One Title, Several Names

No medieval Arthurian text agrees on exactly who the Lady of the Lake is or how many figures answer to the title. Malory's Le Morte Darthur uses it for at least two distinct women: an unnamed enchantress who rises from the water to give Arthur Excalibur early in his reign, later killed at court by the knight Balin in revenge for her own past crimes, and a second figure named Nimue, who takes over the role afterward, becomes Merlin's student, and eventually imprisons the aging wizard once his obsession with her turns dangerous. The thirteenth century Vulgate Cycle tells a different story again, giving the role to a single figure called Niniane, who raises the infant Lancelot in a lake that is in fact a magical illusion over ordinary ground, a fostering that gives Lancelot his French epithet du Lac, of the Lake. Later English retellings, following the line that runs from Malory through Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King in the nineteenth century, tend to collapse these separate figures into one, usually named Vivien or Viviane, the version most familiar in modern film and fiction. She is recorded here as a composite figure for exactly this reason: no one identity beneath the title holds across the tradition, only the role itself, guardian and giver of Arthur's sword, does.