What do you think?
Rate this book
The Legend of Sir Lancelot du Lac: Enriched edition. Studies upon its Origin, Development, and Position in the Arthurian Romantic Cycle
Publisher's series: Grimm Library, No. 12
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1901
4 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Jessie Laidlay Weston
116 books16 followersJessie Laidlay Weston (1850–1928) was an independent scholar and folklorist, working mainly on mediaeval Arthurian texts.
Weston was the daughter of William Weston a tea merchant and member of the Salters' Company and his second wife, Sarah Burton, and named after his first wife Jessica Laidlay. Sarah, after giving birth to two more daughters died when Jessie was about seven. William remarried Clara King who gave birth to five more children. The elder siblings were born in Surrey, but youngest son Clarence was born in Kent. Jessie, her sister Frances and brother Clarence later moved to Bournemouth, where Jessie began her writing career, remaining there until around 1903. Her home at 65 Lansdowne Road still stands, as of 2010. Jessie studied in Hildesheim then Paris under Gaston Paris. She also studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art.
One of her first printed works was a lengthy sentimental verse called The Rose-Tree of Hildesheim. A narrative about "sacrifice and denial", it was modelled on the story of the Thousand-year Rose, which grows on a wall at Hildesheim Cathedral. Published in 1896, it was the title verse in an omnibus of her poems.
(from Wikipedia)
Weston was the daughter of William Weston a tea merchant and member of the Salters' Company and his second wife, Sarah Burton, and named after his first wife Jessica Laidlay. Sarah, after giving birth to two more daughters died when Jessie was about seven. William remarried Clara King who gave birth to five more children. The elder siblings were born in Surrey, but youngest son Clarence was born in Kent. Jessie, her sister Frances and brother Clarence later moved to Bournemouth, where Jessie began her writing career, remaining there until around 1903. Her home at 65 Lansdowne Road still stands, as of 2010. Jessie studied in Hildesheim then Paris under Gaston Paris. She also studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art.
One of her first printed works was a lengthy sentimental verse called The Rose-Tree of Hildesheim. A narrative about "sacrifice and denial", it was modelled on the story of the Thousand-year Rose, which grows on a wall at Hildesheim Cathedral. Published in 1896, it was the title verse in an omnibus of her poems.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 27, 2022
This book constitutes the second in a series of studies which the great early twentieth century Arthurian scholar Jessie L. Weston (1850–1928) would devote to individual Knights of the Round Table. The first focused on Sir Gawain, about whom some of her male colleagues considered she had something of a “complex” – and it was here that she set out her modus operandi: to disentangle and elucidate the various threads of the legend through a thorough study of all available sources; and thus determine which elements were predominantly the product of “literary invention” and which derived from “mythical tradition.” Gawain’s roots she found in “early Irish tradition,” which she believed proved that the feats ascribed to him had their source in Celtic myth.
But Sir Lancelot, unlike Gawain, is “certainly no hero of prehistoric myth”: On the contrary, his story is, by comparison, “extraordinarily deficient in characteristic features. The adventures ascribed to Lancelot might just as well be placed to the credit of any other knight: they are the ordinary stock-in-trade of the mediæval romancer. Guinevere's lover he is, but the love-story is of the most conventional character: the more it is studied the more clearly do the records in which it is shrined appear the offspring of conscious literary invention, and that invention of by no means a high order.”
Here the obvious comparison is with the love of Tristan and Isolde, whose mythic roots Weston had explored in a previous book (The Legends of the Wagner Drama: Studies in Mythology and Romance); and which manages to “by force of sheer humanity lay hold on our imagination”. Not so the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, in which she finds not “the least ring of reality ... They go through all the prescribed gestures of their role with admirable precision. Guinevere is by turns gracious, disdainful, frantically jealous, and repentant of her jealousy; Lancelot is courteous, humble, despairing, hopeful ... but nowhere in the whole wearily drawn-out story does the real, pent-up human feeling break through. We can never imagine these two taking one another by the hand and wandering off into the wilderness, content, and more than content, with each other's presence. The story of Lancelot and Guinevere is artificial, not natural; it demands the setting of the court, not of the woodlands.” She adds that “it is impossible not to feel that the relations of the lovers are dictated by the rules of a conventional etiquette rather than by the impulse of an overmastering passion. Even in the scene in which Lancelot first reveals his love to the queen, there is no touch of genuine passion or self-abandonment...”
When a male reader, referring to her unmarried status, commented: “Perhaps Miss Weston is not an expert in these matters”, she retorted: “I know the real article from a sham, that’s all.”
As will by now be apparent, she was a feisty critic, more than happy to engage head-on with her critics; but she combined this argumentative nature with a passion for original research; meaning that she was second to none in her first-hand knowledge of the medieval manuscripts; and she is forever bemoaning the lack of critical editions, which was (in the first half of the twentieth century) hampering serious scholarship. This also means that some of her chapters on the development of the Arthurian prose cycles, especially the French and Dutch romances, have been overtaken by events. But I’m sure she would have been delighted to know that some of her work had finally been superseded by the publishing of critical editions – and modern English translations – of these vast compilations.
Nor does subsequent scholarship necessarily undermine her contention that “the root of the Lancelot tale was simply a Breton lai, relating the theft of a king's son by a water fairy”; that, by contrast, Arthur and Gawain “stand in very close relation to early Irish mythic tradition”; or that “the tales told in these islands appear to have been of a mythic rather than of a romantic character.”
There is more on Jessie Weston, Arthurian literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Weston begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
But Sir Lancelot, unlike Gawain, is “certainly no hero of prehistoric myth”: On the contrary, his story is, by comparison, “extraordinarily deficient in characteristic features. The adventures ascribed to Lancelot might just as well be placed to the credit of any other knight: they are the ordinary stock-in-trade of the mediæval romancer. Guinevere's lover he is, but the love-story is of the most conventional character: the more it is studied the more clearly do the records in which it is shrined appear the offspring of conscious literary invention, and that invention of by no means a high order.”
Here the obvious comparison is with the love of Tristan and Isolde, whose mythic roots Weston had explored in a previous book (The Legends of the Wagner Drama: Studies in Mythology and Romance); and which manages to “by force of sheer humanity lay hold on our imagination”. Not so the love of Lancelot and Guinevere, in which she finds not “the least ring of reality ... They go through all the prescribed gestures of their role with admirable precision. Guinevere is by turns gracious, disdainful, frantically jealous, and repentant of her jealousy; Lancelot is courteous, humble, despairing, hopeful ... but nowhere in the whole wearily drawn-out story does the real, pent-up human feeling break through. We can never imagine these two taking one another by the hand and wandering off into the wilderness, content, and more than content, with each other's presence. The story of Lancelot and Guinevere is artificial, not natural; it demands the setting of the court, not of the woodlands.” She adds that “it is impossible not to feel that the relations of the lovers are dictated by the rules of a conventional etiquette rather than by the impulse of an overmastering passion. Even in the scene in which Lancelot first reveals his love to the queen, there is no touch of genuine passion or self-abandonment...”
When a male reader, referring to her unmarried status, commented: “Perhaps Miss Weston is not an expert in these matters”, she retorted: “I know the real article from a sham, that’s all.”
As will by now be apparent, she was a feisty critic, more than happy to engage head-on with her critics; but she combined this argumentative nature with a passion for original research; meaning that she was second to none in her first-hand knowledge of the medieval manuscripts; and she is forever bemoaning the lack of critical editions, which was (in the first half of the twentieth century) hampering serious scholarship. This also means that some of her chapters on the development of the Arthurian prose cycles, especially the French and Dutch romances, have been overtaken by events. But I’m sure she would have been delighted to know that some of her work had finally been superseded by the publishing of critical editions – and modern English translations – of these vast compilations.
Nor does subsequent scholarship necessarily undermine her contention that “the root of the Lancelot tale was simply a Breton lai, relating the theft of a king's son by a water fairy”; that, by contrast, Arthur and Gawain “stand in very close relation to early Irish mythic tradition”; or that “the tales told in these islands appear to have been of a mythic rather than of a romantic character.”
There is more on Jessie Weston, Arthurian literature and religious symbolism in my Goodreads blog: Myth Dancing (Incorporating the Twenty Third Letter). A series of posts on Weston begins here: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...
May 25, 2011
This is a useful study of the Lancelot legend, if you haven't read the stories Weston describes. She points out how Lancelot was a late addition to the Arthurian legend, and not one of the original companions of Arthur at all; that his legend did not originally involve his being the lover of Queen Guinevere at all, and that this love affair was added to his adventures under the influence of the popular Tristan-and-Isolde legend. Much of her work consists of summaries of the principal texts--Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet, the obscure Lancelot et le Cerf au Pied Blanc [Lancelot and the Hart with the White Foot], Chrétien de Troyes' Lancelot: Or, the Knight of the Cart, and the Prose Lancelot of the Lake. Like a lot of scholarship from this period, though (the book was published in 1901), it has some limitations as to its methods. Weston's more famous book From Ritual to Romance has some cultural importance because of its influence over T. S. Eliot, but isn't greatly useful for scholarly purposes. On the other hand, this book, like Weston's other little-known book, Legend of Sir Gawain Studies upon Its Original Scope and Significance, is very useful to those wishing to write a fantasy novel based upon the Round Table knights.
November 1, 2020
A still significant and always entertaining author, Jessie Laidlay Weston existed historically at a wonderfully important and tumultuous time in Arthurian scholarship, for she, as commentator and translator, was present when developments in anthropology and textual hermeneutics (think Sir James Frazer and Friedrich Schleiermacher) had the effect of throwing her field in new, interesting directions. So it is no surprise, and even less so to readers of the more widely known work "From Ritual to Romance," that Weston's book length treatment of the Lancelot legend, "The Legend of Sir Lancelot Du Lac: Studies upon its Origin, Development, and Position in the Arthurian Romantic Cycle," is of significant and lasting importance. For in it Weston lays out an airtight argument about the origin of the legend of Lancelot (in mythic, folkloric realm of the 'slaying king, he too to be slain' so familiar to readers of Frazer's "The Golden Bough"); the development of the piece (out of earlier works such as Chretien's 'Perceval,' Wolfram's 'Parzival, and the 'Cliges' and 'Charette' of earlier authors), and finally its position (as a later development, somewhat secularized and adapted to popular tastes). In point of fact, despite the work's great age and admitted 'less than fully realized' nature due to weaknesses in what was the current state of the scholarship, "The Legend of Sir Lancelot Du Lac" presents insightful theories about the work in questions that, to this lay reader, seem justified and relevant. Moreover, Ms. Weston's tying of the origins of the plot to the oral nature of their sources, and, additionally, her linking of these sources to pagan cultural formations such as the 'slaying king, who too is slain,' while not fully realized in the work, suggests depths to these works that are resonant and illuminating. This aforesaid mythological analysis, I am sure, has been explored more fully in subsequent works by different authors; their work bears viewing, I am sure. Finally, as an exemplar of literary research, Ms. Weston's works is here too of first rate caliber, for in the final couple of chapters a direct exploration of differences in various texts is outlined in incredible detail, bespeaking commitment to the craft of literary critic of the highest order.
A compelling read to aficionados of the tales of Arthur, "The Legend of Sir Launcelot Du Lac" also is, because of its historical position in time, an artifact of a field in transition; as such it is somewhat dated and out of focus; however, the passion and resonance with which the argument is presented, in clear, lucid prose, allows the work to assume a more pristine, powerful position: as a work for the ages. For that reason it assumes the mantle of authority it bears so well.
A compelling read to aficionados of the tales of Arthur, "The Legend of Sir Launcelot Du Lac" also is, because of its historical position in time, an artifact of a field in transition; as such it is somewhat dated and out of focus; however, the passion and resonance with which the argument is presented, in clear, lucid prose, allows the work to assume a more pristine, powerful position: as a work for the ages. For that reason it assumes the mantle of authority it bears so well.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews