Onions --> Arthurian Legend

[cimorene]

Via, of course, shallots - small, sweet onions otherwise known as everyone's favourite (or least favourite) humourous misspelling of astolat's pseudonym. After an onion-related culinary disaster I was contemplating switching to shallots because they come in smaller packages - more single-serving, as it were - and then I started thinking, as one does, about the Lady of Shalott, and poking around Wikipedia.

I mean:

• Why is it called both 'Shalott' and 'Astolat' (answer: nobody on Wikipedia knows; Tennyson is their only cited source for the former)?


• What, exactly, was the nature/origin of the curse on the lady?


• How come there's not more legend about her besides like 'o hai there's a hot guy whoops I'm dead'?

Well! The big W told me that Tennyson's source for the legend was a medieval Italian book called Cento Novelle Antiche, so I looked for that version, and was rather surprised to discover that according to it, the lady was in love with Lancelot in the normal way but he ignored all her pleas because he was in love with Guinevere (Ginevra in the translation I saw, which I guess is the Italian version of the name). So she died of love (or possibly killed herself?), stipulating in her will that her corpse was to be arranged in state on a barge and sent to Camelot with a nasty Dear John letter on it explaining how she died because he was so meaaaaaaaaaaan to her. In other words, she was a psycho stalker! Nice. A bit Ophelia-esque. I like Tennyson's better, but then, who wouldn't?

Comments

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

Have you read T H White's The Once and Future King? One of the reasons I love it was his treatment of the women of the legend. I think poor Elayne in particular is a wonderful character in his hands.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Nope. I think I picked it up as a kid but didn't finish it.

[nicocoer.livejournal.com]

hee hee hee, yeah.

The Lady of Shallot has always been my favorite- I might post a post with all sorts of Lady of Shallot stuff? MY OBSESSION FROM HIGHSCHOOL, LET ME SHOW YOU IT.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I've never known much about her but am v. fond of arthuriana in general, so it'd be awesome if you shot me a link!

[sophiawestern.livejournal.com]

This entry brought back vivid memories of struggling through Le Morte d'Arthur in middle english when I took medieval literature in college.

PS: I found your journal because I couldn't believe there were other people who listed "hating postmodernism" as one of their interests. But here you are. And I friended you. No obligation to friend back, but I thought it was polite to introduce myself.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHHAH. Well met, my friend. That's a great reason to friend someone! If you can't bond over such deeply sensitive core philosophical values as hating postmodernism, then what CAN you bond over?

I have a medium-strength interest in Arthurian legend since childhood and have read lots of various transformational fantasy works about it, but few of the "classics" (not The Once and Future King, either - and I barely made it through The Mists of Avalon because it was a favourite of my mother's). I started a modern translation (well, modern - 1960s perhaps) translation of Le Morte d'Arthur when I was nine or ten, but then my mother told me the author wrote it while in prison for raping a prepubescent girl, and I relievedly abandoned it, feeling all obligation to persevere cancelled by that.