Coherent yet Mind-Boggling

I read the Mabinogion this month in preparation for starting Stephen Lawhead’s Arthurian books this coming year. The Mabinogion is a loose collection of fantasy and adventure stories (now defined as that set of stories translated by Lady Charlotte Guest in the nineteenth century) from twelfth-century Wales. Some of the stories mention King Arthur, whose historical inspiration may well have lived there, and a few of them make their way into Arthurian legend through adaptation by Chrétien de Troyes and other medieval French authors.

From descriptions I had read, I was expecting something haphazard and broken like lists of knights and short sketches or fragments of stories: the stuff that will be read only by diehard Arthurian connoisseurs who want to read all the background legends. I couldn’t have been more wrong. These are full-fledged stories, each with a beginning, middle, and end, full of romance, adventure, intrigue, and unexplained magic (people with no hitherto discernible supernatural traits, for instance, suddenly changing form, as if mystical metamorphosis is simply a common fact of life). Here’s a sample summary of one story, “The Lady of the Fountain”:

King Arthur takes a nap while Sir Kynon tells a story about himself: he sets out to find proof that he is the best knight. On his journey, a man at a castle tells him to look for a giant black man with one foot and one eye in the middle of his forehead. The giant, having been found, tells Kynon to look for a fountain with a bowl and a slab. He finds the fountain, fills the bowl and pours it on the slab. Thunder claps, and hailstones fall in such a violent way as to strip all the trees and kill all the animals. An earl rides out, knocks Kynon off his horse (who has been protected by his shield), scolds Kynon for killing all his livestock, and leads the horse away. Sir Owain decides to try copying this adventure. He has the same experience, complete with ELE hailstorm, but Owain kills the earl when he comes out to scold him. Riding toward the now-dead earl’s castle, he is trapped in the portcullis. A girl gives him a ring of invisibility to wear. When the guards come to raise the gate and nab their prisoner, Owain slips out unseen and makes his way to the girl’s room where he says he is in love with the lady he has just seen in the courtyard. The girl says the woman is the widow, and she then goes to tell the widow that if she knows what's good for her, she'll marry a knight from Arthur's court; of course she means Owain. Owain marries the widow and stays three years, "protecting the fountain" (but actually just extorting travelers), then asks to leave for three months in order to visit with Arthur. But Owain stays at Caerlleon (Arthur’s Welsh home) for three years, after which his wife comes and throws her wedding ring at him. Duly chastised, Owain returns to his earldom and his wife. After this he has a couple other adventures that tidy up loose ends, including convincing the black giant that he has been nothing but a tyrant terrifying travelers; the giant decides to be nice!

Now that story is tightly constructed and perfectly coherent, and yet it’s mind-boggling. In reading stories of errant knights for some sixty years now, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that in order to answer any given whim or question that pops into one’s head, one gets on a horse and travels aimlessly, certain that the answer will eventually present itself somewhere along the winding path. And I’ve grown used to the idea that a knight looking for the key place in his quest, even though it’s located in physical space in a perfectly normal way, simply cannot locate it unless he finds someone who knows someone who knows how to find the place. But what kind of magic is this that causes water poured on a slab to bring on the Hailstorm of Death? And if you have the Hailstorm of Death Slab on your land, why do you wait until some clueless knight pours water on it instead of guarding it as if your livestock had some value? Why, given that there’s a girl who gives you a magic ring and invites you to her room for safety, do you opt for the woman you glimpse for a second along the way? And, given that you have opted for the woman in the courtyard, why in the world do you tell the girl? How exactly does Owain protect the fountain? And how does he go from robber baron to moral police over other robber barons?

My first response to all these questions is simply to say, “I love it!” The combination of these surprising choices and this weird magic makes for a fantasy world that is just extremely attractive to me. I could read about this world for the rest of my life (which, of course, is exactly what I plan to do by continuing to enjoy various versions of the Matter of Britain).

But my second response is that the weirdness of the “The Lady of the Fountain” isn’t really all that weird. The Arthurian world is, mutatis mutandis, our world. (I’m so pleased with myself that I found an opportunity to use that Latin phrase!) I often find that answers remain stubbornly hidden when I sit still looking for them in my mind, and then just come to me unbidden when I’m on the move. And I usually can’t complete the most obvious task the first time without guidance from others. I haven’t seen a bowl of water cause a lethal storm, but I have known a plane ticket found in a glove box to cause a marital separation, and I’ve known two poorly chosen words in a joke to cause a separation between good friends. And who can predict when Cupid’s arrow will strike or how a rejected lover will react?

I’m so glad I was wrong about the Mabinogion!