offers a vision of authority that does not ultimately depend on filiation. In place of Wace’s confident assertions of kinship and Welsh visions of inherent liberty, the prose cycle installs a transcendent moral lineage while exploring the violent consequences of everything that threatens ordinary filiation. Paul Rockwell argues in fact that the cycle’s critique of semblance is inimical to the Plantagenet practice of genealogical legitimation, concluding that the ideological benefits accrue to the Capetian monarchy (182–84). Yet such a critique, like the ideology of individualism (another challenge to semblance) and the prose form, disrupts royal authority as easily as any other. Readers of all sorts thus find proof of the dangers of genealogical desire, alongside a moral lineage that bypasses imperial filiation. The combination can inspire admiration without inciting imitation; it withholds durable legitimacy from all earthly efforts.

Like Hebrew genealogy, Hebrew etymology poses a complex challenge to authority. The cycle claims numerous Semitic etymologies, referring to both Hebrew and Chaldean. (Tellingly, the Insular landscape’s traditional etymologies, Britain and London, are entirely absent, and Logres refers interchangeably to both.) The Semitic languages write sacred authority into Arthurian history and surface at moments of conversion or divine intervention: the angels at Josephé’s consecration have white Hebrew letters on their foreheads, Evelach and Mordrain receive Chaldean baptismal names, God writes on Solomon’s ship in Chaldean, and Corbenic is written in Chaldean letters; “en celui langage vaut autretant conme en françois ‘liu a seintisme vessel’” (in that language it means the same in French as “place of the most holy vessel”).⁶¹ The status of Hebrew in the thirteenth century, however, undermines its transcendent authority for contemporary readers: Hebrew learning and the Jews themselves posed direct challenges to hegemony. In Champagne, where Rashi’s rabbinical school had flourished in Troyes since the eleventh century and the count was deeply indebted to Jews “belonging” to the king, the challenges of Hebrew are particularly acute.

Problems of language and authority converge in Escalibor, which receives an extended Hebrew etymology as Arthur engages the Saxons in battle:

& ce fu cele espee quil ot prinse el perron. Et les lettres qui estoient escrites en lespee disoient quele auoit non escalibor & cest .j. non ebrieu qui dist en franchois trenche fer & achier & fust si disent les lettres voir si comme vous orres el conte cha en arriere. (Merlin 94)

[And this was the sword that he had taken from the stone. And the letters that were written on the sword said that it had the name Escalibor. And this is a Hebrew name that means in French “cuts iron and steel and wood,” and the letters tell the truth, as the conte will show you hereafter.]

Just like the Estoire’s Semitic references, Hebrew here signals divine intervention, for the sword appears in the stone as a sign of Christ’s election of the rightful king (91–92). The entire narrative demonstrates the truth of this divine writing, like the text of a proven prophecy. Narrated in the pitch of battle, the Hebrew letters sanction Arthur’s military success as a defense of sacred royal legitimacy. The etymology thus sheaths the sword between biblical history and the Arthurian future, thrusting the blade into the border between legitimacy and transgression. The strategy is probably deliberate, since the etymology has no known source and a Champenois redactor could have encountered suggestive words like chereb (Hebrew for sword, dagger, or knife) and calibs (Latin for steel) in local Hebrew texts with French glosses.⁶² Curt Leviant has in fact suggested that the Merlin redactor had some knowledge of Hebrew because of the proximity of monastic libraries housing Hebrew texts (79). By overlooking the apparently obvious Latin roots of calibs (fully exploited by William of Malmesbury),⁶³ the redactor strategically deploys Arthur’s sword as a sign of ambivalent authority.

In the thirteenth century, the “non ebrieu” places an instrument of culture disruption in the hands of the royal arbiter of culture. While Hebrew connotes divine presence in Christian culture,⁶⁴ Christians also associated Hebrew with evil. Many treated documents written with Hebrew characters with great suspicion, associating the mysterious forms with Jewish black magic and Satan.⁶⁵ Hebrew thus threatens malevolent attacks on the sacred. The sword in fact manifests this demonic potential soon after Arthur gives it to Gawain. With Escalibor in hand, Gawain slaughters his fellows on the steps of Saint Stephen’s; eventually, the knights flee, crying out that a devil has been loosed from hell (Merlin 330). Contaminated by demons, Gawain not only destroys the foundation of social order by killing other Arthurian knights, he blasphemes by murdering them in front of the sacred portals of Camelot’s first church, founded by Josephé himself (Estoire 484). Escalibor’s Hebrew etymology thus demonizes the sword at the same time that it sanctifies it.

Practical knowledge of this powerful language also engenders ambivalence because it both disrupts and extends Christian dominion. Jerome’s translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin brought Christian teachings to the Roman world. His Latin text was then taken as the immutable foundation of divine truth in the Western Church, so that later translators and philologists were considered heterodox. In the eleventh century, Gilbert Crispin registered the threat of Hebrew philology by representing a debate about the relative authority of the Hebrew and Latin Bibles (1026–28). Reacting against Christian Hebraists like Hugh of Saint Victor, Rufinus and other canonists later asserted that the Hebrew Bible was useless for understanding Scriptures.⁶⁶ Ecclesiastical decrees against Christian Hebraism in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries also register the disturbing potential of biblical correction.⁶⁷ Yet by the second quarter of the thirteenth century, the friars (especially the Dominicans) actively cultivated Hebrew language skills and debated Jewish exegesis in order to convert Jews and extend the Church’s authority.⁶⁸ Since Escalibor’s Hebrew etymology implies Christian Hebraism, it conjures these contradictory effects: Hebraism supported the extension of Christian hegemony at the same time that it dispersed central doctrinal authority. The etymology conjoins the sword to these broader movements, suggesting that it can also extend hegemony (by contributing to military victory) while destabilizing authority (by killing indiscriminately).

Like the Hebrew language, the Jewish people are cast into “existential ambivalence” by the Christian Church.⁶⁹ On the one hand, the medieval Church followed Augustine of Hippo in considering the Jews a protected social group because they had witnessed Christ.⁷⁰ At the same time, however, the Jews were considered dangerous outsiders, and their persecution increased after 1200. The Church sought greater social control with several decrees at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, including the requirement that Jews wear distinguishing clothing.⁷¹ Theological ambivalence gave way to clear social displacement in the course of the thirteenth century, especially as expanding urbanism reduced or eliminated traditional Jewish economic roles.⁷² Finally, Christian Hebraism exposed the gap between current Jewish practices and those described in the ancient sources,⁷³ thus depriving the Jews of their authenticity as historical witnesses to Christian truth. For all of these reasons, Augustinian tolerance gave way to persecution.

For a Champenois audience, the Jews’ changing social and economic status directly engaged local relations with the monarchy. In the thirteenth century, Philip II, Louis VIII, and Louis IX consolidated their political authority in part by legislating Jewish activity.⁷⁴ Philip began his centralizing efforts early in his reign and expressed his control of the counties most directly and most bloodily against Champagne in the 1191 massacre of the Jews of Bray-sur-Seine. Nonetheless, Champenois rulers maintained their sovereignty with respect to the Jews well into the thirteenth century.⁷⁵ Indeed, the Jews are the subject of the royal decrees that grant the county the greatest autonomy.⁷⁶ When Philip sought stricter control over Jews in 1222, Thibaut IV rejected his policy and issued a decree allowing Champenois Jews to purchase their liberation.⁷⁷ In 1223, Thibaut again refused to sign onto royal Jewish policy.⁷⁸ The wealthy Jews of nearby Dampierre, where Louis VIII’s stabilimentum was in effect, recognized the fiscal and social advantages of Thibaut’s resistance and sought to relocate to Champagne.⁷⁹ Thibaut himself was deeply in debt to the king’s Jews, and in 1224 Louis ordered him to pay under the terms of the stabilimentum.⁸⁰ Forced to accept the payment schedule, Thibaut lost a measure of his autonomy: in 1230 he joined all the other lords in signing Louis IX’s general order concerning the Jews.⁸¹

The Merlin was written in the midst of these dramatic changes in royal authority, and its Hebrew Escalibor transfers their dynamics to Arthur. On the one hand, the Jews represent the successful preservation of aristocratic autonomy. On the other hand, they show the count indebted and subjugated to the king, his autonomy eroded much like that of the Jews themselves. In the Merlin, the Hebrew sword is placed in Arthur’s hand just as he begins to consolidate his royal power: Escalibor can create that power (as the Jews did for Philip) or resist it (as the Jews did for the counts). Striking through this paradox, Escalibor works for and against Arthur’s royal authority, conjuring linguistic, social, and political ambivalence. The “Judaized” Escalibor also engages the cycle’s own ambivalent Hebrew history. The Hebrew etymology thus associates Escalibor with Old Testament error, exposed in the Estoire and Queste. Yet in these same narratives, Galahad redeems the Old Testament, in opposition to the Arthurian future: accomplishing the Grail quest with the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric at his side, Galahad establishes a celestial order in opposition to the earthly, Arthurian order. The Hebrew etymology draws Escalibor into this matrix of opposition to the Arthurian monarchy. “Judaized,” Escalibor inaugurates a reign of ambivalence; it represents the fragility of the Arthurian order that it defends. The sword guarantees Arthur’s rule while condemning him; it stands unreliably for both legitimacy and transgression, truth and error. These ambivalent equivocations take us straight back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, where the attraction to prestige is haunted by the fear of domination.

From within this border of domination, the prose cycle pursues two fantasies of liberation, both recognizably postcolonial. On the one hand, redactors construct a fiction of total memory that exceeds even Robert of Gloucester’s wildest dreams. On the other, they undermine temporality per se. This paradox structures a historiography that surpasses history for eschatology and romance, yet always returns to historical limits. Time is always already a fixed place (liu et tens, place and time, as narrators say frequently), but on a map without borders.

The prose cycle mobilizes many of the same strategies as Geoffrey, Wace, and Robert to purvey the mastery of time, from annalistic dates to synchronisms. The narrative action itself spans all of human history, from Adam to Henry II (just like Aelred’s Henrician genealogy). Throughout the cycle, numerous prospections and cross-references to emperors, eastern kings, and biblical characters bolster a totalizing historical memory.⁸² The only annal given refers to Galahad’s arrival at the Arthurian court 454 years after Christ’s Passion (Queste 4), realistically within the traditional time of Arthur’s reign, whose end Geoffrey dates as 542 A.D. Like Wace, the Estoire’s hermit dates his own writing—717 years after the Passion (2). In relation to the Historia’s chronology, the hermit lives about a generation after Cadwallader’s exile and in the early years of Saxon dominion. On the other end of the scale, the translation of the Queste and Mort takes place in the twelfth century.⁸³ The writing of millennial history thus takes almost five centuries. It culminates in the present, when the island is “now” called England and its capital London.⁸⁴ This monumental temporal edifice covers all imaginable space, neatly captured in one narrator’s comment that the Island of the Giant is five days long and two days wide (“qui duroit cine jornees de lone et dous de lé”) (Estoire 364). This edifice is founded on Merlin’s divinely diabolical genealogy, which grants him dominion of time per se through absolute knowledge of both past and future.⁸⁵

This elaborate temporal structure masks, however, the dissolution of time. As in the Historia, the mingling of prospection and retrospection destabilizes the linear progress of memory. References to weekdays without years, such as the Monday on which the Estoire’s hermit begins translating (21) or the tenth day before May when Lancelot dies (Mort 261), further the temporal disruption by evoking recurring cycles independent of linear processes. The conte, moreover, is constantly propelled into the future by prophetic objects, inscriptions, and the bodies of the undead. Although it puts itself back on the “droite voie” (straight path), it frequently steps out of its own bounds. These detours into narrative borders contain both truthful explanations and hints of deception.⁸⁶ The Lancelot’s extensive system of rappels and annonces⁸⁷ mines the entire cycle with marginal spaces (islands of true doubt) outside the boundaries of the conte’s “voie.” Likewise, the ubiquitous “or” (now) discontinues narrative lines rather than building linear progressions.⁸⁸ As the narrative contorts temporal difference, linear chronology dissolves.

Strategies like typology, analogy, and allegory also break down temporal differences. They propel the narrative to atemporality by obscuring or even effacing differences between characters, episodes, and historical periods. The cycle’s three identifiable historical periods (biblical, Josephan, and Arthurian), for example, mirror each other analogically and so lose their temporal grounding.⁸⁹ And Galahad, figure of Christ, embodies ahistoricity as he abolishes customs, mends swords, and closes the gaps between the Arthurian and the biblical.⁹⁰ Allegory confounds temporal differences by traveling across the boundaries of discontinuous signifying fields. The substitution allegories that dominate the Estoire and the Queste erase temporal specificity by transmuting events to an anagogical level. Through semblance, the cycle eventually collapses differences of all kinds, installing a “perpetual present” that simultaneously performs the past and future.⁹¹ Burns likewise concludes: “One goal of these tales is to erase time so that the past can be made present, so that King Arthur can live on.”⁹² As in Geoffrey’s Historia, then, the weakness of temporal boundaries casts the narrative into historical equivocation.

The Wheel of Fortune (introduced to Arthurian history by Wace) materializes all of the cycle’s temporal gambits:⁹³ a literal circle, it can rotate forward and backward, move in a nonlinear line, and travel without moving forward. It spins history into timeless romance. Although the wheel can contain complete memory, its periodic repetition disconnects memory from history. The memory, moreover, directly envisions imperial possession in spatial and genealogical terms. When Arthur dreams himself atop Fortune’s wheel, he sees the “circuitude” (circumference) of “tout le monde” (the whole world) (Mort 227). Once Mordred has gouged out these imperial eyes, Arthur recognizes Fortune herself as his mother: “Fortune qui m’a esté mere jusque ci . . . or m’est devenue marrastre” (Fortune who has been mother to me until this point now has become s-mothering) (247). Marrastre implies both a denatured, malevolent mother and a stepmother: in either case, Fortune turns infanticidal, disrupting the genealogical norms that sustain dynastic success. Through Fortune, then, the cycle’s temporality surpasses the dominion of history, proffering a timeless yet twisted present to those suffering from losing battles with the future.

Throughout the cycle, swords bear complex relations to time. They trace the bounds of history and historiography by identifying relationships among the hands that hold them. These relations directly engage the cycle’s geographies, genealogies, and etymologies, rendering the swords fundamental actors in the cycle’s historiographical vision. The Estoire begins by introducing many anonymous swords, as well as the blade that will become the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric. All of these blades patrol the borders of the divine as an absolute boundary of faith and truth; most of them travel through time and across great distances to reach Arthurian Britain. The most vital of these swords, originally wielded by King David, travels from the Old Testament to the Arthurian court as the sign of Galahad’s Hebrew lineage and divine sanction. In the process, the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric performs a monumental lesson in historiography.

The links between Hebrew history and the Arthurian future are forged when Josephé is first consecrated bishop. As Christ anoints him with holy oil, the narrator explains that the same oil was used to anoint all the kings of Britain until Uther and promises that the estoire will tell how unction was lost at that time (Estoire 80). Uther thus breaks the sacral link to Josephé, the founding bishop-king; before Arthur is even born, the cycle excludes him from the continuous line of Insular Hebrew kings. From the beginning, then, the cycle refuses to sanction Arthur’s role in salvation history—a judgment iterated by the Grail and the divinely inspired swords that defect from Loegria to Sarras with the three chosen knights.

Galahad makes the journey to Sarras carrying the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric. The sword (not yet named) arrives in the Estoire even before Josephé arrives in Britain. Nascien (Galahad’s ancestor) meets the ship that carries the sword on his own circuitous journey to Britain. Exploring the mysterious vessel, Nascien discovers a sword bearing inscriptions on the hilt, blade, and scabbard that prophesy the sword’s attachment to a unique future hero. The hilt and blade both declare their ability to discern the rightful hero from all other seekers:

Je sui mervelle a veoir et graindre mervelle a counoistre, car onques nus ne me puet empoignier, tant eüst grande la main; ne ja nus ne m’enpoignera ke uns tous seus, et chil passera de son mestier tous chiaus qui devant lui aront esté et qui aprés lui venront. (263)

[I am marvelous to see and more marvelous to know, for never can anyone handle me, no matter how large the hand. Never will anyone handle me except for one only, and he will surpass in his skill all those who will have been before him and who after him will come.]

The scabbard, after reiterating the intended knight’s superiority, speaks of the woman who will replace the sword’s ragged baldric:

Et chele feme apielera cheste espee par son droit non et moi par le mien, ne ja devant dont ne sera qui par nos drois nons nous sache apieler. (265)

[And this woman will call this sword by its rightful name and me by mine; never before will there be anyone who by our rightful name knows how to call us.]

The events between here and the Queste, when this naming takes place, are cast as a quest for the identities of the knight, the scabbard, and the sword. For the time being, however, readers can only marvel along with Nascien at the objects’ loquacity.

Nascien continues his explorations, and learns from the other side of the blade that the sword will betray the one who praises it most (265). The conte interrupts his exploration to warn readers that this is neither the place nor the time to divulge the histories of these objects (266), but the conte is soon forced to leave its “droite voie” in order to dispel all doubts about the colored spindles Nascien discovers (267). This history in the margins (on the edge) returns to the beginning of time with Adam and Eve (268–74) and Cain and Abel (274–77); it continues “d’oir en oir” (from heir to heir) until the Flood (277–80). Finally, the story arrives at the time of Solomon, son of David, who faces a historiographical predicament of monumental proportions: he discovers that both Christ and a knight surpassing all others will descend from his lineage, and he wishes to communicate his foreknowledge to the knight, who will not be born for over two thousand years (282–83). Solomon, for all of his “science,’ cannot find a solution to the temporal problem until he confides in his wife.

With her “grant engin” (intelligence, deception, and engineering skills), Solomon’s wife guides the construction of the historiographical signs that will convey Solomon’s foreknowledge into the future. First, she has Solomon construct a ship designed to withstand rot for four thousand years; then she recommends that he place his father David’s sword in the ship, since it surpasses all other swords just as the knight will surpass all other knights (284). She does not merely offer the sword as an antique artifact, she directs Solomon to dismantle it: he must remove the pommel and the hilt, and leave the blade “tote nue tornee a une part” (all bare, returned to a solitary state) (285). By stripping the sword to its bare essence—the blade—Solomon removes the genealogical and ethnic signs of his Hebrew father. The blade “tornee a une part” becomes an empty signifier. In salvation terms, it returns to an original state prior to time; the refurbishment extracts it from the processes of history initiated by the Fall. The blade can now enter into a monumental relation with the redemptive future.

Solomon’s wife gives detailed instructions on how to prepare the blade for this future:

[V]os, qui conoissiez la vertu des pierres et la force des herbes et la matire de totes les choses terrienes, faites un pont de pierres precieuses jointes soutilment si qu’il n’ait aprés vos regart terrien qui puisse deviser l’une pierre de l’autre, ainz cuit chascuns qui la verra que ce soit une meesmes pierre; aprés, si i faites une enheudeüre si merveilleuse que nule ne soit si vertuouse ne si riche; aprés i faites un foerre si merveilleus en son endroit come l’espee sera el suen. Et qant vos avroiz tot ce fait, g’i metrai les renges teles come il me plaira. (285)

[You, who know the strength of stones and the force of herbs and the matter of all things earthly, make a pommel of precious stones joined subtly so that after you there will be no earthly gaze that can distinguish one from the other, rather each person who will see it will believe that it is one stone; then, make a hilt so marvelous that there be none in the world so strong or so rich; then make a scabbard just as marvelous in its own way as the sword is in its. And when you have done this, I will put on a baldric such as will please me.]

These instructions demonstrate the limits of Solomon’s wife’s access to the truth, limits signified by the artifact they aim to create. First, her knowledge (along with Solomon’s) is grounded in the “terrien”: within these limits it is superlative, but it will never comprehend the “celestien.” Second, her knowledge is restricted to the world of romance, where the height of achievement is “merveilleus” rather than “spirituel.” Finally, her assertion of individual will (“come il me plaira”) presents the new baldric as a product of romance desire rather than of “devocion” to a divine will. The reconstructed artifact materializes this gap between the Old Testament world and Galahad’s spiritual destiny, where the terrien, the merveilleus, and the moi will all give way to the spirituel.

Solomon accepts his wife’s instructions, except where they require illusion:

[S]i en fist tot ensi come ele li ot devisé, fors que del pont ou il n’ot c’une seule pierre, mais cele estoit de totes les colors que l’en porroit trover ne deviser. (285)

[He did everything as she had described to him, except with the pommel where there was only a single stone, but it was of all the colors that one could find or describe.]

Defying his wife for the first and only time, Solomon here refuses the deception that she practices by “grant engin,” thereby reclaiming a portion of his authority. Substituting the single stone for the fabricated one, Solomon presents a pommel whose surface transparently reflects its ontological reality. Solomon’s refusal of craft, or engineering, rejects evil and tacitly accepts divine authority: the “engineor,” after all, practices deceit as a devilish activity explicitly opposed to divine will.⁹⁴ The pommel must ultimately satisfy this “regart celestien.” Its true wholeness signifies Galahad’s spiritual completion, as the narrator of the Queste insinuates when he later says that each color has its own “vertu” (202). Galahad’s various qualities, like the stone’s colors, form his singular devotion to God and are inseparable from each other. By contrast, Solomon’s wife’s fabricated stone cobbles together un-Christian deception. Its fragmentary art represents fatal disbelief, tellingly realized in the Sarrasin tomb that eventually covers Galehot and Lancelot (Mort 261–63) and that is “[faite] de pieres precioses jointes si soltielment l’une a l’autre qu’il ne sambloit pas que horn terriens peust avoir fete tel oevre” ([made] of precious stones joined so subtly the one to the other that it didn’t seem that an earthly man could have made such a work) (Lancelot 2:254). Dead or alive, Lancelot and Galehot lack Galahad’s ontological integration: they are men of the border, men covered with seams.

To complete the sword, Solomon inscribes the blade with the prophecy promised by the divine voice: no one except the destined hero will draw the sword without repenting (285–86). The inscription textualizes the blade’s latent historiographical function and limits its proper reception to one person. Finally, Solomon’s wife brings a baldric “si laides et si povres come de chamvre et si foibles par semblant que eles ne peüssent mie l’espee sostenir” (so ugly and so poor like hemp and seemingly so weak that it couldn’t possibly sustain the sword) (286). She explains to a surprised Solomon that a future damsel will replace what she has done wrong (“meffait”), just as the Virgin will redeem Eve (286). The historiographical sword thus remains a faire, its conclusion still unwritten. Solomon completes the preparations for this future by writing the history of these “faits” in a “brief” addressed directly to his heir, “chevaliers beneüreus qui sera fin de mon lingnage” (happy knight who will be the end of my lineage) (288). This “brief” and the ship’s artifacts ferry a complete history into the future, encompassing Adam, Christ, David, and Galahad. The narrator immediately conjoins this history to the Arthurian future by reminding readers that this “happy knight” will end the Grail’s adventures in Loegria (288).

As readers absorb this lengthy explanation, Nascien wonders whether these marvels contain any falsehood: his doubt provokes the ship to dump him unceremoniously in the water (291). The narrative thereby purports to prove its own truth. Nascien, however, needs more than an unexpected swim to engender his faith in divine will. When a giant later threatens him, he reaches for the forbidden sword, which promptly breaks (as promised) (333). He then prays to God for help, and finds a sword that had been left on the ground “par aventure” (by chance) (333). In his next moment of dire need, he repeats the same prayer—and his enemy immediately falls down dead (397). Nascien learns to trust solely in God, as does Lancelot when he tries to draw his sword against the lions who guard Corbenic (Queste 253–54). The cycle’s historical pedagogy thus teaches that mortal combat must yield to immortal faith.

In the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric’s final adventure in the Estoire, Lambor receives the Dolorous Stroke that pierces through time to Galahad. While Lambor rules Land Out of Bounds from Corbenic, his Sarrasin neighbor Varlan wounds him with the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric: to punish this mishandling, God creates the “terre gaste” (Wasted Land) and the adventures that only the Grail hero can end (566). The narrator reminds readers of this Dolorous Stroke when Galahad is conceived in the Lancelot (4:210), linking the reversal of gaste directly to reproduction. Varlan’s stroke, however, casts a shadow of doubt over divine agency: how can Varlan, an infidel, even enter the ship without being struck dead, let alone lift the sword that self-destructed immediately in Nascien’s hand? If Varlan can handle the sword just like the chosen hero and holy oil can be inexplicably lost, the foundations of prophetic faith crack. Within these seams, absolute principles equivocate and differences turn to resemblance. At the Estoire’s end, the partially complete Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric contains similar seams, which are the very principles of historiography.

The Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric expresses divine prophecy and, ultimately, spiritual perfection. The ambivalence signed by Varlan’s hand on the sacred hilt, however, soon permeates Arthurian action. Not only does Escalibor purvey ambivalence through its Hebrew etymology, Arthur trades this sign of divine election for a foreign sword named Marmiadoise.⁹⁵ In these episodes, the Merlin redactors insinuate an anti-Arthurian and antiroyal perspective through ancient genealogies, imperial history, and gladial ceremony.

Escalibor begins, like the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric, with a unique and divinely ordained destiny. In answer to the barons’ prayers for a king after Uther dies, a sword lodged in an anvil appears in a stone, inscribed with God’s intention: “cil qui osteroit ceste espee seroit rois de la terre par lelection ihesu crist” (the one who would withdraw this sword would be king of the land by the election of Jesus Christ) (81). This divinely authorized sword guarantees the legitimacy of royal genealogy in the place of the absent paternal phallus. The bishop immediately expounds the doctrine of the Two Swords, identifying the sword in the anvil as a sign of earthly justice (82). This explanation subordinates the gladial sign to divine will, so that (according to the archbishop) the king wields justice on God’s behalf and with the archbishop’s approval. The archbishop clarifies this doctrine when he sends Arthur to draw the sword after his dubbing, and again when Arthur lays the sword on the altar during the coronation (88). Arthur thus occupies the throne under divine approbation, promising to obey God and the Church.

Episcopal control and divine sanction do not, however, protect Arthur from serious challenges to his authority. The barons delay his crowning three times before finally accepting the archbishop’s interpretation of the sword. Immediately after the coronation, neighboring kings refuse to recognize Arthur’s rule because they doubt his royal birth. Genealogical uncertainty plagues Arthur here in ways that never trouble the Historia. As Arthur fights the native rebels (not foreign Saxons, as in other histories), the narrator conjures Escalibor’s Hebrew etymology, a further challenge to stable authority. Finally, pagan antiquity invades the Merlin as the battles drag on and Arthur confronts Rion: the narrator sketches a Greek genealogy for Rion and his sword Marmiadoise that confronts Arthur’s own Trojan origins. Rion both attracts and repels Arthur, implying once again that the ghosts of subjugation frequently haunt fantasies of domination. Like Escalibor’s Hebrew etymology, Marmiadoise’s Greek genealogy challenges the authority of the Arthurian hand that grasps the hilt. The repercussions of this challenge extend to the legitimacy of genealogical authorizations of power in general.

Arthur has already won several battles with Escalibor when he meets Rion, the twenty-four-foot-tall king of Ireland. After an extended skirmish, Arthur pursues the wounded giant into the woods. As Rion reaches for his sword, the narrator interrupts the confrontation with the genealogy:

Lors met main a lespee qui estoit vne des boines del monde. Car cestoit ce dist li contes des estoires lespee hercules qui mena iason en lile de colco por querre le toison qui estoit toute dor. & de cele espee ochist hercules maint iaiant en la terre ou iason amena medea qui tant lama, mais puis li fali il la ou hercules li aida par sa grant deboinairete car pitie len prinst. (230)

[Then [Rion] put his hand on the sword, which was one of the best in the world. For it was, so says the conte of the estoires, the sword of Hercules who brought Jason to the island of Colcos in quest of the fleece that was all gold. And with this sword Hercules killed many giants in the land where Jason brought Medea, who loved him so much. But then he failed her, there where Hercules helped her in his great goodness because pity seized him.]

This summary of how Jason captured the Golden Fleece (with Medea’s help) alludes to the beginning of Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Roman de Troie (although this “conte des estoires” says nothing about a Marmiadoise). The “land of giants” where Jason brought Medea also recalls the Estoire: Hippocrates visits Island of the Giant, so named for the world’s largest giant, killed there by Hercules (364). If we imagine, then, that Hercules carried Marmiadoise throughout his career, Rion’s sword commemorates a superlative Greek knighthood that threatens giants and Trojans and succors women. This Greek knighthood also overpowers royal authority. Before Jason and Hercules arrive at Colcos in the Roman de Troie, they land at the port of Troy and pillage the surrounding countryside.⁹⁶ When King Laomedon accuses them of occupying the land without permission, Jason partly apologizes but Hercules promises to avenge the dishonor of their expulsion (ll. 1074–1106). Like Rion and the Merlin’s other rebel kings, Hercules refuses to recognize the legitimacy of royal jurisdiction. Unlike the rebellious kings, however, Hercules successfully enforces his autonomy when he later destroys Troy (ll. 2079–756). Hercules’s sword thus illustrates the relativity of legal legitimacy by forcefully denying a claim of royal jurisdiction. This relativity troubles Rion’s own relation to his Herculean ancestry because he—a giant—carries the sword of a renowned giant-killer.

The Merlin’s allusion to events from the beginning of the Roman de Troie conjure the rest of the story as well—the second siege of Troy and the Trojans’ flight. The confrontation between Rion and Arthur reproduces this historical rivalry, so that Rion attacks Arthur with a sword whose history has already defeated Arthur’s. Several Merlin manuscripts in fact remind readers pointedly of Arthur’s Trojan ancestry amid his struggles with the rebels. Two redactors insert a brief explanation of Britain’s origins as Merlin sails to Brittany to gather more knights:

Il est uoirs que apres la destrusion de troies. auint que doi baron sen partirent et fuirent hors dou pays et de la terre pour la doutacee des greigois que il ne les occeissent. Li vns des .ij. barons qui sen afui a tout grant partie de sa gent si ot non brutus.... li autres princes qui de troies issi si ot non cormeus. (Merlin 110 n. 3)

[It is true that after the destruction of Troy it happened that two barons left there and fled out of the country and out of the land for fear that the Greeks would kill them. One of the two barons who fled with a great part of his people had the name Brutus.... the other prince who issued from Troy had the name Corineus.]

This summary of the beginning of the Roman de Brut hints at Trojan cowardice while reminding audiences of the historical foundations of Arthur’s rule. A third redactor interpolates a complete prose adaptation of the Roman de Troie between Arthur’s coronation and the beginning of the rebellion.⁹⁷ Merlin narrates this Trojan plot to Blaise as a continuation of the coronation; Blaise willingly transcribes it “car aussi avoie ge grant desirrier de savoir en la verité” (because I also had great desire to know the truth about it).⁹⁸ The truth, however, exposes Arthur’s defeated history at the very moment when defiant kings challenge his inheritance. Both of these interpolations thus expand the Trojans’ narrative presence in ways that weaken rather than strengthen the efficacy of genealogical legitimation.

Having raised the ghosts of Trojan defeat, the Merlin follows the genealogy of Rion’s sword back in time to the siege of Thebes:

& li contes dist que vulcans forga lespee qui regna au tans adrastus qui fu rois de grece qui maint ior lot en son tresor. cele espee ot tideus li fiex le roy de calcidoine le iour quil fist le message al roy ethiocles de tebes. qui por pollicenes son serorge ot puis mainte paine. (230)

[And the conte says that Vulcan forged the sword, who reigned at the time of Adrastus who was king of Greece, who for many days had it in his treasure. Tydeus the son of the king of Calidonia had this sword the day that he brought the message to King Etiocles of Thebes, [Tydeus] who for Polynikes his brother-in-law had great pain.]

This passage refers to the early events of the Roman de Thèbes (another conte that does not mention a Marmiadoise). When Polynikes and Etiocles inherit Thebes from their father and brother Oedipus, they agree to each rule the city in alternating years. While waiting for his turn, Polynikes meets Tydeus on a rainy evening in Argos. They fight almost to the death over Adrastus’s dry porch; having thus proved their worth, they marry his daughters (ll. 944–1205). Etiocles soon refuses to give up Thebes, and Tydeus travels there to inform him that Polynikes intends to claim his rightful inheritance (ll. 1288–463). As Tydeus returns to Argos, fifty of Etiocles’s barons attack him (ll. 1558–671). Through Tydeus, then, Polynikes challenges royal authority, just like Hercules and Rion. Unlike Hercules, however, Polynikes fails to enforce his interpretation of legitimate law. Etiocles also fails to maintain his authority, and is killed during the siege. The fratricidal conflicts that permeate the Roman de Thèbes expose once again the relative dangers of Greek history. Not only do Polynikes and Etiocles wage war to their respective deaths, but Tydeus only arrives in Argos because the Calidonians have exiled him for fratricide (ll. 750–55). His sword, a gift from his father (ll. 167275), signifies the principle of filiation he has violated with this murder. Indeed, the entire history of Thebes, which Marmiadoise inherits, turns on families who cannot keep their differences in order: patricide and fratricide extinguish filial lines, while incest ties genealogical linearity in circular knots.

The very origin of Tydeus’s sword activates relative power. As Tydeus defends himself against Etiocles’s barons, the narrator describes (but does not name) the sword itself:

Galanz li fevres la forgea

et dans Vulcans le trejeta;

treis deuesses ot al temprer

et treis fees al tregetter.

Ja por nul cop ne pliera,

ne ja roille ne coildra;

ne ja nuls homme n’en iert naufrez

qui de la plaie seit sanez.

(Ll. 1676–83)

[Galant the smith forged it and Sir Vulcan carved it; there were three goddesses to temper it and three fairies to carve it. Never on account of any blow will it bend, nor will it ever be burned by rust, nor will there ever be a man hurt by it who will heal from the wound.]

The sword’s mythological team of fabricators design the blade for absolute efficacy, but Vulcan binds it to genealogical relativity because he also fabricates Aeneas’s armor in the Roman d’Enéas. Vulcan agrees to forge the armor in exchange for a night of reconciliation with his estranged wife Venus (ll. 4297–522); the sword (described at length) (ll. 4469–506) and the other pieces of armor are, like Aeneas himself, the fruits of Venus’s sexual labors. Vulcan’s steel progeny are all implicated in heterosexual intercourse; the swords in particular signify the productivity of the paternal phallus. Escalibor’s Latin root calibs could thus identify it as Marmiadoise’s cousin, since Chalybs is the name of Vulcan’s island in Virgil’s Aeneid. Having given Escalibor a Hebrew etymology, however, redactors have severed the sword from Vulcan’s potential paternity. Willfully forgetting the sword’s Latin history, the redactors establish Escalibor as a sign of legitimacy independent from genealogy. Escalibor does signify absent fathers (Uther, God), but does not itself enter into a line of filiation. Marmiadoise, in the other hand, captures a threefold association with ancient genealogy through the romans of Thèbes, Troie, and Enèas. Within this trilogy, Vulcan engenders the tools that create and destroy filial relations (Theban, Greek, Trojan, and Roman alike).

The multiple magic powers of Tydeus’s sword ensure a perfect durability that contrasts sharply with Tydeus himself, killed by the Thebans during the siege (force is indeed relative) (ll. 7269–316). The consequences of Tydeus’s death lead the narrator straight to Troy: as Adrastus induces the Calidonians to continue fighting by promising to let them take Tydeus’s son back to rule Calidonia after the war, the narrator intervenes to explain that this infant Diomedes will distinguish himself in the Trojan War and that he would have defeated Aeneas himself if Aeneas had not received help (ll. 7821–32). After the bodies have been sorted on the Theban fields, Adrastus apparently keeps the sword in lieu of the departed father and son, an emblem of Greek power later passed on to the Greek victors of the Trojan war. Tydeus’s survivors (Marmiadoise and Diomedes) could not oppose the Trojan line (Aeneas and Arthur) more directly.

These allusions to Benoît’s Roman de Troie and the Roman de Thèbes recall the beginning of each narrative; they also propel our memory forward to the romans’ respective conclusions. The last three thousand lines of the Roman de Troie, for example, recount the deaths of the major Greek leaders and several family murders. In these encounters, genealogical ties turn to menace rather than legitimizing strength. The siege of Thebes ends even more disastrously in the last five hundred lines: with all but three of the Greeks killed, the duke of Athens and twenty thousand Greek widows (led by Adrastus’s daughters) dismantle the walls of Thebes. The Greek women return to Argos (now subjugated to Athens) with their family lines extinguished; Etiocles and Polynikes enact genealogical annihilation in perpetuity, as their cinders attack each other in their common tomb (ll. 12020–29). The troubled fates of the Greek victors in both of these romans tinge Marmiadoise with the destructive forces of relatives.

The Merlin narrator concludes Marmiadoise’s genealogy by extending the chronology continuously from Hercules to Rion: “& puis ala lespee tant de main en main & doir en oir que ore est au roy rion qui fu dou lignage hercules qui tant fu preus & hardis” (And then the sword went so much from hand to hand and from heir to heir that now it belongs to King Rion, who was of the lineage of Hercules who was so brave and strong) (230). When we remember the often violent relations between these Greek hands (joined in combat as often as solidarity), this claim to continuity clearly overlooks many broken lines. Indeed, the synecdochic expression of continuity (through hands and heirs) mobilizes a rhetorical form of discontinuity that silently obscures the actual filiation of fathers, mothers, and children. The durable sword itself engenders only certain death.

These paradoxes and ironies derive from the fundamental instability of genealogical differences, which collapse into ambivalence when a rival bears a more prestigious (and thus more desirable) history. The Merlin’s readers encounter the force of this ambivalence when the narrator finally names Rion’s sword and establishes Arthur’s covetous desire:

Quant li rois rions vit que sa mache fu colpee si traist lespee qui tant fu de grant bonte. & si tost quil lot ietee hors du fuere si rendi si grant clarte quil sambla que tous li pais en fust enluminees. & si auoit non marmiadoise . Et quant li rois artus voit lespee que si reflamboie se le prise moult & se trait .j. poi ensus por regarder le si le couuoite moult durement & dist que bur seroit nes qui le poroit conquerre. (231)

[When King Rion saw that his club had been cut he drew the sword that was of very great goodness. And as soon as he had thrown it out of the scabbard it made such a great brightness that it seemed as if the whole country was illuminated by it. And it had the name Marmiadoise. And when King Arthur saw the sword that flamed so, he prized it much and pulled back a little further to watch; he coveted it very much and said that blessed would be the birth of the one who could conquer it.]

As Escalibor meets Marmiadoise, the emblem of absolute legitimacy crosses the force of relativity. The contact reveals the relative weakness of Arthur’s power: although the narrator has said that Escalibor “ieta si grant clarte comme se ce fust vns brandons de feu” (threw out a great brightness, as if it were a torch of fire) (230), one torch seems a minor achievement compared with Marmiadoise’s pyrotechnics. When Arthur realizes that Escalibor literally cannot hold a candle to Marmiadoise, he covets the origin of his adversary’s power. Arthur’s desire expresses the ambivalent attraction that a conquering culture holds for the heirs of the conquered. Oblivious to the dangerous implications of comparisons, which contaminate differences with the shadows of resemblances, Arthur judges himself happy if he can touch the ancient hilt. His success will pull him into the genealogy defined by the history of the hands that have held the sword. In such intimate contact, difference fades into resemblance: in order to avenge his Trojan ancestors, Arthur must join their Greek conquerors.

The conclusion of Arthur and Rion’s fight inaugurates a new valuation of the imperial filiation that originates in Greece. After Arthur and Rion identify themselves and defy each other openly (posing the clash of swords overtly as a clash of histories), Arthur finally blesses his birth by conquering Marmiadoise. He forces Rion to relinquish the sword, which has stuck in Arthur’s shield, by striking his arm. Their duel, however, descends into a wrestling match as Rion grabs Arthur by the shoulders and Arthur grabs the neck of his own horse with both arms. They remain locked in this double embrace until Ban uses his own sword, Angry (“Courechouse”), to force Rion to release Arthur (235). After rescuing Arthur from Rion (just as the Trojans rescued Aeneas from Diomedes), Ban inquires after Escalibor’s fate:

& il li dist quil le ieta a terre si tost comme li iaians le courut enbrachier. & si vous di que iou ai hui fait le plus riche gaaig & que ie miex aim que iou ne feisse toute le millor cite qui soit en tout le monde. (235)

[And he [Arthur] said to him that had thrown it to the ground as soon as the giant ran to embrace him, “And I tell you that I have made today the richest gain and the one I love better than the best city that there is in the whole world.”]

Giving only brief and dismissive attention to the instrument that initially legitimated his authority, Arthur forces a comparison—a relation of almost-sameness—between the Greek sword and cities. As a constructed sovereign space (like Thebes, Troy, Rome, or Camelot), a city is the architectural sign of centralized authority and domination over lands near and far. A sword, however, incarnates the mobile force that can destroy this space without destroying itself (Marmiadoise, for example, has notably outlasted both Thebes and Troy). Arthur’s fetishization of the Greek object takes the place of cities and the empires for which they stand. Arthur thus implies that he loves Marmiadoise more than Rome, and trades imperial desire for individual heroic history. This desire obliterates Escalibor’s Christian origins: Arthur soon judges it worthless compared with Marmiadoise, which follows his desires (“talent”) perfectly (240).

The rebellion’s resolution dismisses Rome more overtly. As the battle continues after dusk, Arthur kills many rebels with Marmiadoise, and hopes that the battle will continue all night so that he can adequately test “la boine espee quil auoit conquise” (the good sword that he had conquered) (239). After many more battles, Arthur reaches a truce with the rebels — except Rion, who challenges Arthur to a duel where he finally meets his death (409–19). Immediately after Arthur receives homage for the lands he gains along with Marmiadoise, Merlin goes to Jerusalem and prophesies the Sarrasin king’s Christian conversion (420–21). The narrator then takes up Arthur’s war with Rome (as recounted in Wace’s Roman de Brut), including the reminder of the previous conquests of Rome by Belinus and Constantine (424–27). After killing the rapist giant of Mont Saint-Michel (with the sword he conquered from Rion) (428–31), Arthur defeats the Romans. At this point, the redactors abandon Arthur’s imperial progress: instead of claiming Rome or returning to Britain, Arthur fights a giant cat from Lausanne (441) (legends of Arthur’s feline troubles thus extend well beyond André’s satiric poem). After more strange adventures, including Jerusalem’s Christian conversion and Gawain’s transformation into a dwarf, the Romans retake Gaul (465). The Roman episodes thus lead to marvels and Jerusalem rather than to imperial dominion. The genealogical telos dissipates into sterile merveilles, while the eschatalogical time of Christian conversion subsumes history.

Meanwhile, Arthur’s acquisition of Marmiadoise has led directly to Escalibor’s alienation. During a temporary peace, Arthur dubs a number of new knights. On Merlin’s advice, Arthur gives Gawain “sa boine espee quil osta del perron” (his good sword he had lifted from the stone) (253). Describing Arthur’s extraction but not God’s insertion, the passage displaces divine legitimation with Merlin’s counsel. Escalibor now resembles the twelve nameless swords that Arthur distributes to Gawain’s companions the same day—swords also acquired according to Merlin’s instructions (251).⁹⁹ Arthur grants his kingdom to Gawain along with the sword, justifying his action with only “car ie le uoel” (because I want it) (253). Arthur’s “ie uoel” expresses the same romance desire as Solomon’s wife’s “come il me plaira;” Bohort concludes the Mort with the same expression (“comme il voudroient”) (263). In each instance, autonomous desire dismisses genealogical constraint, ecclesiastical dominion, and the logic of history. The dangers of rogue autonomy surface in Gawain’s growing demesure as he turns a friendly tournament into a deadly massacre on the steps of Saint Stephen’s (Merlin 330–35).

Escalibor and Marmiadoise each challenge royal authority in different ways. The peripatetic Merlin traces their troubled histories, intertwining them with the foundation, defense, and expansion of the Arthurian realm. The narrative keeps these histories in motion, fictionalizing linear romance desire in order to escape the demands of linear history. For aristocratic readers, the cycle offers a fantasy of royal weakness by exposing the forces of relativity that inhere in genealogical legitimation. The Merlin’s Greek histories resonate with particular strength in Champagne, where many knights and lords (including the historian-knights Geoffroi de Villehardouin and Robert de Clari) had participated in the sack of Constantinople in 1204. At that time, they abandoned a crusading tradition of Greek identification and avenged the Trojans’ ancient defeat by installing Baldwin IX of Flanders as emperor of the Greek empire.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, Robert de Clari identifies the site of Troy near Constantinople with precision, and makes vengeance a major motive for the crusade (159, 216). Like Arthur’s conquest of Marmiadoise (valued more than any city, and thus more than the Greek imperial capital), the Trojan-Flemish rule of Constantinople overturns an ancient order of domination. The dynamics of Arthur’s Greek fetish demonstrate, however, that the new order causes as much ideological trouble as it resolves.

Together, the Estoire and the Merlin establish a hierarchy of swords that enforces a hierarchy of values. The Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric (sign of divine transcendence) subordinates Escalibor (sign of political justice). Arthur, however, willfully subverts this semiology by exchanging Escalibor for Marmaidoise’s imperial genealogy. This transfer turns the hierarchy into an opposition, as the artifacts aligned with God (the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric, the Grail) threaten those aligned with the monarchy (Escalibor, Marmiadoise). The Lancelot plays on this tension while introducing a complex of multiple allegiances that defies all linear solutions. Lancelot himself occupies the guilty center of these conflicts.

Lancelot (a disinherited orphan) receives his first sword from the Lady of the Lake (7:258), who presents the blade as an instrument of Christian justice. The Lady articulates a complete theocratic hierarchy, citing the testimony of Scripture as she explains that knights were created to protect the weak from the strong and to guard the Holy Church (7:249–50). Drawing from Saint Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (Eph. 6:14–17), the Lady allegorizes the instruments of knighthood. Each stage of her hermeneutic exercise connects chivalry to ecclesiastical obligations and casts the knight as a servant of divine justice. She elaborates the sword’s significance in the greatest detail, since it is the most honored of the arms (“de toutes armes la plus honeree”) because it can wound in three ways—striking with each edge and thrusting with the point (7:252). Each mode signifies a specific authority: one edge avenges transgressions against Christianity; the other punishes earthly crimes; the point signifies strict obedience (“moult a droit obedience”) to both domains of authority “[c]ar ele pointe” (because it pierces) (7:252). This rigorous allegory of the sword defines the place of all blades in a divinely ordered economy of force.

Armed with this knowledge, Lancelot sets out for the Arthurian court, intent on receiving knighthood from Arthur. The Lady, however, endeavors to protect him from Arthurian allegiance by stipulating that her sword be used in the ceremony. Crossing the Channel from France to Loegria, Lancelot enters the court already bound to the other side of the border: he cannot help but enter into conflict as he carries unsettling multiplicity into the Arthurian center. He does actually evade direct service to Arthur in the knighting ceremony: in the excitement over Lancelot’s audacious offer to remove the weapons from the body of a wounded knight, Arthur forgets to gird Lancelot’s sword (7:278). Although Yvain later remembers and informs Lancelot that he is not yet a knight since the king did not gird the sword, Lancelot leaves the court anyway. He does not desire (“n’a talent”) to receive knighthood from the king, “mais d’un autre dont il quide plus amender” (but from another who he thinks he’ll help more) (7:286). Until Lancelot receives this sword, he never uses one in combat. Eventually, he sends two damsels he has won from an errant knight to the court with a message for the queen:

[E]t li dites que je li mant que por moi gaaignier a tous jors, que ele me fache chevalier et qu’ele m’envoieche une espee com a chelui qui ses chevaliers sera, car mes sires li rois ne me chainst point d’espee, quant il me fist chevalier. (7:298)

[And tell her that I ask her that in order to gain me forever that she make me a knight, and that she send me a sword as for the one who will be her knight, because the king did not gird any sword on me when he made me a knight.]

Just as Arthur conquered Marmiadoise (a “riche gaaig”), Guenivere can possess Lancelot: he offers himself as a conquest (“gaaignier”) that the queen can cultivate for her own enrichment. Once he girds on her magnificent sword, he is truly a knight and belongs to Guenivere (7:298, 8:106). By maneuvering to hold the queen’s sword, Lancelot keeps himself outside the bounds of the Arthurian and the ecclesiastical¹⁰¹—in the feminized border between Guenivere and the Lady of the Lake.

Lancelot does, however, circulate within the court as well as against it. Eventually, he encompasses Arthur within his divided identity. In battles against the Saxons, for example, Lancelot and Lionel identify their Arthurian allegiance by shouting “Clarence,” the city of one of Arthur’s ancestors (8:468). Moreover, Lancelot fights with a sword belonging to Arthur:

[E]t quant ses glaives li brisa, si sot bien mettre le main a l’espee trenchant qui avoit non Seure, c’estoit une espee que li rois ne portoit s’en bataille mortel non. (8:468)

[And when his lance broke he knew well to put his hand on the slicing sword that had the name Sure. This was a sword that the king did not carry except in mortal combat.]

Since Lancelot is not a king, the description clearly attributes Sure to Arthur. Like Gawain with Escalibor, then, Lancelot defends the king’s interests with the king’s sword. Through his three swords, he identifies at least partially with Arthur, Guenivere, and the Lady of the Lake. He himself perceives that he only exists as the sum of these parts: “je sui plus a autrui qu’a moi” (I belong more to others than to myself) (2:248). Lancelot recognizes here the split subjectivity of the border. In his homoerotic relationship with Galehot, he becomes the quintessential border-crosser, partially identified with an ever multiplying range of subject positions.

The instability of Lancelot’s border subjectivity contaminates the Arthurian center dramatically during the crisis over the False Guenivere (an exemplary situation of troubling resemblance). As Lancelot defends Guenivere against the charges of the False Guenivere (whose case Arthur embraces), some manuscripts report that he carries Escalibor for love of Gawain (1:134–35). Gawain, who carries Escalibor as his own and is elected king when the barons think Arthur is dead,¹⁰² purveys royal and chivalric authority. Lancelot’s hand on his hilt draws the Arthurian center (already split by the two Gueniveres) into the fragmented edges of identification. Even if, as other manuscripts report, Lancelot carries Galehot’s sword for love of him (1:134–35), Lancelot’s multiple partiality thrusts his defense into irony: he challenges Arthur with either the king’s own sword or that of a rival king who nearly defeated Arthur. During the battle, Lancelot addresses specific praise to the sword, remarking that he who carries it “doit avoir cuer de preudome” (must have the heart of a worthy man) (1:140). If he speaks to Escalibor, the sword touches three heroes (Gawain, Arthur, and Lancelot) who in fact fail to prove themselves truly worthy. If he addresses this praise to Galehot’s sword, he conjures the shadows of a homosocial desire equally “unworthy” of witness.

The Lancelot contests the linear basis of hierarchical authority by representing these multiple and fragmented allegiances. Lancelot and Galehot, heroes of the border, disrupt the Arthurian center with their boundary-crossing identifications. Lancelot’s multiple partialities in particular disperse hierarchical order, and bring dispersal right to the center of the court. There, his exemplary position (best of all knights) exposes the center’s dependence on the transient subjectivity of the edge. For aristocratic readers, then, Lancelot offers a fantasy of effective peripheral power, capable of realigning royal identities. At the same time, of course, he performs the fatal risks of guilty and fragmented subjectivities.

When Galahad arrives at the court in the Queste, he displaces Lancelot as its most exalted member. The substitution exiles the play of fragmentation, stabilizing value through inimitable spiritual perfection. This new center, however, disrupts the court more violently than Lancelot’s border effects because it excludes the spiritually unworthy, which is to say most of the royal court. Following the Lancelot, the Queste illustrates a model of chivalric behavior (already theorized by the Lady of the Lake) that exposes Arthur’s spiritual failure—that is, the breaking of promises made when he received Escalibor. Galahad completes the Round Table by occupying its empty seat, only to empty out thirty-two others (Mort 2). When the Grail and the Ship of Faith (carrying the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric) finally land on Britain’s shores, they depopulate the land like spiritual invaders and then retreat to their original domain.

Galahad’s resemblances to his father only underscore their differences. Like Lancelot, for example, Galahad handles three different swords. In Galahad’s case, however, they successively close off the potential for multiple allegiances. Galahad receives his first sword (at the abbey where he has been raised) from Lancelot (Queste 2), suggesting engagement with Lancelot’s own multiple identifications—the ultimate father David, the surrogate mother Lady of the Lake, the adulterous lover Guenivere, the homoerotic lover Galehot, the dependent lord Arthur. Yet Galahad not only refuses to return to the court with Lancelot, he arrives there the next day with neither sword nor shield (7). Galahad thus refuses the Arthurian allegiance implied in Lancelot’s gift¹⁰³ and seems to have summoned his father only in order to reject him and his fragmented identifications.

Galahad’s second sword directly displaces Lancelot’s position at court. It arrives lodged in a stone that floats in the river, bearing an inscription that identifies the one person who can lift it as the best knight in the world (5). Galahad’s successful extraction proves that Lancelot is no longer the best knight in the world (11–12). This supernatural blade thus signifies Lancelot’s exclusion from the center of meaning, exiling his border subjectivity to the edges of relevance. Galahad himself carries the sword unencumbered by earthly allegiance, for he girds it on himself (12). As soon as he encounters the accompanying shield, given to Mordrain by Josephé (Estoire 556), he abandons his Arthurian companion Yvain (31). Now fully endowed with divine armor, Galahad has passed through Arthur’s court only to demonstrate his distance from it. His movements redraw the boundaries of value, consigning the court itself to sin.

The Grail manifests the new boundary dramatically. Like a hostile foreign knight, it “attacks”¹⁰⁴ the court and proclaims dominion. Although Arthur at first expresses happiness at this sign of the Lord’s benevolence (“debonereté,” “amor”) (16), he rages in anger when he realizes the Grail’s destructive effects. Since Gawain swears first to the quest to find the Grail, Arthur formally accuses him of treason (21). Gawain did indeed divide his loyalties between Arthur and a rival Lord when he pledged allegiance to the quest. Since all the knights have made the same pledge, the Insular landscape will now be divided between Arthur’s earthly knights (“terrien”) and Galahad’s celestial knights (“celestien”).

Each knight’s experiences on the quest reveal his place along this new boundary. While most of the knights, like Gawain, reside firmly on the side of the terrien, Lancelot once again lives in the border itself. Before he leaves, Guenivere accuses him of treason, just as Arthur accused Gawain (24). Guenivere recognizes that Lancelot has adopted an allegiance that excludes all others. If he succeeds in the quest, he will trade his multiple partialities for a single, unified, spiritual wholeness. And he does succeed—partially. His transformation begins when a knight, recently healed by the Grail, steals his sword while he sleeps (60). Divested of the sign of his earthly allegiance to the queen, Lancelot finally confesses his sin with Guenivere (in part) to a hermit (64–66). This hermit, with little ceremony, gives Lancelot a new sword before he proceeds on his repentant path (117). These new arms signify Lancelot’s new spiritual service. For the time being, his loyalties are secure enough for him to reject his former sword when he vanquishes the knight who stole it (132). Lancelot eventually achieves sufficient purity to (partly) glimpse the Grail (253–55), but in the end he returns to Arthur’s court like all the other sinful knights. Lancelot’s relation to both chivalries remains equivocal, and at the beginning of the Mort, he has returned to his adulterous love more audaciously than ever before (3).

Meanwhile, Perceval, Bohort, and Galahad inhabit the celestien unequivocally. They meet together for the first time at the Ship of Faith, which has sailed to Britain from the Old Testament. Here, Galahad receives his third and final sword, the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric, sign of perfect divine identification. Like Galahad, the sword comes from David’s high lineage. Both, however, lose this genealogical history as they are re-signed beyond time. The Queste narrates much of the sword’s history as the knights explore the ship and read the same inscriptions that Nascien did in the Estoire. The baldric, however, is emphatically aligned with the transfer from Old Testament errors to divine completion. Whereas in the Estoire Solomon’s wife surprises him with a baldric as poor as hemp (286), in the Queste she angers him with “renges d’estoupe” (a baldric of crude fiber) (223). Such fibers form impenetrable boundaries, and the verb estouper refers to blocked passages: a devil promises to leave a body “si me destoupe la voie” (if you unblock the path for me) (Estoire 18), and Lancelot awakes from an enchantment to find the windows “estoupees” (blocked up) (Lancelot 4:211). Estoupe thus refers figuratively to a blockage of truth. For Solomon, the crude baldric indeed belies the sword’s richness. Yet Solomon’s wife’s inability to engineer an appropriate baldric communicates truthfully the limits of her knowledge, as she herself explains (Queste 223). She cannot sustain (“sostenir”) the sword because it signifies a Christian purity whose advent lies in the future and that will displace romance desire (“come il me plaira”). Thus while Solomon condemns the baldric as a product of deceptive engin, it derives not from artifice but from honest partial understanding.

Solomon’s wife prophesies that the sword will be completed (that is, redeemed to true understanding) by a superlative virgin, who turns out to be Perceval’s sister. She recounts the ship’s entire history to the three knights; they accept it as true once they have read Solomon’s “brief” (226). As they are about to leave to seek the noble virgin who can complete the sword, she shows them “unes renges ouvrees d’or et de soie et de cheveux mout richement” (a baldric worked in gold and silk and hair very richly) (227). She attaches this baldric to the sword, “si bien com se ele l’eust fet toz les jorz de sa vie” (as well as if she had done it every day of her life) (227). This is of course the first and only time she performs this engineering feat—but she has no need to learn it, since her spiritual devotion inspires her movements. Her unique work is perfect from inception, just like the hero it will adorn.

Perceval’s sister completes the sword’s translation from history by christening it “l’Espee as estranges renges” (227). “Estranges” refers ambiguously, for it can designate either Solomon’s wife’s surprisingly poor baldric or Perceval’s sister’s inconceivably rich one. This ambiguity thematizes the object’s distance from the familiar while effacing the memory of its association with David and Solomon. In place of this genealogy, the name locates the baldric—and Galahad—beyond all limits, across the boundary of known history. The baldric of virgin hair integrates the feminine into the phallic symbol,¹⁰⁵ crossing yet another identity boundary. When Perceval’s sister chastely girds the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric on Galahad, he attains true knighthood for the first time (228); he is reborn as the son of a genealogy that undoes time rather than performing it. The sword from “beyond” (“estranges”) signifies the borderless, hegemonic dominion of perfected spirituality.

Before Galahad can leave Britain and ascend with the Grail, he must mend the sword that broke in Joseph’s thigh (266). At the end of the quest, Bohort carries this ancient sign of Insular Christianity (in place of a sword given by Lancelot)¹⁰⁶ and Perceval carries the one that Galahad drew from the floating stone: each sword reflects the hero’s place in the Queste’s moral economy.¹⁰⁷ The celestial order thus assimilates the logic of chivalric allegiance to Christian hegemony. This new dominion disinherits Arthurian dominion, as the three knights sail from Britain along with the Grail:

Et en la maniere que je vos ai devisee perdirent cil del roiaume de Logres par lor pechié le Saint Graal.... Et tot autresi come Nostre Sires l’avoit envoié a Galaad et a Joseph et aus autres oirs qui d’ax estoient descenduz, par lor bonté, tot autresi en desvesti il les malvés oirs par lor malvestié. (274–75)

[And in the manner that I have described to you, those of the realm of Loegria lost the Holy Grail on account of their sins.... And just as Our Lord had sent it to Galahad and to Joseph and to the other heirs who were descended from them because of their goodness, so He divested the bad heirs because of their badness.]

The Grail’s departure punishes those who failed to achieve celestial chivalry as much as it rewards those who succeeded. The narrator’s lament echoes Cadwallader’s exile speech, except that in this spiritualized landscape, dominion itself leaves the island (with no desire to return) while the Britons remain.

Galahad’s voyage to Sarras reverses Joseph’s voyage to Britain with the Grail in the Estoire. Galahad returns the sacred vessel to its native land, so that it can return to God. Its sojourn on the island is thus an interlude of mobility between these two poles of fixed truth. When the Grail casts the light of this truth across the Insular landscape, it catches only a few reflections. The Grail’s immutable, timeless identity also opposes Arthurian lineage, except where the Arthurian crosses the Hebrew. Ultimately, the adventures that define Arthurian activity result from the fissures opened in the Insular landscape by historical transgressions. Once Galahad closes these gaps, Arthurian dominion has no future. The Queste thus attempts to dispel the ambivalences mobilized in the Merlin and the Lancelot in favor of stable divine limits. These limits dominate royal power and prove as disruptive to political authority as Lancelot’s equivocations. From a rather different direction, then, the cycle once again proffers a fantasy of royal loss.

Escalibor, born within the frame of ambivalence, survives beyond the limits set by the Queste. From its inception in the Merlin, it moves away from the divine allegiance contained in the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric. Unmoored from its origins when Arthur transfers it to Gawain, it moves through the Lancelot and the Mort as a sign of transient service. At the same time, the Lancelot bolsters the Merlin’s dismissal of genealogical legitimation by presenting images of Troy in relation to frustrated eros (genealogies never generated) rather than deriving lessons of imperial heritage.¹⁰⁸ By the time the Mort opens, the fragmentation of imperial identifications, in conjunction with the consolidation of spiritual transcendence, has mined the Arthurian landscape with fatal conflicts.

From the Mort’s beginning, Arthur divorces his authority from the Queste’s celestial order. He rejects the Christian ideology embodied in the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric (now presumably lying in Sarras) by avoiding the logic of swords altogether. As the conflicts multiply, Arthur repeatedly defines his kingship through his crown and his genealogy: confronted with Lancelot and Guenivere’s infidelity, he swears by his crown to bring them to justice (65); debating whether to pursue Lancelot (who has taken the queen to Joyous Guard), Arthur reminds his knights that he has not lost a war since he was crowned (135); he swears by Uther’s soul that he will pursue Mordred (228). Forgetting his royal sword (sign of justice), Arthur overlooks his bonds of obligation to both the Church (where he received the sword from the altar) and his knights.

As Arthur dismisses his obligations to others, his reactions become increasingly violent, recalling Gawain’s rogue autonomy in the Merlin. Pressing his nephews to disclose their thoughts about Lancelot and Guenivere, for example, he grabs a sword that happens to lie nearby and threatens to kill Agravain (109). This murderous impulse borders on infanticide, and threatens to destroy family and vassal at the same time. The encounter exemplifies Arthur’s defiance of the control of violence usually achieved through fealty bonds (signified in the giving and receiving of swords). Arthur rejects the political system per se, wherein the logic of sword relations distributes blows justly within a closed network of lateral and hierarchical allegiances to knights, kings, and archbishops. The dismantling of this system sets allegiances in motion, touching off a fatal chain of warfare—Arthur lays siege to Joyous Guard, Gawain attacks Lancelot, the Roman emperor challenges Arthur, and Mordred usurps the throne. By breaking vassalic bonds, Arthur engenders a cultural disaster that eventually destroys him and returns the land to its original barren state (“les terres gastes et essilliees”) (232). This landscape bears no traces of history as the postcolonial nightmare converges on the precolonial myth of empty land. In this Insular desert, memory withers on the vine as if dominion had never taken root.

Although the causes of the disaster are multiple (as has long been noted),¹⁰⁹ Mordred and Guenivere demand close attention in relation to the dynamics of Arthurian betrayal established in the Historia. The queen’s adultery in this case obviously concerns Lancelot, not Mordred. Although the irregular intercourse began in the Lancelot, only in the Mort does it disrupt the social order as Lancelot’s political rivals strive to reveal it to the king.¹¹⁰ Unlike other Arthurian histories, the queen is in fact convicted of adultery and judged to die at the stake (121), yet she avoids intercourse with Mordred once he seizes the throne (166–78). Her conviction, however, leads directly to the possibility of this unnatural marriage, because Arthur leaves Mordred in charge of the kingdom in order to pursue Lancelot on the Continent: while rescuing Guenivere from the stake, he accidentally killed Gawain’s brother, and Gawain insists on blood vengeance (165). Adultery and political usurpation thus remain intimately intertwined. Mordred himself plots the elaborate betrayal because he loves the queen uncontrollably, in terms identical to Lancelot (171). Romance desire thus directly undermines stable dominion.

The process of betrayal serves, in part, to expose a whole set of irregular intercourses. If adultery forms one root of disaster, incest forms another. In the midst of the letter that Mordred crafts to convince everyone that Arthur is dead, he himself (or the narrator?) insinuates an irregular origin when he has Arthur ask the barons to make Mordred king, “qe ge tenoie a neveu—mes il ne l’est pas” (who I held as nephew, but he isn’t) (172). Guenivere publicizes the irregularity when she denounces Mordred as a traitor and “filz le roi Artu” (son of King Arthur) (176). Mordred’s origins are thus incestuous, since his mother (Loth’s wife) is Arthur’s half sister (Merlin 73, 96, 128–29). Arthur himself declares the incest as he swears vengeance: “Mes onques pere ne fist autretant de fill comme ge ferai de toi, car ge t’ocirrai a mes deus meins” (But never did a father do to a son what I will do to you, for I will kill you with my two hands) (211). The narrator concludes the battle with a final reminder: “Einsi ocist li peres le fill, et li filz navra le pere a mort” (Thus the father killed the son, and the son wounded the father to death) (245). Multiple genealogical disruptions thus converge on the final disaster: adultery, incest, infanticide, and patricide. The Roman war becomes almost incidental (the emperor is never named) (207–9), utterly overshadowed by the extended conflicts among Gawain, Lancelot, Arthur, and Mordred.

Escalibor reemerges in the narrative at a critical juncture in the disaster, as Gawain and Lancelot meet in single combat to resolve their protracted war. Their meeting distills the conflict between the Arthurian center (delegated to Gawain) and the disruptions of the border (embodied in Lancelot). Gawain engages Lancelot with the emblem of (tainted) royal authority, “Escalibor, la bone espee le roi Artu” (Escalibor, the good sword of King Arthur) (195). This coercive encounter harks back to Lancelot’s first arrival at court, where he pointedly refused Arthur’s sword. The duel replays the crisis of allegiance engendered by this refusal, as well as the crisis of authority provoked by Arthur’s substitution of Escalibor for Marmiadoise in the Merlin. Having received Escalibor, and carried it throughout the Lancelot, Gawain speaks for Arthur yet deforms royal justice by pursuing vengeance beyond the constraint of law and chivalric virtue; the Roman emperor and Arthur himself later pursue the same deformed logic of force (207, 225–27). Accordingly, toward the end of the combat, Gawain’s grip on royal justice begins to fail: he is so tired, “qu’a peinne puet il tenir s’espee” (that he can hardly hold his sword) (201). Forced to relinquish the offensive and take cover, Gawain’s defeat signals his misunderstanding of the sword, a misprision he inherits from Arthur’s own efforts to sever authority from the limitations of political allegiances. In the end, Escalibor no longer conjures triumphant, singular loyalty but the losses of divided allegiance.¹¹¹ The inconclusive duel, in which the determination of justice eludes everyone, performs the final dispersal of authority.

Arthur manages to collect these fragments together briefly, but only in order to remove the sword from circulation altogether. Arthur himself never touches the sword until his last moments. Previously, he struck the Roman emperor with an anonymous sword “clere et trenchant” (bright and sharp) (209) and killed Mordred with a lance “gros et fort” (large and strong) (245). The Roman battle in fact departs dramatically from the Historia tradition by reducing the battle narrative to a minimum,¹¹² not naming Escalibor, and having Arthur himself kill the emperor. The cycle thus once again evacuates the imperial theme, shifting focus to the dissolution of dominion per se. Just before the ultimate dissolution, Arthur resurrects Escalibor’s relation to the divine order of justice:

Ha! Escalibor, bone espee et riche, la meilleur de ceste siecle, fors cele as Estranges Renges, or perdras tu ton mestre. (247)

Ha! Escalibor, good sword and rich, the best in this world except the one with the Extra-Ordinary Baldric, now you will lose your master.

Arthur places Escalibor in the same relation to the Sword of the Extra-Ordinary Baldric as Lancelot to Galahad—superlative only on the terrestrial plane and subordinate to spiritual authority. Moreover, governed by a “master,” the blade obeys the logic of vassalic service (just like Robert of Gloucester’s Sir Caliburn). On the verge of death, then, Arthur draws Escalibor back into the system of constraint he had dismantled at the beginning of the Mort, or perhaps as early as the Merlin.

Arthur goes on to deplore the absence of Lancelot, Escalibor’s only imaginable heir. The irony of the impulse is palpable, for Lancelot would compound (not control) the sword’s tainted ideological history. To invest his border subjectivity with the emblem of royal justice would shatter the stable differences on which centralized authority depends. Lancelot is suitably absent from the scene, and since Arthur fears the “malvès oir” (bad heirs) who remain (that is, Mordred’s sons), he orders Girflet to throw the sword in a nearby lake (248). Girflet covets Escalibor just as Arthur did Marmiadoise, but Arthur—unlike Rion—maintains his mastery to the end: Girflet’s substitutions (first of his own sword and then of the scabbard) fail, and Arthur does not rest until he hears that a hand has risen from the lake to claim the sword (249). Gasping his last breath, Arthur recovers the authority he lost when Lancelot’s affair was publicized, or perhaps back when the Grail first attacked, or perhaps even as early as the conquest of Marmiadoise. Ironically, he can only use this authority to oversee his own demise. The aquatic hand withdraws the (tainted) sign of legitimation and aborts future filiation: there will be no passage from this hand to another heir. Having spanned the entirety of Arthur’s political life, Escalibor drowns in “useless immobility”;¹¹³ its fate signs the “evacuation” of the imperial myth that Dominique Boutet reads in the Mort as a whole.¹¹⁴

Appropriately, the Mort concludes with an abnegation of genealogy’s dynastic purpose. Once Lancelot has killed Mordred’s sons (253–57), he wanders into the forest and becomes a hermit rather than proceeding by droite voie to the capital city (257–59). Bohort, meanwhile, leaves Loegria to rule his own lands (260) but returns the day of Lancelot’s burial (263). Retiring to pray, King Bohort orders his men to make “tel roi comme il voudroient” (whatever king they would like) (263). No principle other than individual desire governs this final passage of dominion (which concerns Gaunes, not Loegria), just as only Arthur’s desire (“talent”) governed Marmiadoise. Arthur’s tombstone in fact bears no witness to genealogy or history, only conquering force: “Ci gist le rois Artus qui par sa valeur mist en sa subjection .XII. roiaumes” (Here lies King Arthur, who by his valor put twelve kingdoms in his subjection) (Mort 251). The memory of dominion fades in this deserted realm. History dissolves in romance desire, discrediting genealogical filiation. The dissolution sustains aristocratic ideologies that value royal dependence over vassalic submission and that reject the concentration of authority in exclusionary genealogies.

The prose cycle’s named swords enact an extended conflict between competing authorities. The Estoire launches durable signs of spiritual perfection, while the Merlin traces the dangerous consequences of political judgment divorced from this divine order and the Lancelot explores the complexity of political equivocation. The Queste finally condemns terrestrial politics altogether, while the Mort explores the bloody details of their failure. Dismissing imperial ambitions, the cycle turns the very idea of dominion into a romance fantasy. The prose medium itself insinuates the illegitimacy of autonomous action: every conjunctive seam connects to another and no part of the narrative can function alone. The possibility, or even the inevitability, of continuation¹¹⁵ ratifies desires for a world of borders (of endless seams)—and, paradoxically, a borderless world. The cycle thus chronicles a history of absolute boundaries that converges on the impossibility of boundary formation. Subverting the very mechanisms that usually determine limits, the cycle sustains aristocratic fantasy while also conjuring imperial nightmares.

Specifically in Champagne or more generally elsewhere, the Arthurian prose cycle delegitimizes royal authority that refuses lateral service bonds. It also challenges the potency of Trojan origins (favored by the French monarchy), exposing the ideological dangers of genealogical legitimation in general: relatives, no matter how prestigious, cannot sustain absolute principles. Arthur himself becomes the active emblem of genealogical paradox (enchanted bastard, incestuous philanderer, infertile king, and so on). While the cycle’s plot glorifies his achievements, the consequences of his victories unsettle his history. Once he trades Escalibor for Marmiadoise, every coercive encounter recalibrates his authority. An aristocratic audience (especially one with royal pretensions of its own) could identify with Arthur as well as with the critique of his power. Generating ambivalence about the Arthurian past, the prose cycle ingeniously resists history with spiritualized genealogies. As the heroes of history return to their sacred origin in Sarras, the victims pray in the deserted Insular forest.