An Introduction to Launcelot

Today we are joined by poet and author, Malcolm Guite whose new book Galahad and the Grail is a tale of adventure in ballad form that tells the story of Sir Galahad, and the other knights of the quest as they set out from Camelot to achieve the Holy Grail. Malcolm’s wisdom of Arthurian legends runs deeps and his recent work to retell these stories, as Tennyson once did, make him the perfect guide for us as we endeavor to unlock C.S. Lewis’s poem, Launcelot found in Narrative Poems.

Lewis had a lifelong love of the legends of King Arthur and was familiar with its main source for English writers, Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century compilation of translations from earlier sources, Le Morte d’Arthur. Indeed, along with his fellow Inklings J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, he had an academic as well as personal and artistic engagement with the whole ‘Matter of Britain’1, as the mediaeval poets called the cycle of Arthurian legends, including the legends of the Grail. As Sørina Higgins writes in The Inklings and King Arthur, the authoritative book on this subject:

“As highly educated men of letters, several of whom taught literature at Oxford or Cambridge, these authors provide an essential dual insight into the Arthurian texts. Their professional knowledge of Mediaeval and Renaissance literature gave them the ability to read the earlier Arthurian materials with a level of accuracy, detail, and interpretive depth not available to the average reader—or writer. Yet they were focussed not on a revival of the past, but on the present’s need for redemption: as soldiers, office workers, and creative professionals, the Inklings wrote Arthurian works that contained incisive critiques of their own times and visions of utopian or dystopian futures evolving out of contemporary decisions.”2

We can see this very clearly with Lewis in his introduction of Merlin as a character in That Hideous Strength, his prophetic and dystopian novel, and it is also this latter emphasis, the use of Arthurian material to embody or express our own contemporary dilemmas or future fears, that concerns us most in reading ‘Launcelot’.

Before turning to the text of ‘Launcelot’ itself, we should also notice that there is an arc of development in Lewis’s response to the Arthurian legends, and especially to the Grail. There is a significant change brought about firstly by his conversion to Christianity and secondly by his friendship with Charles Williams. After these major life events, his understanding of the Grail changes significantly. At first, Lewis follows Tennyson’s lead in regarding the Grail as peripheral to the main subject of the Round Table and the court of Camelot—it draws the knights away, weakens and undermines the fellowship, and is ultimately part of what leads to the breaking of the fellowship. Williams changes all that, successfully arguing that the Grail is central, that Camelot exists for the Grail and not the other way around, and that this is a working through of Christ’s dictum that we should first seek the Kingdom of God, and then these other things; the nation and the civil polity will find their proper place. By the time Lewis publishes Arthurian Torso3 in 1948, which contains the unfinished manuscript of The Figure of Arthur, Williams’s treatise on the whole Arthurian cycle together with Lewis’s own commentary on Williams’s Arthurian poetry, he is convinced by Williams that the Grail is at the centre of the Arthurian legends, not the periphery.

But to return to the poem at hand, the 296-line fragment ‘Launcelot’, skillfully written in hexameter couplets, we are looking at an earlier stage in Lewis’s appreciation of ‘the Matter of Britain’. Walter Hooper dates this to the early 1930s.4 I would suggest that it is before Lewis’s fuller Christian conversion in 1931, precisely because it veers away from the Grail, rather than towards it. The Grail Cycle, in its fullest mediaeval development, is about the sacrament and mystery of Presence, whereas ‘Launcelot’ is essentially a poetic lament circling around various kinds of emptiness and aching absence. It is set not on the Grail Quest but amongst the empty chairs and expectant emptiness of Camelot after the departure of so many knights on the quest. That sense of aching absence is especially focussed on harrowing insights into the heart of Guinevere. The poem opens with this atmosphere of vacancy: ‘Desolation was in Arthur’s hall / and stillness in the City of Legions’. Far from promising fulfilment and achievement, those who remain say ‘the Sangrail has betrayed us all’. All this is focussed on the feelings and intuitions of Guinevere:

And the Queen understood it all. And the drab pain,

Now for two years familiar in her wearied side,

Stirred like a babe within her.

This is the dark poetry of paradox, for there is no ‘babe’, no fruition of love, and if there were, the whole tone makes it plain that it would be a stillbirth. Indeed, Guinevere, so long tortured by Launcelot’s absence, knows already that their affair is dead: ‘No tidings now could do her good’.

Then she has the shock of knowing that Launcelot has in fact returned but has not immediately come to see her. They are both putting off the inevitable.

The most striking thing in this interval is the weary, dispirited, almost mute mood of the knights who do return. It is as though they have come back from some unspeakable war rather than from the joyous quest on which they set out. We will examine this response in more detail next week, in the passage I have chosen for close reading.

When Launcelot finally does speak to Guinevere, he holds her hand not passionately but piteously, as one ‘to whom they bring bad news she will not understand’.

What follows is Launcelot’s account to her of his part in the Grail Quest. Those who know the narrative in Malory will know that, because of the dolorous stroke, struck by Balin, wounding the Fisher King, any knight approaching the Grail Castle will have to pass through the Wasteland, all the lands made desolate in the instant the King was wounded. The real purpose of the Grail Quest, certainly in Williams’s understanding, was to heal the Fisher King with the same spear with which he was wounded and so restore the Wasteland. And certainly, Launcelot describes his passage through the Wasteland. Lewis knows that we should then expect him to reach the Grail Castle, but he and we are disappointed; he turns aside to other adventures.

The Wasteland is brilliantly described in poetry as evocative as Eliot’s, the poet whom Lewis affected to despise:

He passes by

Forsaken wells and sees buckets red with rust

Upon chains. Dry watercourses filled with dust

What is going on here, in this exploration of desolation? We will take a closer look at one passage and see what we can discover next week.

Enjoy an excerpt from Malcom’s Galahad and the Grail which invites us as reader’s to “take up the tale” of Arthurian legends where “Who knows what wonders might be met...”5

Read the Excerpt!