Lady of the Lake

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.

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.