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This storie is also trewe, I undertake, As is the book of launcelot de lake, That wommen holde in ful greet reverence.1 he Scots-english Lancelot of the Laik,found in Cambridge university library Kk.1.5.vii, is an incomplete mid-to-late fifteenth-century verse adaptation of the noncyclic Prose Lancelot do Lac’s account of the love of lancelot and Guenevere and of the knight Galehot’s war against Arthur. A better known and quite different account of lancelot in english is in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur,completed in 1469/70 and published by William Caxton in 1485. Lancelot of the Laik is based upon a source with a happy ending: the Lancelot do Lac ends with lancelot establishing his reputation as Arthur’s greatest knight and winning the love of Guenevere. Malory, however, drew upon the vulgate (lancelot-Grail) Cycle’s account of the love of lancelot and Guenevere, which includes most of the noncyclic Lancelot do Lac but also tells of the results of the adulterous love: it causes lancelot’s failure on the Grail Quest and contributes to the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom before reaching its resolution through the lovers’ penance and salvation. The different sources that the author of Lancelot of the Laik and Malory used give contrasting interpretations of the love story, and although Malory apparently had access to the material found in Lancelot do Lac, he chose not to use it.The author of Lancelot of the Laik may have been moved to write his version as a reaction against Malory’s version, but since there is no proof that he had read Malory’s account, he simply may not have seen the tragic potential of the story. Although Lancelot of the Laik breaks off at line 3487, with an estimated three thousand additional lines needed to complete the story,2 a summary at The Scottish Lancelot of the Laik and Malory’s Morte Darthur: Contrasting Approaches to the Same Story Edward Donald Kennedy t 89 the beginning indicates how it was to end: the author’s subject is “the weirs . . . of Arthur in defending of his lond / Frome Galiot”; how lancelot came to Arthur’s defense; how, thanks to lancelot, Arthur and Galiot made peace; and how venus rewarded lancelot by granting him his lady’s love.3 It was intended as a partial adaptation of its French source. Its author, like Chaucer in the Knight’s Tale, uses the rhetorical device of occupatio to tell us in eighty lines (214–94) what he is not going to discuss, that is, he is not going to tell us about lancelot’s birth, his being brought up by the lady of the lake, his falling in love with Guenevere, his vowing to avenge a wounded knight, his being sent to defend the lady of noralt, his conquest of dolorous Garde, or his rescue of Gawain and others. The list continues, and he probably added this for those in his presumably aristocratic audience familiar with the source. Any one of the omitted adventures, he admits, “mycht mak o gret story” (296), but he will leave the task of adapting them to others. The work is framed as a love vision in which the narrator, like Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and Gower in Confessio Amantis, wanders into the woods on a spring morning, falls into a trance, and dreams. In his dream a bird tells him that the god of love wants him to write “for thi lady sak”a declaration of love based upon “sum trety . . . / That wnkouth is” (145–47).The narrator recalls a story “boith of loue, and armys”(200), the story of lancelot, and prays for inspiration from an anonymous “flour of poyetis” (320), probably Chaucer. In fact, the choice of subject may have been inspired by Chaucer’s statement that the tale of launcelot de lake is one that “wommen holde in ful greet reverence” (even though Chaucer’s relegating it to the equivalent of today’s supermarket romances is hardly complimentary).4 Sally Mapstone, contrasting Lancelot of the Laik with the tragedy that Malory produced, describes the former as optimistic.5 Mapstone is concerned primarily with the part of the romance focused on Arthur, and she points out that although in this romance a wise man severely criticizes Arthur, his kingdom will not be destroyed as it is in Malory’s account, and Arthur learns to become a better king...

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