Lancelot with the Grail: first stage

Abstract There is another Prose Lancelot which, as great scholars such as Ferdinand Lot and Jean Frappier have shown, possesses a unity as a literary work, in spite of contrasts between the different branches. In that romance the tale of Lancelot’s childhood and adventures up to his installation as a companion of the Round Table forms only the first part of a great cycle which includes a Grail Quest firmly integrated in Lancelot’s own story through the person of his son Galahad, and a Mort Artu which recounts the tragic conclusion of Lancelot’s love for Guinevere and the destruction of Arthur and the Round Table. The non-cyclic and the cyclic Prose Lancelot share the same text up to Lancelot’s welcome into Arthur’s court (at the end of Sommer III), although some scribes, seeing the obvious contradictions between the Grail allusions in this part of the tale and the Galahad Quest, have tried to remove them or alter them, as will be seen in the last part of Chapter XI. The cyclic and non-cyclic romances, therefore, only diverge at the end of Sommer III (at the end of phase V in the work studied in Part I of this book), when Galehot takes Lancelot away from court and journeys to his own lands. It is this divergence into two different versions of the journey to Sorelois, the False Guinevere episode, and the death of Galehot which I propose to study in this chapter. I use the title ‘version (a)’ to designate the brief version (‘special version’ in the terminology of Micha) which corresponds to phase VI of the non-cyclic Lancelot and which brings the story to an end with the death of Galehot.2 I use the title ‘version (b)’ to designate the cyclic version. We have seen that version (a) (phase VI) is linked through references back and a