Ruler of a Realm Beneath the Water

Whatever her name, the Lady of the Lake is consistently placed outside the ordinary world, ruling from a realm reached by going beneath or through water rather than by any ordinary road. In the Vulgate Cycle's account this otherworld is explicitly an illusion, a fair country hidden under the surface of an actual lake, where the infant Lancelot is raised among a company of maidens with no memory of the human world he came from until he is grown and ready to be presented at Arthur's court. This placement puts her in a long line of Celtic and Arthurian figures whose power is bound to water and to a realm set apart from the everyday one, the same pattern that gives Arthur his sword from a lake in the first place and carries his body to the otherworldly island of Avalon after his final battle. Excalibur itself only ever properly belongs to water: given from the lake at Arthur's need, and returned to it, caught by the same rising hand, once Sir Bedivere finally obeys the dying king's third command to throw it back. The Lady of the Lake is not merely a supporting figure in that exchange but its origin and its ending, the one power in the legend with an unbroken claim on the sword throughout Arthur's whole reign.