Lady of the Lake
The Lady of the Lake is a title used by multiple characters in the Matter of Britain, the body of medieval literature and mythology associated with the legend of King Arthur. As either actually fairy or fairy-like yet human enchantresses, they play important roles in various stories, notably by providing Arthur with the sword Excalibur, eliminating the wizard Merlin, raising the knight Lancelot after the death of his father, and helping to take the dying Arthur to Avalon after his final battle. Different Ladies of the Lake appear concurrently as separate characters in some versions of the legend since at least the Post-Vulgate Cycle and consequently the seminal Le Morte d'Arthur, with the latter describing them as members of a hierarchical group, while some texts also give this title to either Morgan or her sister.
Names and origins
Today, the Lady of the Lake is best known as the character called either Nimue, or several scribal variants of Ninianne and Viviane. French and foreign medieval authors and copyists since the early 13th century produced various forms of the latter two. Such forms include Nymenche in the Vulgate Lancelot; Nim'ane and Ui'ane in the Vulgate Merlin ; Nin'eve / Nivene / Niviène / Nivienne and Vivienne in the Post-Vulgate Merlin ; and Nimiane / Niniame and Vivian / Vivien in Arthour and Merlin and Henry Lovelich's Merlin. Further variations of these include alternate spellings with the letter i'' written as y, such as in the cases of Nymanne and Nynyane. According to Lucy Paton, the most primitive French form of this name might have been Niniane. Danielle Quéruel of the Bibliothèque nationale de France explains:The much later form Nimue, in which the letter e can be written as ë or é, was invented and popularized by Thomas Malory through his 15th-century English Le Morte d'Arthur and itself has several variations: her name appears as Nymue, Nyneue, Nyneve and Nynyue in William Caxton's print edition, but it had been rather Nynyve and Nenyve in the Winchester Manuscript. Even though 'Nymue' appears only in the Caxton text, the modernized and standardized 'Nimue' is now the most common form of the name of Malory's character, as Caxton's edition was the only version of Le Morte d'Arthur published until 1947. Nimue is also sometimes rendered by modern authors and artists as either Nimuë or Nimüe, or Nimueh'.
Arthurian scholar A. O. H. Jarman, following suggestions first made in the 19th century, proposed that the name Viviane used in French Arthurian romances, was ultimately derived from the Welsh word chwyfleian, meaning "a wanderer of pallid countenance", which was originally applied as an epithet to the famous prototype of Merlin, a prophetic wild man figure Myrddin Wyllt in medieval Welsh poetry. Due to the relative obscurity of the word, it was misunderstood as "fair wanton maiden" and taken to be the name of Myrddin's female captor. Others have linked the name Nymenche with the Irish mythology's figure Niamh, and the name Niniane with the Welsh mythology's figure Rhiannon, or, as a feminine form of the masculine name Ninian, with the likes of the 5th-century saint Ninian and the river Ninian.
Further theories connect her to the Welsh lake fairies known as the Gwragedd Annwn, the Celtic water goddess Covianna, and the Irish goddess of the underworld Bé Finn. It has been also noted how the North Caucasian goddess Satana from the Nart sagas is both associated with water and helps the Scythian hero Batraz gain his magic sword. Possible literary prototypes include two characters from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini: Merlin's one-time wife Guendoloena and Merlin's half-sister Ganieda. Another possibility involves Diana, the Roman goddess of hunt and nature, a direct or spiritual descent from whom is actually explicitly attributed to Viviane within some French prose narratives, in which she is arguably even serving as Diana's avatar. It has also been speculated that the name Viviane may be a derivative form of Diana.
The mythical Greek sea nymph Thetis, mother of the hero Achilles, similarly provides her son with magical weapons. Like the Lady of the Lake, Thetis is a water spirit who raises the greatest warrior of her time. Thetis' husband is named Peleus, while in some tales the Lady of the Lake has the knight Pelleas as her lover; Thetis also uses magic to make her son invulnerable, similar to how Lancelot receives a ring that protects him from evil magic. The Greek myth may therefore have inspired or influenced the Arthurian legend, especially since The Iliad involving Thetis was well known across the former Roman Empire and among the medieval writers dealing with Celtic myths and lore. The Roman fort Aballava, known to the post-Roman Britons as Avalana and today seen by some as the location of the historical Avalon, had been also curiously dedicated the Roman water goddess Dea Latis. Laurence Gardner interpreted the supposed Biblical origins of Lancelot's bloodline by noting the belief about Jesus' purported wife Mary Magdalene's later life in Gaul and her death at Aquae Sextiae; he identified her descendant as the 6th-century Comtess of Avallon named Viviane del Acqs, whose three daughters would thus become known as the 'Ladies of the Lake'.
Chrétien de Troyes's French Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, the first known story featuring Lancelot as a prominent character, was also the first to mention his upbringing by a fairy in a lake. If it is accepted that the Franco-German Lanzelet by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven contains elements of a more primitive version of this tale than Chrétien's, the infant Lancelot was spirited away to a lake by a water fairy known as the Lady of the Sea and then raised in her Land of Maidens. The fairy queen character and her paradise island in Lanzelet are reminiscent of Morgen of the Island of Avallon in Geoffrey's work. Furthermore, the fairy from Lanzelet'' has a son whose name Mabuz is an Anglo-Norman form of Mabon, son of Morgan's early Welsh counterpart Modron. According to Roger Sherman Loomis, "it seems almost certain" that Morgan and the Lady of the Lake have originally began as one character in the legend. In a related hypothesis, the early Myrddyn tradition could have merged with the fairy lover motif popular in medieval stories, and such role would later split into Merlin's two fairy mistresses, one of them 'good' and the other 'bad'.
Character evolution
According to Maureen Fries, "more beneficent splittings-off from original role emerge in the several Ladies of the Lake who later develop from her archetype: literally watered-down from Morgan." She wrote about this "fluid figure, always at least double and usually multiple in her manifestations":Legend
Lancelot's guardian
Following her early appearances in the 12th-century poems of Chrétien and Ulrich, the Lady of the Lake began being featured by this title in the French chivalric romance prose by the 13th century. As a fairy godmother-type foster mother of the hero Lancelot, she inherits the role of an unnamed aquatic fairy queen, her prototype found in Ulrich's Lanzelet. Ulrich uses the changeling part of the fairy abduction lore for the background of Lancelot as having been swapped him with her son Mabuz. However, the figure of Lancelot's supernatural foster mother has no offspring of her own in any of the later texts.She does not appear in person in Chrétien's Lancelot. The text only has her mentioned briefly as an unnamed fairy "who had cared for him in his infancy" and continues to aid Lancelot remotely, through a magic ring given by her to him. There is no connection to water mentioned in this version.
In the Lancelot-Grail prose cycle, loosely based on Chrétien, the Lady resides in an otherworldly enchanted realm, the entry to which is disguised as an illusion of a lake. There, she raises Lancelot from his infancy having stolen him from his mother following the death of his father, King Ban. She teaches Lancelot arts and writing, infusing him with wisdom and courage, and overseeing his training to become an unsurpassed warrior. She also rears his orphaned cousins Lionel and Bors after having her sorcerous damsel Saraïde rescue them from King Claudas. All this takes her only a few years in the human world. Afterwards, she sends off the adolescent Lancelot to King Arthur's court as the nameless White Knight, due to her own affinity with this color.
Through much of the Prose Lancelot Propre, the Lady keeps aiding Lancelot in various ways during his early adventures to become a famed knight and discover his true identity, usually acting through her maidens serving as her agents and messengers. She gives him her magical gifts, including a magic ring of protection against enchantments in a manner similar in that to his fairy protectoress in Chrétien's poem. Later on, she also works to actively encourage Lancelot and Guinevere's relationship and its consummation. That includes sending Guinevere a symbolically illustrated magic shield, the crack in which closes up after the queen finally spends her first night with Lancelot. She furthermore personally arrives to restore Lancelot to sanity during some of his recurring periods of madness, on one occasion using the above-mentioned shield to heal his mind.
Merlin's beloved and captor
The Vulgate Cycle is first to tell of either possibly a different or explicitly the same Lady of the Lake in the Prose Merlin-derived section in which Merlin falls in love with her, typically unrequited. There, she also uses other names, including Elaine. As a result of their usually final encounter, Merlin almost always either dies or at very least is never seen again.The story takes place before the main Vulgate Lancelot section but was written later, linking her with the disappearance of Merlin from the romance tradition of Arthurian legend. She is given the name Viviane and a human origin, although she is still being called a fairy. In the Vulgate Merlin, Viviane refuses to give Merlin her love until he has taught her all his secrets, after which she uses her power to seal him by making him sleep forever. The text explains this by a spell she put "on her groin which, as long as it lasted, prevented anyone from deflowering her and having relations with her." In an alternative Bristol Merlin fragment, she resists his seduction with the help of a magic ring during the week they spend together.
Though Merlin knows beforehand that this will happen due to his power of foresight, he is unable to counteract her because of the 'truth' this ability of foresight holds. He decides to do nothing for his situation other than to continue to teach her his secrets until she takes the opportunity to get rid of him. Consequently, she entraps and entombs her unresisting mentor within a tree, in a hole underneath a large stone, or inside a cave, depending on the version of this story as it is told in the different texts. In the Prophéties de Merlin, for instance, Viviane is especially cruel in the way she disposes of Merlin, making him die a long death inside his tomb while taunting him. There, she is proud of how Merlin had never taken her virginity, unlike what happened with his other female students, such as Morgan.
The Post-Vulgate revision has Viviane described as causing Merlin's death out of her hatred of him. Conversely, the Livre d'Artus, a late alternative variant of the Prose Lancelot, shows a completely peaceful scene taking place under a blooming hawthorn tree where Merlin is lovingly put to sleep by Viviane, as it is required by his destined fate that she has learned of. He then wakes up inside an impossibly high and indestructible tower, invisible from the outside, where she will come to meet him there almost every day or night—a motif reminiscent of Ganieda's visits of Merlin's house in an earlier version of his life as described by Geoffrey in Vita Merlini.
In the Prophéties de Merlin, she then takes Tristan's half-brother Meliadus the Younger, also raised by her along with Lancelot, as her actual lover who then convinces her to access Merlin's tomb to record his prophecies while Merlin is still alive. The Lancelot-Grail, too, has Viviane take a lover, in this case the evil king Brandin of the Isles, whom she teaches some magic that he then applies to his terrible castle Dolorous Gard. In the Vulgate Merlin, an unnamed lady, possibly Viviane, abortively turns King Brandegorre's son Evadeam into the deformed Dwarf Knight for refusing her love. In the Post-Vulgate Merlin, Viviane later protects Arthur from Morgan through her magical interventions.
In her backstory in the Vulgate Merlin, Viviane was a daughter of the knight Dionas and a niece of the Duke of Burgundy. According to the Post-Vulgate, she was born in Dionas' domain that included the fairy forests of Briosque and Darnantes, and it was an enchantment of her fairy godmother, Diana the Huntress Goddess, that caused Viviane to be so alluring to Merlin when she first met him there as a young teenager. The narrator informs the reader that, back "in the time of Virgil", Diana had been a Queen of Sicily that was considered a goddess by her subjects. The Post-Vulgate Suite de Merlin describes how Viviane was born and lived in a magnificent castle at the foot of a mountain in Brittany as a daughter of the King of Northumbria. Here, she is initially known as the beautiful 15-year-old Damsel Huntress in her introductory episode, in which she serves the role of a damsel in distress in the adventure of the three knights separately sent by Merlin to rescue her from kidnapping; the quest is soon completed by King Pellinore who tracks down and kills her abductor.
The Post-Vulgate rewrite also describes how Diana had killed her partner Faunus to be with a man named Felix, but then she was herself killed by her lover at that lake, which came to be called the Lake of Diana. This is presumably the place where Lancelot of the Lake is later raised, at first not knowing his real parentage, by Viviane. Nevertheless, only the narration of the Vulgate Cycle actually makes it clear that its Lady of the Lake and Viviane are in fact the one and same character in the French romances. Viviane is also only 12 when she meets Merlin in the Forest of Briosque in the Vulgate Merlin.