On Hauntings – or Le Morte D’Lamorak

I’ve been putting off writing this first post not so much because I didn’t know quite what to write – okay, I didn’t know what to write. I thought I would be talking about knightly identity making in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur – about shields, names, reputation-making jousts and tournaments, Launcelot’s general proclivity for showing up to any fight in increasingly elaborate disguises and why these disguises for the most part disguise nothing at all.  Perhaps I’ll come back to some of this in a later post but as I thought about names and naming, one particular name kept recurring – Sir Lamorak.  Lamorak is one of only a few Cornish knights alongside the likes of Tristram and King Mark.  He is a young knight with great potential but is killed off in Book X, about halfway through Arthur’s Morte, though he doesn’t leave the narrative at this point. Instead, his death becomes one of the defining moments in the story – a rather large feat considering how many knights die in Le Morte. He goes down in this history as the third best knight in the land behind Launcelot and Tristram and by Book X he has been given enough opportunities to prove his right to the title, but this isn’t really what’s important about Lamorak.  His real claim to fame is how he dies.  After he wins the day at a tournament held by King Arthur, Gawaine and several of his kin ambush and kill the young knight out of jealousy and spite and throughout the rest of the text, Laromak’s name is often repeated as a marker of missed potential – he has died too soon – and treacherous death.  His name becomes a lament – “there was never none so bewailed” (XIX. xi).

As important as his death is, the gruesome deed is not directly narrated.  We hear of it through other characters, as something that has already happened.  Palomides breaks the news to a distraught Percivale who is so overcome by grief that he swoons and falls off of his horse – a detail that is not unimportant since part of what makes Lamorak’s murder so awful is that his horse was slain first and he was forced to fight on foot.  The next mention of his death comes several pages later as Tristram laments the loss of his fellow Cornwallian and Gareth, one of Gawaine’s brothers, sites the murder as his reason for splitting with his family.  But Lamorak’s death is not only narrated in terms of what it means for knightly identity – prowess and loyalty.  In a text primarily concerned with chivalry – courtly love, tournaments, adventures – Lamorak’s mother’s lament for her lost son breaks through as a particularly haunting moment.  When her surviving sons come to visit her, she recounts her losses – a husband and two sons. She adds, “And for the death of my noble son, Sir Lamorak, shall my heart never be glad” (XI.x).  She falls to her knees and begs her two remaining sons to stay with her but they refuse claiming, “it is our kind to haunt arms and noble deeds.”  They must seek adventure.  Heartbroken, she responds – “for your sakes I shall lose my liking and lust, and then wind and weather I may not endure.”  Shortly after her sons leave her, she sends a squire after them in order to give them some provisions for their travels but when the squire reaches the knights, they decide to send him back to their mother to comfort her. He never makes it back to her.  When this unnamed go-between seeks shelter en route, a baron has him drug out of the castle walls and slain for his association with Lamorak’s family.  The heartbroken mother never receives the comfort her sons intended to send her and shortly thereafter she dies.  She is inconsolable.   

As Malory’s narrative draws to a close and Arthur’s morte approaches, the king is inconsolable as well but not because of the death of a particular knight.  Rather, he is haunted by the death of an alliance – a fellowship. He offers this lament:

Alas, that ever I bare crown upon my head! for now have I lost the fairest fellowship of noble knights that ever held Christian king together. Alas, my good knights be slain away from me […] for now I may never hold them together no more with my worship” (XX.ix). 

For Arthur, the beginning of the end is marked by the adventure of the Grail and then by the feud between Launcelot and Gawaine.  The drive for glory and the need for vengeance make it impossible for him to hold the fellowship together. What is more, they can no longer hold him together – Arthur knows that he will die when his knights are gone.  Like Lamorak’s mother, he will not be able to withstand the wind and the weather alone.  But while the mother is haunted by one death – a moment replayed and a name repeated, the king’s is a more abstract haunting – a slow coming on of dissolution. A coming apart that takes time.  It is hard to mourn – alas, alas.  And as Launcelot and Gawain shout through walls and across bloody battlefields, a name is uttered as both a lament and an accusation.  In the death throws of a mythic alliance, Lamorak hangs in the air.

But the history of an event is not the same as the history of a person and in order to make the connection I'm making, I've left out names from the story - Gareth, for example, Gawaine's brother whom Launcelot accidentally kills in the process of rescuing Guenevere.   And many more knights died - too many to name.  The dissolution of Arthur's Round Table is a fragmented event without a singular cause. An unraveling that started with the title, Le MorteD'Arthur - a proclamation of the only death that is, in the end, left uncertain.  The possibility of a misidentified body, a mis-ascribed name. A death deferred because some names leave residues that aren't localizable enough to fit into one abbey, one coffin, one life or one death.