I Have A Few Conflicting Sets Of Headcanons—if Character X Is ______, Then Character Y Is ______,

“The Elder Knight” by Dorothy L. Sayers

Note: the speaker is Galahad; the elder knight is Lancelot. This poem is one of my favorites. It’s unusual in that its version of Galahad is really, really spiteful, and the ending is unforgettable.   I.

I have met you foot to foot, I have fought you face to face,

I have held my own against you and lost no inch of place,

    And you shall never see

    How you have broken me.

You sheathed your sword in the dawn, and you smiled with careless eyes,

Saying "Merrily struck, my son, I think you may have your prize."

    Nor saw how each hard breath

    Was painfully snatched from death.

I held my head like a rock; I offered to joust again,

Though I shook, and my palsied hand could hardly cling to the rein;

    Did you curse my insolence

    And over-confidence?

You have ridden, lusty and fresh, to the morrow's tournament;

I am buffeted, beaten, sick at the heart and spent.—

    Yet, as God my speed be

    I will fight you again if need be.

               II.

A white cloud running under the moon

   And three stars over the poplar-trees,

Night deepens into her lambent noon;

   God holds the world between His knees;

Yesterday it was washed with the rain,

But now it is clean and clear again.

Your hands were strong to buffet me,

   But, when my plume was in the dust,

Most kind for comfort verily;

   Success rides blown with restless lust;

Herein is all the peace of heaven:

To know we have failed and are forgiven.

The brown, rain-scented garden beds

   Are waiting for the next year's roses;

The poplars wag mysterious heads,

   For the pleasant secret each discloses

To his neighbour, makes them nod, and nod—

So safe is the world on the knees of God.

             III.

I have the road before me; never again

   Will I be angry at the practised thrust

That flicked my fingers from the lordly rein

   To scratch and scrabble among the rolling dust.

I never will be angry — though your spear

   Bit through the pauldron, shattered the camail,

Before I crossed a steed, through many a year

   Battle on battle taught you how to fail.

Can you remember how the morning star

   Winked through the chapel window, when the day

Called you from vigil to delights of war

   With such loud jollity, you could not pray?

Pray now, Lord Lancelot; your hands are hard

   With the rough hilts; great power is in your eyes,

Great confidence; you are not newly scarred,

   And conquer gravely now without surprise.

Pray now, my master; you have still the joy

   Of work done perfectly; remember not

The dizzying bliss that smote you when, a boy,

   You faced some better man, Lord Lancelot.

Pray now — and look not on my radiant face,

   Breaking victorious from the bloody grips—

Too young to speak in quiet prayer or praise

   For the strong laughter bubbling to my lips.

Angry? because I scarce know how to stand,

   Gasping and reeling against the gates of death,

While, with the shaft yet whole within your hand,

   You smile at me with undisordered breath?

Not I — not I that have the dawn and dew,

   Wind, and the golden shore, and silver foam —

I that here pass and bid good-bye to you —

   For I ride forward — you are going home.

Truly I am your debtor for this hour

   Of rough and tumble — debtor for some good tricks

Of tourney-craft; — yet see how, flower on flower,

   The hedgerows blossom! How the perfumes mix

Of field and forest! — I must hasten on —

   The clover scent blows like a flag unfurled;

When you are dead, or aged and alone,

   I shall be foremost knight in all the world —

My world, not yours, beneath the morning's gold,

   My hazardous world, where skies and seas are blue;

Here is my hand. Maybe, when I am old,

   I shall remember you, and pray for you.

POLL TIME 2 ☺️☺️

Some background for each!

Gwalchmai: The OG Gawain, slayer of giants in Welsh myth, besties with Owain and Peredur. He's known for his gold/silver tongue and is literally like The Best Boi. I am enamoured with him. Tells Cai to do one when Peredur gives him a broken arm. Also this passage single-handedly convinced me that Peredur and Gwalchmai are a couple: 'And Peredur and Gwalchmai went to Gwalchmai's pavilion to take off their armour. And Peredur put on the same kind of garment that Gwalchmai wore. And they went hand in hand to where Arthur was, and greeted him.' Thank u, Sioned Davies.

Branwen: Is the only woman in the Mabinogi to have a branch named after her. Literally the sweetest woman ever. Her dad is the sea God, Llŷr, and her brothers are Bendigeidfran and Manawydan. Trained a starling to send messages to Bendigeidfran to say she was being abused by the Irish court in an absolutely amazing move. Sadly she passes away once she's made it back to Wales alongside Manawydan, Pryderi, and five other men (and Bendigeidfran's severed head!) '"Oh son of God," she said, "woe that I was even born. Two good islands have been laid waste because of me!" She gives a mighty sigh and her heart breaks. And they make a four-sided grave for her and bury her there on the banks of the Alaw.'

Cai: OG Kay. Depending on what u read he is either the most renowned warrior ever - 'Prince of plunder/The unrelenting warrior to his enemy' as Pa Gur yv y Porthaur says - the possession of the most fuckin batshit magical powers as Culhwch ac Olwen relates: 'Cai had magical qualities. For nine days and nine nights, he could hold his breath under water. For nine nights and nine days, he could go without sleep. A wound from Cai's sword no physician could heal.' And so it goes on. Or he is literally the most grumpo to have ever grumped and I respect him hugely.

Blodeuwedd: OWL WOMAN. FLOWER-FACE. 'Then they took the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured up the fairest and most beautiful maiden that anyone had ever seen.' She is literally stupidly beautiful AND SHE PLOTS TO KILL HER HUSBAND, LLEU, WHO QUITE FRANKLY DESERVED IT. A fuckin queen. She fucked over Gwydion's bb boi in one fell swoop, I simply MUST Stan.

Finally, RHIANNON: HORSE WOMAN. QUEEN OF DYFED. LITERAL TYLWYTH TEG LADY. She literally says to Pwyll - who she later marries - 'Be silent for as long as you like: never has a man been more stupid than you have been.' And if a woman said that to me I WOULD PERISH. also had an amazingly fast horse and like dhdjdddj when Pwyll dies - in a, I presume, stupidity-related incident - Rhiannon marries Branwen's brother Manawydan and actually gets treated with respect instead of whatever fuckery Pwyll was pulling.

Anyways VOTE, VOTE, VOTE. Best two go through to the quarter finals. U only have 1 DAY TO VOTE SO ZOOMIES!!!!

A post of mine from several months ago about the Perlesvaus self-rearranging forest just wandered across my dash again and made me think about it some more, so I wanted to talk about it a bit.

Perlesvaus, for those who don’t know, is a 13th-century French Arthurian romance. It’s intended to be a continuation of Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, but it’s mostly known for being completely batshit when it’s known at all. (There’s an old book on Arthurian texts that dedicates a chapter to Perlesvaus and repeatedly speculates that the anonymous author had Something Wrong With Him. This is the longest scholarly treatment of Perlesvaus I’ve been able to find & read.)

Anyway, there’s an odd worldbuilding detail in the text. See, it’s a Thing in chivalric romances that the questing knights happen upon castles & lords & damsels & such that are unfamiliar to them and have to be explained. You know, “this is the Castle of Such-and-Such, where the local custom is as follows. It’s ruled by Lady So-and-So, whose character I shall now describe to you.”

This is a genre convention that largely goes unquestioned, but it’s a bit odd if you think about it. All these knights are at least minor nobility. They don’t know the other nobles in their region? They don’t know what castles are where? Don’t they have, like, diplomatic relations with these people or at least attend the same tournaments? Even if they’re all fully committed to the knight-errant lifestyle and don’t really engage in courtly diplomacy, you’d think they would share information with each other and get the lay of the land. But instead, to use TTRPG terminology, it’s like they’re all on a hexcrawl that was randomly generated just for them to have these adventures.

The author of Perlesvaus decides to address this. In what’s kind of a throwaway paragraph late in the text, he explains that God moves things around so knights always have new quests to do (and, presumably, is also making sure they always arrive at the right narratively-significant moment). So the reason they’re always encountering people & places they have no knowledge of is because those people & places really weren’t there yesterday. They didn’t know about the Castle of Such-and-Such because it’s normally a thousand miles away and the forest path they followed to get there used to lead somewhere else.

And I think that would be a really interesting thing to stick into a novel or a TTRPG or something. When a knight rides into the forest with the intent of Going On A Quest, at some point they go around a bend in the path, cross an invisible barrier, and wind up in the Forest of Narrative. This is a vast forest with no set geography, filled with winding paths and populated almost entirely with questing knights, damsels in search of questing knights, friendly hermits, strange creatures, and allegorical set-pieces. Then, at the narratively-appropriate time, they cross back over the invisible barrier back into the regular world, and find themselves wherever the Narrative has decided they need to be. This could be a different country, a different continent, or a different world entirely.

Whether anyone involved is actually aware that this is how it works is… optional, really. Though if it’s not a Known Phenomenon, the people whose jobs it is to handle trade & diplomacy & god forbid, maps, are going to end up tearing their hair out in frustration.

The knights as YouTube comments, No. 1

I can’t decide which knight is saying this, but it explains a lot.

( A comment on “i accidentally read the worst book of the year so far” by The Book Leo, beginning with a quote from the video)

Edit: Never mind. Knights kiss all the time in some texts. Most of the Arthurian texts I’ve read are weird and random (Gawain plays tennis, Galahad gets married, Guinevere’s mother’s ghost issues prophecies of doom…) and gave the impression that being turned into a murder-dog was more common than physical affection.

💚😏🗡️ <for arthuriana ask game =)

Favorite quest/story arc:

That’s a tough one. Basic as it is, one of my favorites would have to be the Grail quest. It’s been told in so many different ways, it has so much potential for interpretation and reinterpretation, and if you look around, its influence is everywhere in pop culture. I also really like Galahad, Percival, and the Grail Heroine (though reading T. H. White left me with an anti-Bors bias I’ve never been able to shake).

Gawain: 

The way I got into Arthuriana was a seventh-grade GVC assignment where I had to write an alliterative paragraph, drew “G” out of a hat, started writing about Gawain, never got to a stopping point, decided to write a novel, decided I had to do research for the novel…you get the idea. He isn’t my all-time favorite, but I like Gawain. I find his revenge quest interesting when it’s done well, but I think that it’s become too ubiquitous. There are so many stories about him and there’s so much more to him than the man in The Once and Future King whose main traits are “angry” and “Scottish” (though I do love it when he calls Galahad “yon lily laddie”).

Who Are You Betting On In This Month's Tournament?

I think it depends on which canon it is and who’s in town. If I could choose from every Arthurian character I know of, I would say the Knight of the Lantern, hands down. At the start of The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog, he defeats and ties up everyone on Arthur’s hunting trip who he thinks is worth fighting—which adds up to well over seven thousand knights—in one afternoon. Later on, he’s defeated by his older brother Alastrann (who’s in monster-dog form), but when their father dies, Alastrann becomes the King of India, and he can’t very well casually jaunt over to the far end of another continent when he has a country to run. The Knight of the Lantern also returns to India, but he has unparalleled magical powers and less responsibility, so he could probably swing by for a tournament.

Thanks for the ask!

@thescreechowl has translated the "König Anteloy", a German Arthuriana from the 13th century, into English. With her permission, I have made a PDF file of her translation for sharing, reading and preservation purposes. Happy New Year's to all!

Read the "König Anteloy" in PDF format here.

Happy late ace day!

Arthuriana has so many major aspec characters, and it’s fabulous

Here are a few characters who I interpret as aspec:

Dinadan!!! He is an absolute aroace icon. In a source whose name has slipped my mind, Isolde comments on how he ought to be in a relationship and his reaction is something along the lines of, “Yeah, hard pass. How’s that working out for you, by the way?” (Read it with sarcasm).

Galahad, Bors, and the Grail Heroine all seem quite happy about the eternal chastity thing. None of them have any close calls with demon ladies, unlike poor Percival, the one allo person in the friend group. (Yes, Bors has a son, but a cursed ring was involved there, which is why as much as I do not stand Bors’ Morte misogyny, I will always pity him).

Kay is very rarely ascribed romantic relationships, and in one Welsh source, his father prophesies that Kay’s heart will be “eternally cold”, which could be interpreted as never enflamed by love.

Any others who come to mind?

That is very relatable because I did the exact same thing. Here's a partial list of my own awful ideas:

It started with Marianne Le Fay (I didn't like the name Morgan, so I renamed her) being so called because she was friends with fairies in the French Alps, then shifted to her being a changeling child who was raised by fey beings after Uther and the rest of his hunting party was killed while hunting a wild boar in Broceliande. No adequate explanation was given for why a three-year-old princess was taken along to hunt a wild boar.

Camelot was actually named Caramel-Not. Bors told people in the foreign countries he was in while he had amnesia that he was from a camel-lot and it stuck. (Also, Bors converted to Hinduism, regained his memory, and decided never to go back. All this was mentioned offhand--he hadn't lived in Camelot for years and never showed up in the story).

Prior to the start, Mordred somehow drove every human apart from him and Arthur, who he kept mostly unconscious, out of Camelot through wild goose chase quests, falsely tarnished names, and more creative but always nonlethal methods.

Mordred isekai'd Guinevere to a world made of clouds. The first part of the plot was just her trying to get back.

Mordred stuck Agravaine, Gareth, and Gaheris on a boat and set it adrift so that listening to Agravaine singing "The Ballad of the Pickled Cabbage" would eat away at the others' sanity.

Gawain and "Gallahad" were best friends. Gallahad was kind of a rustic himbo, in contrast to Percival, who was older and had found the Grail before he showed up (I actually like the last bit's angst potential).

Lancelot was really evil and in league with Anna (who was evil). Guinevere, Gawain, and Gallahad all hated him.

Mordred was a sorcerer and had a strix named Deluge who wanted to be named Norman as his familiar. (I know it makes no sense but I still have a soft spot for corny socially awkward evil wizard Mordred).

Arthur and Guinevere were going to get their marriage annulled, then eventually remarry, because the marriage was arranged and also because when they first married, Guinevere was under a curse.

The whole thing began with a seventh-grade assignment to write an alliterative paragraph, so a weird number of words in the prologue started with the letter G. Thus, we have Gawain grappling a ghastly green ghoul over a golden grail (not THE Grail, apparently, but that isn't clear until much later) at the very start.

Pendragons could turn into literal dragons. Mordred, as Uther's grandson, could turn into one despite lacking the Pendragon name, since it was genetic, but Guinevere could also turn into one because she was a Pendragon by marriage. (The lore was a bit spotty). The climax of the book was going to be an epic dragon battle between Mordred and Guinevere.

There's a bit more of that sort of thing, but I'll leave it there for now.

so a few years ago, before I realised that there was such a thing as an Arthuriana fandom on Tumblr that I could mine for resources, I decided, in my infinite wisdom, to start writing a novel.

now where this goes off the rails is the fact that I a) did no research and b) had some pretty unusual ideas about the characters I was going to be using. having since found out some actual, concrete information on these characters, I thought it would be fun to go through my old ideas and see how fucking wild they are in comparison to what I now know the characters are actually like.

Kea's list of awful ideas:

morgan le fay was going to be a werewolf

king arthur was going to be colourblind and have a peanut allergy as his only identifying traits

lancelot was going to murder his abusive merchant father by staging a cart crash in the middle of the woods, then stabbing him in the confusion. for plot reasons

Nimue/lady of the lake and Lancelot were going to be adoptive siblings who were raised by the wild hunt (still kinda fuck with the siblings idea tbh)

Kay was going to be Arthur's dog.

Guinevere x Lancelot? nah, Guinevere x Lancelot's sister (also still kinda fuck with this, give that woman some lesbianism she deserves it)

the main villain was going to be some random ass faerie assassin called the Shrike, so called because it skewered knights on trees (I used to listen to far too much hozier, if you couldn't guess)

Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin were going to be in a polyam relationship and Guinevere, Nimue and Morgan were going to be in a polyam relationship, which, if you consider the two pairs of siblings in that collection, means that the family tree of these characters is literally a circle.

the Fae were going to have big fuckass bird wings for no particular reason other than I thought it would be cool

I have so many more of these, if this breaches containment I'll make another

I've only messaged people on Tumblr three times: the third when I didn't have an answer for an ask (I'm still working on it), the second when I had a question to ask someone which didn't seem big enough to be ask-worthy, and the first to a very prominent Arthurian blog which wasn't strongly related to my admittedly odd and random comment about the Grail questers but was the only Arthurian blog I'd encountered at that point, since I hadn't yet figured out how Tumblr worked or that I could post things. I'm a little mortified about that last one, but all three people were nice about it. Anyway, I don't make a habit of messaging people on here because I'm worried it would seem weird and invasive. Then again, if someone messaged me, I wouldn't find it either of those things. I don't think I'm alone in this: I can vaguely remember seeing a post where someone said they would feel like they were ambushing someone in a dark alley if they messaged someone but would be happy if someone messaged them.

Anyway, all that is to say I'm not really sure how Tumblr messaging culture works, but if you want to message me, feel free to. I won't think it's weird.

“Dagonet the Fool” by Susan Spilecki

They call me "little man," "King Arthur's fool,"

And "simpleton," those lackeys at the court,

But this fool's mother had the Second Sight,

And sometimes when I caper for the king

I see more than Taliesin the bard

And Merlin the enchanter can, combined.

I stand before the dais, juggling:

The red balls first, then yellow, green and blue,

And when I add the gold and silver spheres,

The oval blur between my hands takes form.

A glowing, rainbow mirrow it becomes

Through which I see the king an older man.

His beard is shot with grey. Astride his horse

He sits up straighter than he would on land

When all the kingdom's cares, some awful guilt,

And the death of all his dreams lie on his back.

I see two rows of soldiers and a snake,

A sword unsheathed to kill it, turned on him--

I drop the balls and stammer out some jest,

A wish for pardon, while the courtiers roar.

He does not laugh. He sees my face go grey

With terror. Arthur thinks I fear his wrath.

He hands me the gold ball, rolled to his feet,

Says, "Dagonet, all people make mistakes."

He glances at his wife; she looks away.

Fool I may be, but even I can tell

There's something wrong when Guinevere looks down

Among the milling courtiers at one knight,

The tallest, bravest, handsomest in spurs:

At Lancelot, who never makes mistakes.

I scramble for the balls. He looks at me,

Then looks away, and shrugs his lion's mane.

Dismiss me as a fool, Sir Lancelot.

Better a fool in small things all my life

Than a great lord who, with one folly alone,

Casts all he loves to ruin at life's end.