Lancelot

Lancelot's origin story is set apart from every other major knight of the Round Table by the strange upbringing the Vulgate Cycle gives him. Orphaned as an infant when his father, King Ban of Benoic, dies of grief after losing his kingdom, the child is carried off by the Lady of the Lake into her own otherworldly domain, a fair country that is, the text makes clear, an illusion cast over an ordinary lake rather than a literal underwater realm, where he is raised among a company of maidens with no knowledge of the human world he came from. This fostering gives him his defining French epithet, du Lac, of the Lake, and explains why he arrives at Arthur's court already fully formed as a warrior with no ordinary training or lineage introduction of the kind other knights receive. Chretien de Troyes, writing decades before the Vulgate Cycle fixed this fuller origin story, already assumes Lancelot's association with the Lady of the Lake without explaining it at length, again suggesting that pieces of his story circulated before any surviving text lays out the whole of it. The effect, across every version, is the same: Lancelot enters the human court of Camelot already marked as something not quite ordinary, shaped by an otherworldly power before he ever swears an oath to Arthur.

By the time the Arthurian legend absorbs the Grail material, above all in the Vulgate Cycle's Queste del Saint Graal, Lancelot's very greatness as a knight becomes the measure of what his affair with Guinevere costs him. He rides in the Grail quest as the acknowledged best fighter of the Round Table, yet is granted only a partial, distant vision of the Grail rather than the full achievement reserved for a knight of unstained purity, his sin with the queen standing between him and the object his own son will attain in his place. That son, Galahad, is conceived under deliberate deception: Elaine of Corbenic, daughter of the Grail's guardian king, uses enchantment to make Lancelot believe he lies with Guinevere when he in fact lies with her, a trick specifically engineered because prophecy holds that only Lancelot's bloodline can produce the knight destined to achieve the Grail, and only through such deceit could that bloodline exist at all given Lancelot's fixed devotion to the queen. Galahad succeeds where his father cannot, achieving the Grail fully and dying soon after in a state of grace, while Lancelot returns to the ordinary, compromised world of Camelot and to the affair that will, within the same cycle's larger story, help bring the whole fellowship down. The Grail material does not punish Lancelot by stripping his prowess; it simply draws a line his prowess alone cannot cross, and lets that line define him as clearly as any victory in single combat does.