Lancelot and Guinevere, the love that divided the Round Table

In the Arthurian world Lancelot is the best of knights and Guinevere the queen, wife of King Arthur. Their love, secret and faithful for years, is the heart of the chivalric legend and at the same time the cause of its ruin. Unlike Tristan and Isolde, the two are not victims of a potion: they choose each other, and for that very reason their story puts the entire code of courtesy to the test.

The knight of the cart

Lancelot enters literature as Guinevere's lover with Chrétien de Troyes, who around 1177 to 1181 wrote The Knight of the Cart at the request of Marie de Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The poem, completed by another author, Godefroi de Leigni, tells of the abduction of the queen by the wicked Meleagant, who carries her off to the mysterious land of Gorre.

To reach her Lancelot agrees to climb into a cart, the vehicle of the condemned, a gesture that covers him with shame. But he hesitates for two steps before doing so, and Guinevere, when she sees him again, receives him coldly precisely because of that hesitation. The knight then crosses a bridge made of a sword blade. It is the manifesto of courtly love: total obedience to the lady, even at the cost of honour.

The great prose cycle

In the 13th century anonymous authors composed in French the so-called Vulgate or Lancelot-Grail cycle, which narrates the knight's whole life. Here appears Galehaut, the lord who arranges the first kiss between Lancelot and the queen, the same episode that Francesca would read with Paolo in the Comedy. The cycle interweaves the adulterous love with the quest for the Holy Grail.

Because of his sin Lancelot cannot win the Grail. The quest falls to his son Galahad, born of his union with the daughter of King Pelles, whom the knight had been tricked into believing was Guinevere. In this way the romance sets two forms of love side by side, love for the lady and love for God, and the second prevails.

The fall of Camelot

In the last part of the cycle, The Death of King Arthur, the knights Agravain and Mordred expose the affair. Guinevere is condemned to the stake, and Lancelot rescues her by force of arms, killing in the fray, without recognising him, even Gawain's favourite brother. From then on Gawain becomes his implacable enemy and the Round Table splits into factions.

While Arthur fights Lancelot in France, Mordred usurps the throne. In the final battle the king and the traitor wound each other mortally. Guinevere withdraws to a convent and takes the veil; Lancelot becomes a hermit and a priest. When she dies, he follows her soon after. In 1485 Thomas Malory reworked this material in Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by William Caxton.

A love and a kingdom

In the 19th century Alfred Tennyson retold the story in the Idylls of the King, and the Pre-Raphaelite painters illustrated it many times: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for example, drew Lancelot surprised in the queen's chamber in 1857. The image of a penitent Guinevere and of Lancelot torn between loyalty and passion became an emblem of the conflict between duty and feeling, and helped fix the queen's face in the modern imagination.

The story of Lancelot and Guinevere shows an aspect that other legends leave in shadow: love is not only a private affair, but can crack an entire political and moral order. No outside enemy destroys Camelot as thoroughly as the bond between the best of knights and the queen he should only have served.