4. Lancelot

The stories about King Arthur and his Round Table were a very popular genre in the Middle Ages. Valour, loyalty, chivalrous courage and love for fair maidens are the salient ingredients within great themes like the life of Lancelot, the quest of the mysterious Grail, and the fall of the Realm of King Arthur.

The most important Middle Dutch version is the ‘Haagse Lancelotcompilatie’. The ``Roman van Lancelot'', as this manuscript is also called, can boast all of 87,000 lines, written on 475 pages. Yet this is not the most complete version: the Middle Dutch text is part of a skilful rhymed adaptation of a thirteenth-century French trilogy in prose. The first part on Lancelot in the Hague manuscript does not have the initial part on his youth. The adaptor of the Middle Dutch text has changed the three French parts, Lancelot du Lac, La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le Roi Artu into a compilation incorporating seven other chansons de geste. The compiler has interlaced the different stories in an ingenious way by a technique appropriately called entrelacement: a deliberately chosen principle of structuralization to indicate that all the events in this ‘chronicle’ took place at the same time. At one moment attention is drawn to the adventures of Lancelot the Knight, at another the focus is on a different protagonist. In the end all the stories come together in the point of departure, Arthur's castle. 

The fourth book of the Lancelot compilation tells the story of the death of King Arthur. The only Middle Dutch version of this narrative is found in the ‘Lancelotcompilatie’. The page reproduced here contains lines 1-172 of the prologue to this book. The large initial M in red and blue indicates the beginning of a new ‘book’.

The manuscript has come to the Koninklijke Bibliotheek via the collection of the stadholders. The obvious assumption is that it was already part of the library of John IV, Count of Nassau, in the fifteenth century. The first owner of the codex was Louis of Velthem, as is written on fol. 238 recto: ‘Here ends the book of lancelot which belongs to lodewijc van velthem’.

Literature

• Roman van Lancelot, (XIIIe eeuw) naar het (eenig-bekende) handschrift der Koninklijke Bibliotheek (ed. W.J.A. Jonckbloet). Dl. 2. Den Haag 1849 
• Bart Besamusca. Repertorium van de Middelnederlandse Arturepiek. Utrecht 1985 
• Lanceloet. De Middelnederlandse vertaling van de Lancelot en prose overgeleverd in de Lancelotcompilatie. Dl. 2-3. Assen, Maastricht 1991-1992  
• The Seventeenth-Century Orange-Nassau Library. Utrecht 1993, no. 2868.