Allusive Fonteinnes: love as trouble in La Mort le Roi Artu.

King, David S.

Scholars have long noted how the first half of the thirteenth-century French prose romance, La Mort le Roi Artu, parallels the narrative of Beroul's twelfth-century verse Roman de Tristran (1) David F. Hult, in the preface to his recent edition and translation of the Mort Artu, indicates the resemblance as evidence that the prose romancer sought to glorify the adulterous love between Lancelot and Guenevere. Hult, like many other scholars, sees the final installment in the Lancelot-Grail cycle as turning away from the ascetic concerns of its immediate predecessor, La Queste del Saint Graal (63). (2) But one must not mistake the secular focus of the characters in the Mort Artu for that of the author. The same portion of the romance that resembles Beroul's poem makes a number of smaller scale allusions to other texts that suggest kinship with the spirit of the Queste. These allusions center on the image of the fonteinne (fountain or spring), first evoked in a description of Guenevere recalling the lovers' initial meeting in the Prose Lancelot. Following that point, two springs appear in the narrative. Lancelot stops to rest by one when chased from court by Guenevere's jealousy, and again by another when drawn back by peril she faces. Elements of these scenes allude to the Narcissus myth, as told in the twelfth-century Lai de Narcisse, and to Biblical verses that associate fountains with marital fidelity/infidelity and the water from such sources with knowledge of the divine. The scenes also recall Lancelot's oneiric encounter with the sole fountain in the Queste, a vision underscoring the knight's unworthiness. With these references in mind, we may understand Lancelot's behavior at the springs in the Mort Artu as suggesting his obsession with worldly matters and his neglect of the spiritual. The allusions encourage the reader to think of adultery as a source of turmoil rather than as an inspiration, a message in harmony with the Queste's attitude toward carnal passion.

The description of the queen given in the opening folios of the Mort Artu recalls and recasts the one given on Lancelot's and Guenevere's initial meeting. In the Prose Lancelot, he steals furtive glances at her, losing interest in the beauty of all other women. The narrator endorses the young knight's infatuation: "il n'avoit mie tort, se il ne prisoit envers la roine nule autre dame, car che fu la dame des dames et la fontaine de biaute. Mais s'il seust la grant valor qui en li estoit, encore l'esgardast il plus volentiers, car nule n'estoit, ne povre ne riche, de sa valor" (7: 274). (3) The Mort Artu's narrator, by contrast, tells us that: "la reine estoit si bele que touz li monz s'en merveilloit, car a celui tens meismes qu'ele iert bien en l'aage de cinquante anz estoit ele si bele dame que en tout le monde ne trouvast l'en mie sa pareille, dont aucun chevalier distrent, por ce que sa biaute ne li failloit nule foiz, qu'ele estoit fonteinne de toutes biautez" (3-4). (4) This narrator is less effusive in his praise. He attributes the fountain simile to others rather than vouch for its truth himself. The queen's inner virtues merit no mention, and her beauty is a feature of this world, thereby hinting at the beauties of another world that escape the attention of those at court. What precedes the description motivates this inference. The narrator reminds us that "Lancelos se fust tenuz chastement par le conseill del preudome a qui il se fist confes quant il fu en la queste del Seint Graal et eust del tout renoiee la reine Guenievre" (3). We then learn of the hero's surrender to temptation following the quest--"il renchei el pechie de la reine autresi comme il avoit fet autrefoiz" (3). Soon thereafter, Agravain denounces the lovers to the king. In this context, the allusion to the Prose Lancelot reads more like an explanation of Lancelot's relapse rather than as a celebration of the pair's illicit love.

From this point on and until Lancelot leaves Arthur's kingdom, the narrative closely associates love with mortal peril. Lancelot receives a serious wound at the Winchester tournament during which he wears the girl of Escalot's sleeve on his helmet. Hearing of this apparent gesture of affection, Guenevere "en est tant a malese qu'ele ne set quel conseill prendre de soi, fors tant que ele se venchera de Lancelot" (32). When speaking to Bors who wounded him, she says "Maleoite soit l'eure ... que vos ne l'oceistes" (33). As Lancelot recuperates from his wound far from court, the girl of Escalot tells him that his unwillingness to love her will soon bring about her death. A squire tells Lancelot of a tournament that Guenevere will attend. Knowing that he cannot participate in it, Lancelot fears dying of grief. When the agitation he experiences reopens his wound, his physician tells the squire: "Vos l'avez mort par voz paroles" (43). The girl of Escalot returns to Lancelot, telling him, "ge sui a la mort venue, se je n'en sui par vous ostee" (67). Bors delays telling his cousin of the queen's jealousy for fear her anger will drive Lancelot to suicide.

Although narratives that idealize adulterous love commonly intertwine love and mortal danger, the Mort Artu excludes an essential element of such idealization. As Simon Gaunt notes, "the morbid drive toward death, indeed the desire for death that characterizes many of the Tristan stories, are largely absent from Lancelot's love affair with Guenevere" (124). No matter how many others die for or because of their love, they ultimately refuse "to be martyrs for love" (128). (5) But one may sense the narrative's mistrust of the adulterous passion long before reaching the romance's conclusion and well after its prologue. Recovered from his wound at the Winchester tournament, Lancelot returns to court where he learns of Guenevere's anger. Leaving his companions behind, he seeks refuge "chies un hermite a cui il s'estoit fez confes aucune foiz" (78). The narrator does not identify this hermit as the one to whom Lancelot confessed during the quest, but such precision is not necessary given the detail offered earlier. That Lancelot confessed reminds us again of his renunciation of love for the queen in the previous romance and underscores his current retreat from contrition. It is difficult to imagine a purpose for such a reminder, if not to encourage doubt about the moral quality of the hero's love.

During his stay at the hermitage, Lancelot goes for a ride in the forest. Oppressed by the day's heat, he stops to rest by a "fonteinne," lies down, and falls asleep (79). The earlier description of Guenevere's beauty, along with the reasons for Lancelot's confession and his exile, suggest that this fountain is also designed to make the reader think of her. The image of Lancelot asleep next to the fountain, representing Arthur's wife, no doubt alludes ironically to Proverbs 5, a Bible chapter frequently cited by Saint Bernard, promoter of the Cistercian order whose monks figure prominently in the Queste. (6) We can, therefore, presume the passage was familiar to thirteenth-century readers. In it, Solomon warns his son to avoid adulterous women. He then urges the boy to content himself with his own spouse and not to share her virtue with others in figurative terms: "bibe aquam de cisterna tua et fluenta putei tui. / deriventur fontes tui foras et in plateis aquas tuas divide. / habeto eas solus nec sint alieni participes tui" (Drink water from your own cistern, flowing water from your own well. / Should your fountains be scattered abroad, streams of water in the streets? / Let them be for yourself alone, and not for strangers with you) (5: 15-17). The connection between well and wife becomes clearer in the next verse, when Solomon concludes: "sit vena tua benedicta et laetare cum muliere adulescentiae tuae" (Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth) (5: 18).

While Lancelot sleeps by the fountain, a forester hunting a "grant cerf" ' fires an arrow that misses the animal and instead pierces Lancelot's left thigh (79). In a literal sense, Guenevere's jealousy puts him in the arrow's path, so we may understand the arrow, in a figurative sense, as a warning against the danger of sleeping beside the queen. Several elements of the scene also call to mind the legend of Narcissus, secular in its inspiration but used by ecclesiastical authors to preach against pride and vanity. (7) The Mort Artu's author references in particular the Lai de Narcisse where the poet tells us "Narcisus, qui fu mors d'amer / nous doit essanple demostrer" (35-36). (8) This twelfth-century narrative diverges in important ways from the myth related in book III of Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the lai, Narcissus spurns the love of a young woman, Dane, an Old French rendering of Daphne, the name of a water nymph and daughter of the river god, Peneus, in book I of Ovid's work. (9) Thus the young woman's name, like Guenevere's, evokes a body of water. In the French poem, Dane is the daughter of a king, and Narcissus is a "fius a un suen home" (551). When spurned by Narcissus, Dane, like Guenevere, calls for revenge on the object of her affection, and Venus complies with the princess' request. Narcissus, hunting deer on a hot day and separated from his companions, stops to drink from a "fontainne qui mout ert clere et douce et sainne" (635-36). When he bends down to quench his thirst, he falls in love with his own reflection in the spring. He perceives not his own likeness, but that of a water nymph, a creature recalling the princess' namesake. Indeed, the verse indicating what he sees in the fountain--"cuide ce soit fee de mer" (651)--closely resembles the one relating his first impression of Dane: "cuide que ce soit diuesse u fee" (450).

As the feminine image in the fountain suggests, this poem does not represent a negative exemplum on self-obsession or one, as Gerald Seaman would have it, where the "poet was attempting to reduce the whole of Ovid's story to a narrative on the perils of unrequited love" (26). (10) Seaman accepts in earnest part of the lai's prologue that insists a lady, faced with a suitor's pleas, "ne soit pas vers li trop fiere" (22), and that if a man rejects a lady's entreaties, "on le doit ardoir u pendre" (32). The narrative itself suggests a different moral, one on requited love, for when Narcissus realizes that what captivates him is an illusion that cannot return his ardor, he remembers Dane and transfers his affection to her, telling himself: "Dius! s'or venoit par aventure, / ja porroit estre bien seure / que ele conqueroit m'amor" (959-61). She comes to the spring in search of him, whereupon he reaches out his arms in welcome. Although in Ovid's telling, Narcissus and Echo never come together as she would wish, in the French text, Narcissus and Dane die in each other's arms. Reciprocity provides them no relief; union rather than rejection proves fatal. One can understand the prose romance author's interest in alluding to the poem, given this conclusion. In calling the lai to the reader's mind, the author suggests the destructive power of Lancelot's and Guenevere's mutual embrace.

The gesture on Lancelot's part that would most clearly associate his visit to the fountain with Ovid's poem or with the lai is missing from the Mort Artu. Whereas Narcissus drinks from the fountain, Lancelot never bends down to the water. His abstention is particularly striking in light of the circumstances the narrator describes: "[c]elui jor fist moult grant chaut et por l'ardeur que Lancelos trouva ... il ... s'ala gesir seur l'eur d'une fonteinne et s'endormi erranment por le leu que il trouva froit et resant; et il avoit eu devant moult grant chaut" (79). His lack of thirst serves a dual figurative purpose. On the one hand, it suggests Lancelot's respect for Guenevere's wishes. Forbidden as he is from her presence, he dares not approach his lips to hers, though his proximity to the fountain suggests his longing. On the other hand, his abstinence implies a misdirected passion, pointing to another meaning for the fountain. Lancelot never reaches toward the water, but the stag approaches the fountain and drinks. The image recalls the beginning of Psalm 41: "quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus. / sitivit anima mea ad Deum fortem: vivum" (As the stag longs for flowing springs, so my soul longs for thee, O God. / My soul thirsts for God, for the living God) (41: 2-3). (11) These verses, like others in Scripture, associate drinking from a spring with the assumption of divine knowledge or the spiritual development of the believer. (12) In the Mort Artu, that Lancelot feels no thirst, despite his overheated state whereas the stag drinks, draws the reader's attention to what the hero neglects. That we should understand this neglect as pertaining to spiritual matters seems all the more likely given the episode's resemblance to another in the Queste where water plays the same metaphorical role as it does in the Psalm.

In that romance, Hector has a dream in which he sees a penitent Lancelot riding an ass. When Lancelot dismounts to drink from "une fontainne, la plus bele qu'il onques veist," the water disappears (150). (13) The preudome who interprets the vision for Hector tells him that the spring represents "li Sainz Graax, ce est la grace del Saint Esperit. La fontaine est la douce pluie, la douce parole de l'Evangile, ou li cuers del verai repentant troeve la grant doucor" (159). The vision prophesizes Lancelot's attempt at Corbenic Castle to enter the room that contains the Grail, the chamber a voice warns him not to enter. The preudome says of Lancelot "il perdra la veue des eulz devant le Saint Vessel, por ce qu'il les conchia a resgarder les terrianes ordures" (159). While in this context the fontaine represents holiness, it also references the fountain of this world, the queen, for Lancelot's fixation with her represents, at least in part, the "terrianes ordures" that prohibit the slaking of his thirst in the dream. By this point Lancelot has renounced his sin with the queen; nevertheless, he remains burdened with the pride that grew out of their love. As a preudome tells him earlier: "si tost come tu eus tes eulz eschaufez de l'ardor de luxure, maintenant enchacas humilite et atresis orgueil" (126). His lamentable performance at a tournament, his attempt to fight his way into the Grail castle, as well as his attempt to enter the room where the Grail stands, evince his stubbornness and his inability to place greater faith in his Creator than in his own power (144; 253). Hult interprets Lancelot's denial of direct access to the Holy Vessel as an "exclusion apparente de la compagnie de Dieu" (42). Although pride and the "terrianes ordures" Lancelot has seen distinguish him from Galahad, Perceval, and Bors who see the Grail first hand, he experiences a vision of the Grail during his temporary blindness at Corbenic. When the dream ends, he expresses regret, saying: "Ha! Diex, por quoi m'avez vos si tost esveillie? Tant je estoie ore plus aeise que je ne sere hui mes!" (257). His bliss suggests that we understand the vision in the way Albert Pauphilet does, as one that joins "chatiment a la recompense" (129). This dual meaning is all the more evident when we take into account the conclusion of the quest for the one who dreams about Lancelot and the spring. Hector is turned away as unworthy at the castle gates, and the remaining knights from Arthur's court never even find their way to Corbenic. Given this contrast, we may understand the less than truly repentant heart as benefiting from the mere attempt to drink, and as more graceful than those who experience no thirst at all for the "douce pluie."

In the Mort Artu, scarcely had Lancelot left court because of the queen's anger than Guenevere passes a poisoned fruit to Gaheris who dies on the spot. From Lancelot's injury at the fountain, the narrative turns our attention back to court where Gaheris's brother Mador accuses the queen of treachery. Here we have the suggestion that love will prove fatal for Guenevere because she has chased away the knight who would champion her cause. Immediately thereafter, the narrative presents a sign of love's fatal effect and yet another allusion to episodes in the Queste and the Prose Lancelot that stress the very continence Lancelot now forsakes. A boat carrying the girl of Escalot's body arrives on a river near the palace at Camelot. Amazed by the beauty of the vessel, Gawain says to Arthur: "a poi que ge ne di que les aventures recommencent" (88). Gawain's remark itself underscores the allusive quality of the scene. As the Mort Artu's first folios indicate, adventures in Logres "estoient si menees a fin," a cessation announced in the previous romance when the Grail departs for Sarras (3). (14) On board the boat, Gawain and Arthur find a bed, the girl's corpse, and a note blaming Lancelot for the girl's death. The three elements recall a discovery Lancelot makes in the Queste. On a beautiful boat, he finds the body of Perceval's sister on a bed with a note explaining the cause of her death. She expired after giving blood to cure a lady whose face is "deffet et brocone et si mesaeisie de la meselerie" (240). Because Perceval's sister was virginal in thought and in deed, her blood restores the noble woman's former beauty. However, the abuse of virtue so angers the heavens that divine vengeance destroys the "desloial pecheresse," all who served her, and her castle (245). The reminder of this collective punishment implies a warning for Logres in the Mort Artu, though Arthur's realm is not so irredeemable as that of the leprous woman. But just as the leper kills Perceval's sister, Lancelot bears moral responsibility for the girl of Escalot's death in that he prefers the unchaste love of a lady to that of a maiden. His spurning of the latter in favor of the former in the Mort Artu contrasts with his abstinence in the Queste. While he rides in the boat with Perceval's sister, a preudome on shore implores him: "Or gardes que tu soies chaste en pensee et en oevre des or en avant, si que la chastee de toi s'acort a la virginite de lui. Et ainsi porra durer la compaignie de vos deus" (249). Because Lancelot obeys the injunction, the boat delivers him to the gates of Corbenic Castle, another sign that God affords him grace for his repentance.

Although the boat, the letter, and the deceased maiden in the Mort Artu closely parallel those in the Queste, the girl of Escalot does not represent a perfect analogy for Perceval's sister. The girl of Escalot remains virginal in deed, but not in thought, for she seeks Lancelot's affections. She thus represents a composite reflection, one of Perceval's sister, and one of another maiden who appears late in the Prose Lancelot, at a point where the romance begins acknowledging the moral priorities imposed by the upcoming quest. This unnamed maiden meets and falls in love with Lancelot beside a "fontainne bele et clere" (4:133). Lancelot drinks from this spring, yet not before serpents have poisoned it. The toxin destroys his beauty as his body swells and his hair and nails fall out. The maiden uses her knowledge of medicine to heal him, but she becomes sick from unrequited love and can no longer treat her patient. As a result, Lancelot's condition worsens until a compromise allows the recovery of both parties. She will remain a virgin devoted to him, and he will serve as her platonic ami whenever they are together. In other words, we may understand chastity as the antidote for the sufferings of Lancelot and the maiden, and the poisoned fountain as a metaphor for his illicit love, since this romance originates the description of Guenevere as fountain. The absence of such a chaste accord to save the girl of Escalot suggests the retrograde direction that Lancelot has taken in the Mort Artu. With the boat, letter, and body, the author hints that the girl, like Perceval's sister, perishes for an unworthy cause.

From that life wasted, the narrative returns to Lancelot, telling us that "tant demora Lancelos chies l'ermite qu'il fu auques gueriz de la plaie que li venerres li avoit fete" (92). The sentence reminds us of Lancelot's visit to the fountain and, a third time, of his confession of sin with the queen. Again, he rides in the forest and stops by a fountain. This time, another knight sleeps beside it. Rather than disturb him, Lancelot approaches quietly and waits for the sleeper to wake. Neither knight drinks, but Lancelot assumes the role of the stag in the previous fountain scene in the sense that he draws knowledge from the unnamed knight who tells him of the queen's predicament. No one will defend her against Mador's charge of treachery. With this knowledge, Lancelot returns to court, defeats Mador, and reignites his liaison with the queen. To the sin of omission suggested by the previous fountain episode that alludes to the neglect of spiritual matters, this episode adds the sin of commission represented by the active pursuit of the queen's affections.

The juxtaposition of the fountain evoking the queen, and Lancelot's lust of her, and the sort of fountain Lancelot bends down to drink from in the Queste calls to mind another biblical passage, this one from the New Testament. In John 4, the Samaritan woman approaches Jacob's well to fill her jug, and Jesus, resting on the well, offers her a different kind of water, saying: "omnis qui bibit ex aqua hac sitiet iterum, qui autem biberit ex aqua quam ego dabo ei non sitiet in aeternum / sed aqua quam dabo ei fiet in eo fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam" (Everyone who drinks this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; / the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life) (4: 13-14). Aware that Christ speaks figuratively, she asks to taste this water. But he tells her first to fetch her husband and return. She demurs, admitting that she has no proper husband, whereupon christ reveals his knowledge of her marital history and of the man with whom she now lives in sin (4: 15-18). Therefore, like the queen and Lancelot, she fails to respect the sanctity of marriage. As a consequence, the woman is not fully ready to drink the water that provides eternal life. Nonetheless, she calls Jesus a prophet and leaves the well in order to tell others about him, a conclusion implying, in Augustine's words, that "she accepts the direction that will lead her to living well" (15. 28). (15) Her behavior resembles that of Lancelot in Hector's dream during the Grail quest. She wants to drink, though true repentance does not yet fill her heart. Lancelot, speaking to the unnamed knight by the fountain in the Mort Artu, moves in the opposite direction. He has no interest in the water that represents "la douce parole de l'Evangile" (Queste 159). His sole desire is to save the queen and end his period of involuntary separation from her.

In fact, after his triumph over Mador at Camelot, Lancelot and the Guenevere resume their affair with such intensity "que li pluseur de leanz le sorent veraiement" (107). From this point on, the narrative ceases the intertwining of love and death to concentrate on the latter theme, as the love exposed brings open conflict. Lancelot's men battle Arthur's at the Joyous Guard. To buy a temporary peace, Lancelot agrees to leave the kingdom. But Camelot's violent unraveling has already begun. Because Lancelot's rescue of Guenevere killed Gawain's brothers, the fight moves to Gaul, and in Arthur's absence, moral degeneration accelerates at home. The lovers, and others in Logres, repent in time to save their souls, but too late to save the kingdom. The narrative purpose of this repentance, especially the retreat to the ascetic life of Lancelot and other Round Table knights, must be to recall the values promoted in the Queste and to recall the Mort Artu's opening folios. There the author focuses attention on the moral inadequacies of the quest's survivors, last but not least of them, Lancelot who relapses into the sin he renounced at the urging of the hermit.

Following the reminder of that confession, we find the description of Guenevere's beauty, likening it to that of a fountain. Although the image alludes to the hero's and the queen's first meeting in the Prose Lancelot, the context in which the Mort Artu's narrator offers it suggests that we examine it closely. With muted praise for the queen, this narrator presents the fountain as a worldly phenomenon, a distraction from the ethereal matters that might weigh on Lancelot's mind in the wake of the quest. If not for further reminders of the Grail adventure, one might assume the author shares the secular preoccupations of the inhabitants of Logres, given the attention he devotes to passion. Lancelot's and Guenevere's brushes with death, and the demise of the girl of Escalot, fill the center of the narrative stage. However, the repeated allusions to Lancelot's renunciation of adultery, his visits to a fountain, and the boat containing the girl's body suggest a desire, not to distance the romance from its austere predecessor in the Lancelot-Grail cycle, but to keep the values of the Queste on the reader's mind. These scenes reference other texts of similar moral thrust. That which brings Lancelot to the fountain and the hunting theme call to mind the Lai de Narcisse, a poem where the lovers sharing of affection coincides with their deaths. Other elements point to passages in Proverbs and the Psalms that promote marital fidelity or eagerness for knowledge of the divine. That Lancelot never bends down to drink from the fountains underscores the thirst for spiritual betterment he has lost since the Grail quest. His obsession with the queen pulls him in the opposite direction of the Samaritan woman and tears the kingdom apart. Thus the romance's allusive fountains point to harmony with the Queste. The Mort Artu's author employs more subtle means of denigrating worldly obsessions than his fellow author in the cycle, but the two romancers share a common spirit.

STOCKTON UNIVERSITY

WORKS CITED

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Baumgartner, Emmanuele. "Lancelot et le royaume." La Mort du roi Arthur ou le crepuscule de la chevalerie. Ed. Jean Dufournet. Paris: Champion, 1994. 25-44.

Bogdanow, Fanny. "The Evolution of the Theme of the Fall of Arthur's Kingdom." King Arthur: A Casebook. Ed. Edward Donald Kennedy. New York: Routledge, 1996. 91-103.

Boutet, Dominique. "Arthur et son mythe dans La Mort le roi Artu: visions psychologique, politique et theologique." La Mort du roi Arthur ou le crepuscule de la chevalerie. Ed. Jean Dufournet. Paris: Champion, 1994. 145-65.

Bruce, James Douglas. Evolution of the Arthurian Romance. Vol. 1. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1928.

Coulson, Frank T. "Ovid's metamorphoses in the School Tradition of France, 1180-1400." ovid in the middle ages. Ed. James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 48-82.

Frappier, Jean. Etude sur la Mort le Roi artu, roman du XIIIe siecle. Geneva: Droz, 1972.

Gaunt, Simon. love and Death in medieval French and occitan Courtly literature: martyrs to love. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006.

Goldin, Frederick. The mirror of Narcissus in Courtly love lyric. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967.

Hult, David F. Introduction. "Esquisses d'interpretation." La Mort du Roi Arthur. Ed. and Trans. David F. Hult. Paris: Librarie Generale Francaise, 2009. 9-115.

Lacy, Norris J. "The Sense of an Ending: la Mort le Roi artu." a Companion to the lancelot Grail Cycle. Ed. Carol Dover. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003. 115-23.

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(1) See Lot (198-99), Bruce (436-37), and Frappier Etude (188-95).

(2) See, for example, Baumgartner, Bogdanow, Boutet, Lacy, Suard, Szkilnik, Trachsler.

(3) All quotations of the Prose Lancelot are from Micha's edition, indicated by volume and page.

(4) All quotations of the Mort Artu are from Frappier's edition, indicated by page.

(5) Whereas Gaunt acknowledges the adulterers' repentance at the end of the romance, it is not clear that he sees the Mort Artu as attuned to the values of the Queste, for he refers to Lancelot and Guenevere as "model ... lovers" and to their illicit love as "legitimate business" (128).

(6) See Lubac (1: 233).

(7) See Coulson (49-55).

(8) All quotations of the poem are from Eley's edition.

(9) For the source of name Dane, see Thiry-Stassin (216-71).

(10) Goldin (42) and Vinge (66) indicate a similar understanding of the poem's moral.

(11) Psalm 41: 2-3 in the Latin Bible corresponds to Psalm 42: 2-3 in the Revised Standard Version. Here I alter the translation by replacing "hart" with "stag" and "streams" with "springs" to better follow the Latin text.

(12) See also John 7: 37 and Psalms 35: 10.

(13) All quotations of the Queste are from Pauphilet's edition, indicated by page.

(14) "[C]est saint Vessel, qui anuit se partira dou roiaume de Logres ... ne des or mes n'en avendra aventure" (271).

(15) From Homilies on the Gospel of John, indicated by tractate and paragraph, found in Migne, col. 1520. The translation is mine.