Fascinating: Mythical Lancelot killed by Moors...read the comments
unspun on tumblr • medievalpoc: BNF Français 118: Lancelot du Lac ...
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BNF Français 118: Lancelot du Lac
f. 200v
France (c. 1400-1425)
Vellum Codex
Bibliothèque Nationale
I’m having a hard time figuring out why these two naked men are fighting with swords, so if any of you Arthurian fans out there can explain, I’d be happy to know.
[x]
OMG I WORKED ON THIS MANUSCRIPT FOR MY PhD WOOOO I CAN BE USEFUL. That said I was looking mostly at the pretty clothes and heraldry, but ahem. The Mandragore database (part of the BNF) describes this as “Combat de Lancelot et des automates”, which, yeah, is (according to whoever titled it) Lancelot vs. Medieval Robots. But I don’t want to stop just there.
But first, some background on why this is going to be difficult and annoy me. The story is the Lancelot-Graal cycle, aka the Vulgate Cycle, aka the Prose Lancelot, aka holy cow this thing is long the only full English translation is like 5 volumes minimum. BUT This image is one folio (page leaf) after Lancelot hanging out at the Dolorous Guard, so it’s around that point in the story, and I managed to find a googleBooks scan of this section of the Vulgate (which is entitled “Lancelot du Lac”). Yay! It looks like they’re supposed to be the “two knights cast in copper” [x]. Which explains their colour, but does not explain why the fellow on the left seems to have curly hair (which, if he’s meant to be a knight, would be weird, since that wasn’t fashionable at the time, and illuminators almost always dressed knights in fashion, even if they were antagonists, unless they were in hermit-mode or there was a very specific narrative reason). It doesn’t explain why the guy on the right has black/sub-Saharan features (the artists were very good at drawing faces in this manuscript). And it certainly doesn’t explain why they’re naked.
I wish I had the Middle French edition of this, because I want to see whether the only translation possible is “cast in copper”, or whether it could also be translated as “the colour of copper”. Because the narrative doesn’t seem to indicate they’re ‘automatons’ (even though Lancelot vs the Robots is hilarious), but is rather an extrapolation from the text. Certainly the illumination supports this!
Edit because just saw ginnabean's comment from her prof: Hm. The modern French translation has “sculptés en cuivre”, but I’d still really like to see the Middle French…
Re: Other comments on this post:
It’s definitely much too early in the manuscript (which is actually four volumes, BNF Fr. 117-120) for Lancelot to be dying. Lancelot being killed by Moors/Turks I know happens in Le Morte Darthur, which is a liberal English compilation of various Arthurian bits and pieces. Do you know if it occurs in the Vulgate? These MSs also have a really distinct way of depicting people from “the east”: this picture makes it REALLY CLEAR who’s the “other”.
The “ghost sword” on the left is a result of this manuscript having been re/over-painted. They were originally finished around 1404 (as we’ve a record of the manuscripts being bought in 1405), but another owner had them updated/retouched in 1460. This included changing faces, hands, poses, clothes, and backgrounds. It’s really most obvious in this illumination, where the overpainted “natural” background is damaged and reveals the original patterned background (and a horse’s bum).
For medievalpoc: This got me to go back through my files of this manuscript! Groadain in folio 223v definitely looks like he’s supposed to be PoC (I think particularly interesting because he’s a dwarf). F. 250 has a darker-skinned king, which I can’t track down in an easily-linkable form but could upload. And now I want to dig through the manuscripts I used during PhD properly to see what else I missed. I do remember, there was some reeeeally interesting use of clothing in some of them to “other” enemy combatants who physically didn’t look much different from the knights.
P.P.S. sorry everyone if this went too academic-speak. Or short-handy. I’m trying to write this really quickly before heading to sleep and so I may have been jargony without realizing it.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tgBV3T_1oAa2av3QUl2HZeIDjnPqQCssRCkn4NgonMkPi8pQFmXtNvNKMryA9dg5nP_6jFC-6x1lzPAsD7yyIja85bU_ZShO6kIaKJI-uqHePZ_AB3EMK4mowNKagQzHHFZbbH1ZbxIy_A8sRyzxrRYp2G6X2nenO-JVQxk4Joarhw=s0-d)
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