Arthurian Alphabooks: M is for Morgawse

My belated contribution to the Arthurian alphabet for M is the lady Morgawse, who, in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur, is the wife and later widow of King Lot of Orkney; half-sister and lover to a young King Arthur; ill-fated paramour of Sir Lamorak; mother, by Lot, of Sir Gawain and his brothers Aggravain, Gaherys, and Gareth; and mother, by Arthur, of Mordred.

If the names Lot, Lamorak, and Mordred mean anything to you, you appreciate the trouble that this woman finds herself in (and participates in or contributes to herself, whether wittingly or otherwise). She's pretty enigmatic because she remains only faintly drawn by Malory: the occasion of great desire in others—at one point Lamorak is overheard lamenting aloud about the emotional anguish his love for Morgawse causes him—she never gives voice to her own desires. But given her sexual history—which includes a long liaison with the son of a man whom her late husband's sons believe to have slain their father during Lot's war against her half-brother Arthur—I think it's fair to assume that she had rather strong feelings and desires of her own.

She also pays for her desire in one of the most shocking and brutal scenes in all of Malory (and that's saying something). Malory's narration of that scene includes wickedly painful details delivered in a laconic style that makes their hurt seem worse than a more empurpled prose would have done, and there's some astonishing dialogue, too.

***
For this drawing, I took a new tack to the preparatory phase, doodling quick rough sketches on a magnetic doodle pad that belongs to my daughter. You know, like the one Isaac used here. A pretty efficient medium for trying out visual ideas, actually!

Arthurian Alphabooks: L is for Lancelot, late [hors série]

My drawing for L—an obvious choice of Sir Lancelot—is over a week late, and my M drawing is not even begun; so my apologies to Isaac for mucking up the blog's alphabetical continuity, though he can attest that I did draw my original attempts at Lancelot several days before the deadline. Too bad they were L for lousy—so unsatisfactory that I took a while to come up with an alternative, and in doing so I broke one of my own unofficial constraints for this project, so the image above is presented hors série. It's a cartoony version of Lancelot as portrayed by John Cleese in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (on my DVD copy of MP&HG, which begins with an abortive short about dentistry, the pose crops up about 22:09 into the film, with Lancelot toward the left of the screen as part of Arthur's retinue shortly before they are accosted by God Almighty).

The rules I'm breaking here have to do with my interest through this project to discover what images of Arthurian characters I may harbor that are not consciously derived from specific prior visual interpretations—other artists' drawings or actors' faces, mostly. Where possible, I've also tried to follow the visual cues provided textually in whatever single work of Arthuriana I have taken as my reference for a given character, even in a given moment. (My first bad attempts at Lancelot were based on a description of the young man prior to his dubbing to knighthood—not yet the mature lover or seasoned fighter, but that's where the fullest physical description of him that I know of him could be found in the Old French Prose Lancelot.)

Here, I'm not only relying on someone else's image of Lancelot, but on an image born in a visual medium to begin with—no Arthurian book to speak of! (Unless, of course, one accepts "The Book of the Film" as a book; and it is glimpsed very shortly before the scene where I paused my DVD for the sketch. See also Isaac's earlier ripostes to the sort of pedantic literalism about Alphabooks that in part defines my book-centric approach.)

Incidentally, one of the current Alphabooks images—an M drawing—is also Arthurian, though it is of course not one of my drawings (it's by Axel Medellin, and I recommend his Achilles and his Illustrated Man, as well!). It's another obvious, even necessary choice—M is for Merlin—and I'm glad to see Merlin get some attention there since he will not be featured in my Arthurian alphabet here. And yet, the purist in me is a bit disappointed, because while the drawing is technically excellent, it is presented as a portrait of Merlin as featured in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur—yet it shows him with an owl perched on his shoulder. Malory nowhere associates an owl with Merlin, whereas Merlin's familiar owl Archimedes is indeed familiar from the first part of T. H. White's The Once and Future King (and its Disney adaptation, The Sword in the Stone); indeed, the cover of my paperback edition of The Once and Future King prominently features an owl, probably Archimedes himself, swooping toward the famous sword while knights and ladies are relegated to the background. (Meanwhile, for an Alphabooks drawing of Archimedes by Sarah Pittman, see here!)

For the record, I should note that I like Axel Medellin's image of a kind of catchall Merlin, drawing on a variety of widely recognized wizardy motifs; but I don't like seeing it presented as Malory's Merlin, whose appearance is a lot harder to pin down (since Malory never really describes Merlin outright, save when Merlin is disguised as someone other than himself!). Just compare Burne-Jones's famous painting The Beguiling of Merlin for an effective image where the wizard has no beard or staff or owl—but he does have the languid yet haunted expression of a man who is resigned to be buried alive because he is so "besotted" with love for Nimue/Ninian/Vivian.

(Then again, I may just be touchy about the Alphabooks image of Merlin because for a long time I had a professional interest in staying on top of the details of literary Arthuriana, and whether or not Merlin has a familiar owl seems to me like a matter of some importance. By contrast, it didn't at all bother me to see Axel Medellin's futuristic take on Homer's Achilles, and I don't think that's just because the artist copped to its being "a very, very free interpretation.")

Arthurian Alphabooks: K is for Klinschor

Here's a version of Klinschor, yet another character from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival:
 
His name appears as Clinschor in the manuscripts, but it's commonly spelled with a K in modern German, so that's my excuse for drawing him this week. Fair warning: this will not be the last time I use spelling variations to fudge my way through the Arthurian alphabet! (And incidentally, on the subject of names: Richard Wagner further changed Klinschor's character, his role, and his name in creating the part of Klingsor for his opera Parsifal; a final change for the wizardly knight came with his transformation into Corporal Klinger in M*A*S*H*. Ha, I kid! Moving on...)

Klinschor was a knight and Count of the Terra di Lavoro in Italy, but he had the misfortune to be castrated by his lover's husband. (Nevertheless, the part of Klingsor in Parsifal is sung by a bass.) Thereafter Klinschor turned to the arts of magic and created threatening traps for other knights in his Castle of Wonders (Schastel marveile), until the spells therein were defeated—or at least survived—by Gawan (Wolfram's version of Sir Gawain / Gauvain).

The technique this week is a bit of an experiment. I did a very quick pencil sketch from life, as a guide to the shadows, principally; then I put down the vellum and attempted to ink the image with a minimum of outlines, hoping to build up the shapes out of hatching (not unlike the way John Totleben might ink, though very unlike his way in the care taken and the effects achieved):
 
That turned out okay, but it lost a lot of the shadowy contrast I'd been hoping for. So I tried again by inking the pencils directly with a bias toward direct black and white opposition instead of gradations of shade (though not exclusively, as you can see below):
 
I liked that one better, overall, but just for fun I decided to lay the vellum over the original inks and see how that composite would look when scanned. And lo, that's how I got the version I submitted to Alphabooks and that appears at the top of this post. Not exactly the best of both versions, but I think the overlaid image is more interesting than either of its layers alone. And to spare you any scrolling up for a recap, here it is again just before the post ends:


Next week: a foregone conclusion for the letter L...

Arthurian Alphabooks: J is for Jeschute

Sorry I'm late. In this week's Arthurian alphabet image, J is for Jeschute:

Jeschute is the name Wolfram von Eschenbach uses in his Parzival to designate a character who goes nameless in his source, Chrétien de Troyes's Perceval, or The Story of the Grail. In both texts, the character is a woman who is twice victimized: first by the titular hero, whose abusive behavior can in part be explained (though not excused) by his vast ignorance of society and courtesy; then she is tormented over a longer period by her own husband, Orilus, the Proud Knight of the Plain.

Soon after Parzival has left his home in the Waste Forest to find Arthur (in hopes of being made a knight), he encounters the beautiful Jeschute lounging in her pavilion. Misunderstanding his mother's  instructions about how to treat women, Parzival grossly mistreats Jeschute, forcing his kisses on her, stealing a ring from her finger, and eating her food before riding off, completely oblivious to his violations of courtesy and insensitive to Jeschute's tearful protests. (The first time I taught this text, several of my students described him bluntly as "a jerk.") When Orilus returns to see the disorder in his tent and the distress of his wife, he assumes that Jeschute has betrayed him with another man and strips her of her finery, cruelly taunting her and refusing to believe her protestations of innocence.

As (badly) depicted above, Jeschute next appears in the text some time later. The main descriptive detail provided by both Chrétien and Wolfram is that her clothes are in tatters, little more than the collar of her shift and a few rags that reveal more than they conceal. I assumed her hair would also be in some disarray and that she would look rather pained.

I would have liked to have made her look a bit more aggrieved, rather than just wounded, and I would have liked to have made her more beautiful (at least by my lights), but I had a really hard time making a satisfactory drawing this time around. I made various attempts at inking a pencil sketch, on vellum tracing paper and then directly on paper, before I gave up and tried to get a decent freehand image. The first few passes at a freehand drawing were also pretty lousy, but the one above I can live with. I do wish it looked more obviously medieval, however; the hairstyle's disarray masks my original design, which had a more ancient appearance, and the tatters of her shift look dismayingly like a worn T-shirt. Oh, well.

Incidentally, an affecting (and effectively disturbing) cinematic treatment of Jeschute's character—or, more accurately, that of her nameless Old French forebear—may be seen in Eric Rohmer's film Perceval le Gallois (1978). It hews fairly closely to Chrétien's text, apart from its ending (in that Rohmer attempts to supply a conclusion to Chrétien's unfinished narrative, which abruptly breaks off in the middle of an episode with Gauvain/Gawain).

Arthurian Alphabooks: I is for Sir Ironside

Here's another knight from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur—the Red Knight of the Red Lands, whose given name is Ironside:

As usual, physical descriptive details are few in Malory, but we are told that Ironside is attractive, at least. He's also proud, and a wily fighter. Indeed, when he's in combat with Sir Gareth, his foe in the first part of The Tale of Sir Gareth, his cunning style of fighting serves to educate his young opponent, who up till then has prevailed against his enemies through straightforward strength and skill.

He's also a pretty vengeful heartless fiend—at least at first. When Gareth embarks on his inaugural quest, he does so to answer an appeal to save a beleaguered woman from Ironside's unwanted attentions. In the meantime, Ironside has cultivated a creepy habit of hanging the bodies of the woman's would-be deliverers, assembling the corpses of his knightly victims in a large group that dangles from a tree. When Gareth sees this, he's not sure what to think, but he's certain that it's not chivalric behavior.

It's something of a surprise, then, that Ironside gets recuperated: his life spared by the victorious Gareth, Ironside renounces his hateful ways, explains that it was all 'cause he loved a lady, and ends up welcome at the court of King Arthur. Go figure!

But all that redemptive stuff comes after the drawing above, which is meant to show Ironside in his pitiless days. He could maybe do with still more of a sneer, but I hope it's at least marginally credible that the face above is that of a man who is pridefully ready to hang a bunch of his fellow knights just because his would-be squeeze won't give him the time of day.

Arthurian Alphabooks: H is for Hallewes

With this week's Arthurian Alphabooks drawing, you may be forgiven for thinking that H is for Headdress—

Believe it or not, the headdress is closely patterned on an illustration from a genuine medieval manuscript!

—but in fact H is for the lady Hallewes, a minor character in Malory's "Noble Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lake" from Le Morte Darthur. Minor—but unforgettable, because she is One Creepy Dame. Hallewes is a sorceress who has employed her magic(ks) to create an enchanted trap for either Gawain or Lancelot, whichever, though really she has her heart set on Lancelot. And just what does she want with him? Why, to love him, naturally. And if he won't love her back, that's hardly an obstacle. Let her speak for herself:

     "And Sir Lancelot, now I tell thee, I have loved thee these seven year, but there may no woman have thy love but Queen Guenevere; and since I might not rejoice thee nother thy body on live [=alive], I had kept no more joy in this world but to have thy body dead. Then would I have [em]balmed it and cered it [=wrapped it in waxed cloths], and so to have kept it my live days—and daily I should have clipped thee [=embraced thee] and kissed thee, despite of Queen Guenevere."
     "Ye say well," said Sir Lancelot. "Jesu preserve me from your subtle crafts!"

While the whole episode takes up just a few paragraphs in a massive tome, I find that the specter of the lady's necrophiliac canoodling with a mummified Lancelot produces an outsized horror. Brrr!

*     *     *     *     *

And now, a process note or two (mostly for Isaac's benefit, as he has expressed interest or at least tolerance for these in the past). As the caption below the above picture indicates, I actually did a little visual research for this drawing, consulting a few books of medieval images to find a headdress that I thought was suitably wacky and some clothing that seemed appropriately wanton for a dangerous woman driven crazy by desire. (I borrowed the headdress and the rest of the clothing from two different illustrations, but in both cases the women pictured seemed more assertive in their desires than is often the case in illustrations from this period; if anything, the neckline of the dress in the original manuscript image plunged even further than in my drawing above.)

For the second week in a row, I tried to see what it was like to ink a vellum sheet laid over my original sketch. Oddly enough, my brush seemed to behave like a nib pen when I began (as I often do) by inking in the eyes. I remembered that Gary Martin, author of two books on comic-book inking, suggests an exercise where the inker should try to achieve brush effects with nibs and nib effects with brushes. I'd been trying to get a brushy calligraphic line out of a nib pen ever since I was a kid: my first cartooning efforts were full-on imitations of Walt Kelly, and I simply didn't know at first that he used a brush rather than a pen. (In my defense, I was seven at the time.) But making a brush line look like pen work seemed like a weird (and difficult) exercise to me. Now that I've accidentally achieved something of that effect, in at least parts of this drawing, I can see the virtue in making the single tool more versatile, and given my recent problems with ink blots from nib pens it might even be more practical to use a brush for my "pen" lines, thereby to reduce the risk of blots and smears. Still, I suspect that the pen-like qualities might be owing more to the unfamiliar tooth of the vellum surface and/or the viscosity of my ink.

I also had a more practical reason for using vellum, which is that my preliminary sketch this week was drawn not in pencil but in ballpoint pen, which is a lot harder to erase than pencil. That did mean, however, that the rough sketch survived the ink job, so for the sake of comparison here it is below (slightly blurry and rendered in grey rather than the original blue):

It's a commonplace of cartooning to lament that finished drawings lack some of the energy or spontaneity of the rough art. Well, sure, and there are ways in which this rough drawing probably does a better job of making Hallewes look crazy; but to my eye, at least, this rough version of Hallewes also looks less like a highborn lady or a credible amorous threat to Lancelot. She also looks a little too robust, so I made sure to gaunt her up a bit in the finished drawing, which accounts for her thinner lips in the inks. (As for the heavy shading around the eye sockets in the final version, it occurred to me while inking that I might want to suggest "the skull beneath the skin" in this person who, if not herself "possessed by death," wanted to possess Lancelot in death).

I kind of like the face in the rough drawing—it looks like a usable study for some other character—but, despite the label scrawled at the lower right of the picture, I don't find the rough drawing very convincing as Hallewes. So score one for the finished drawings, for a change.

Arthurian Alphabooks: G is for the Green Knight [en série]

Because I somehow wound up committing myself to yearbook-style portraits for my early Arthurian characters, I went ahead and penciled one for the Green Knight before deciding to get more lively with the image in my previous post. But having penciled the headshot, I felt obliged to ink it. It's still fairly lively, though, in a Brian Blessed-as-Prince-Vultan sort of way (though not deliberately so), and I've given it a greenish cast to befit its subject. And here ya go:

Arthurian Alphabooks: G is for the Green Knight [hors série]

This week I'm departing from my usual black-and-white "yearbook" approach for the Arthurian alphabet to bring you this:

It just seemed wrong not to show the Green Knight in his emerald resplendence. Of course this is Sir Gawain's mysterious antagonist from the fourteenth-century masterpiece Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I recommend reading it in Middle English if you can (the better to enjoy lines like "the snawe snitered ful snart"), but the modern English translations by Marie Borroff and Simon Armitage are both excellent and I warmly recommend them!

If you know the poem, you recognize the moment depicted above. If you don't know it, fear not—this drawing doesn't spoil much, since the moment occurs in the first of the poem's four parts (or "fitts").

I suppose it's about time I contended with showing a knight on horseback. (Just ask Isaac about my perennial struggles with drawing horses; I'm really making an effort here, guy!) My first pass at this drawing featured laughably stubby legs for both the horse and the Green Knight, so I had a fair bit of erasing to do before committing the drawing to inks. That's part of why I decided to invest in some tracing vellum to practice my inks this week, the better to limber up before drawing the limbs.

The other part of why I bought the vellum is that I wanted to see what the drawing might look like in two different thicknesses of nib pen, as opposed to my usual brush, and tracing vellum was the easiest way to reuse the pencils. In the event, I stuck with my favored drawing tool, but I did enjoy the challenge of using a pen and was amused at the different character of the three drawings (one of which featured some fortuitous inkblots that doubled as blood spatters). Just for fun—and because I think it looks pretty freaky—here's a screenshot of the three different heads side by side, suitable for printing out and coloring at home!


Next week (if all goes well): a really creepy dame.

Arthurian Alphabooks: F is for Feirefiz

Believe it or not, I posted my F drawing to the Alphabooks tumblr on time last week, but since I was traveling at the time my Internet interface wasn't convenient for posting to the blog. So now, belatedly, I present my drawing of an Arthurian character whose name starts with F: the unusual Feirefiz, yet another character from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival:


Feirefiz is the older half-brother of Parzival, the Grail-winning hero of Wolfram's romance; they share a father, Gahmuret the Angevin, whom you may remember as the husband who abandoned Belakane, the Queen of Zazamanc, when she was pregnant with none other than Feirefiz. (I have recycled Gahmuret's motif of the anchor, which I previously worked into the fabric of Belakane's mantel, in the image here on the clasp of Feirefiz's cloak; fortuitously, the shape atop the nasal guard on Feirefiz's helmet, modeled after an actual medieval helmet from the Muslim world, also recalls the form of an upright anchor.)

As with Belakane, Feirefiz is a non-Western character who enjoys great esteem among the Europeans he encounters. He is invited to join the Round Table even before he converts to Christianity, and evidently his fabulous wealth outshines that of all his compatriots in the fellowship. He does eventually adopt the faith of his half-brother, however, though his motive is more obviously romantic than spiritual: he falls in love with a keeper of the Grail and must become a Christian before their marriage can be solemnized. In Wolfram's telling, their son will grow up to be the legendary Prester John, Christian king of the East.

I'm afraid that my finished inked drawing really fails to capture the visual effect that gives Feirefiz a notable appearance among Arthurian figures, and that is his mottled complexion. The name Feirefiz itself has been conjectured to mean something like "speckled face" or "speckled skin" (built on Old French terms rather than Wolfram's own Middle High German), and Wolfram compares his skin variously to the coloring of a magpie and to the appearance of writing on parchment—apparently the result of the difference between his parents' light and dark complexions. While Feirefiz's appearance is unusual enough to be remarked upon by other characters within the romance, all agree that he is quite handsome, and he shares his father's reputation as an amorous knight with a succession of desirable lovers.

Arthurian Alphabooks: E is for Ettarde [Updated]

Here's my profile portrait of the lady Ettarde, a minor character in Le Morte Darthur who has some genuine shortcomings but whose ultimate fate is fairly disquieting, not only for its seeming excessive punishment but for the ugly light it sheds on some more prominent figures in Malory's Arthuriad.

Ettarde is a proud lady who spurns the advances of the worthy knight Sir Pelleas. Apparently her pride is unwarranted, since other ladies and gentlewomen "were fayrer than she"; but Pelleas esteems her highly, wants none other, and willingly suffers repeated humiliation and physical degradation at the hands of Ettarde's knights.

When Arthur's nephew Sir Gawain meets Pelleas, he sympathizes with his plight and offers to win Ettarde's hand for him by pretending to have defeated him. Pelleas agrees, but once Gawain lays eyes on Ettarde he pulls a John Alden and ends up wooing Ettarde himself—albeit in an underhanded way that effectively entraps Ettarde into granting him her sexual favors.

While Gawain enjoys a couple of days in a romantic tryst with Ettarde, Pelleas starts to wonder where he is and why he himself isn't united with Ettarde at last. Seeking them out, Pelleas comes across the lovers asleep in a compromising position, much as various versions of the Tristan story depict King Mark finding Tristan and Iseult together in the woods (a scenario transferred to Arthur finding Lancelot and Guenevere sleeping together in John Boorman's Excalibur). Pelleas considers killing them, but chooses instead to lay his naked sword across their throats as they sleep. He then takes to his bed, expecting to die of grief.

At this point, Gawain and Ettarde awake, discover the sword, and realize that Pelleas has found him—a bit of a shock to Ettarde, who had thought him slain by Gawain. Meanwhile, news of Pelleas's plight reaches the powerful lady Nynyve (a.ka. Nimue, a.k.a. Niniane, a.ka. Vivian), the chief Lady of the Lake. Nynyve not only takes pity on Pelleas, she also falls in love with him and deems Ettarde unjust to have shown him no mercy in denying his suit. So she casts an enchantment upon Ettarde that causes her to fall desperately in love with Pelleas—and her love is indeed desperate, since now that he thinks he knows her for what she is, he hates her.

Ettarde cannot understand her new feelings, declaring "Ah, Lord Jesu, how is it befallen unto me that I love now [him who] I have hated most of any man alive?" Nynyve's reply is curt and chilling: "That is the righteous judgment of God," she says. Thereupon Pelleas bids the "traitoress" never to come in his sight again, and "near out of her mind" with sorrow she goes away—where she does in fact die of sorrow, while Pelleas enjoys a long life of unnatural safety under the magical protection of his new lover Nynyve.

So: this little episode, just a few pages long, shows Gawain in rather an ugly light early in his knightly career—but I don't find Nynyve's behavior very becoming, either. Throughout, Ettarde is played upon by others more canny or powerful than herself. And while she may indeed be haughty in her refusal of Pelleas, and downright cruel in directing her knights to beat him and humiliate him, no less an authority than Lancelot will declare (over the corpse of the Fair Maid of Ascolat) that "love must only arise of the heart's self, and not by none constraint"—a view endorsed at once by King Arthur himself, who agrees that "That is truth, ... and with many knights love is free in himself and never will be bound; for where he is bound he looseth himself." Ettarde is artificially driven insane with love for a man she never cared for in the first place, is judged and found wanting for failing to grant his petition. Her own desires are overlooked or discounted by everyone else. And in sympathy with Ettarde, I have tried to draw her at the distraught moment where she realizes with horrified disbelief that she now loves unto death a man whom she despised when in her right mind and who now hates her utterly, utterly.

Arthurian Alphabooks: D is for Dinadan

If you're not careful, reading medieval Arthuriana can seem like an exercise in obsolete classist parochialism: just look how the upper classes of the age flatter themselves with their beauty, strength, wealth, and accomplishments! Look how they assume the rightness of their many privileges! Look how they attend only to their own affairs, with scarcely a thought for the many toilers who have made their comfortable lives possible! And then, if you're not careful, you start to sound like Dennis from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Thank goodness, then, that there are medieval Arthurian texts that dare to question at least some of the assumptions that undergird the ethos of their own elite audiences. And one of the characters who voices some of the most sensible objections to the knightly ethos is the plainspoken and witty Sir Dinadan, created in the French Prose Tristan cycle but best known nowadays from Malory's Morte Darthur. Here's my attempt to capture what I imagine to be one of his typical expressions:

I say "attempt" because I am not altogether satisfied with the result. The expression I was aiming for was a kind of affronted disbelief. The occasion for the expression is no doubt yet another instance where one of Dinadan's more traditionally heroic companions has insisted on the correct knightly protocol of engaging in some sort of combat that Dinadan considers pointless or extravagant.

Dinadan's problem, you see, is that, while he is himself a dab hand at jousting and swordplay, he prefers not to exercise his knightly skill unless it's really called for; but he's such good company that he is forever falling in with honor-crazed knights such as Tristram, who practically force him to fight for a glory that he would be quite happy to do without.

Dinadan doesn't even see the point of the love affairs that are the raison d'être for so many of his nobler companions of the Round Table. By challenging the utility of both combat and [so-called] courtly love, Dinadan becomes a devil's advocate bringing charges against both the chivalric and the chivalrous sides of knighthood.

His wit is reported more than displayed, but it is said of him that he composed an insulting ditty about the wicked King Mark (Tristram's hateful uncle) that he arranged for a minstrel to sing at Mark's court. (I think it would be a worthwhile bit of Arthurian fanfic for someone to write a text for said ballad, just in case anybody out there is looking for something to do.)

I seem to recall that a knight called Sir Dinadan features in Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court but that, like so many characters seemingly borrowed from Malory, he is unrecognizable as his medieval original.

Anyhow, that's my D entry for the Arthurian alphabooks. Next week: a lady who is rather distraught.

Arthurian Alphabooks: C is for Cundrie la surziere

Last week I presented Belakane, one of the many beautiful people from Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. And this week, from the same text, I give you this:

Here's how Wolfram describes her, in the recent (2004) translation by Cyril Edwards:

She was called Cundrie; her byname was Surziere [i.e., the magician or sorceress]…. A bridal cloth from Ghent, bluer even than lapis lazuli, that downpour on joy had donned. It was a well-cut cape, all in the French style. Beneath, next to her person, she wore fine furs. A peacock-feather hat from London, lined with cloth-of-gold—the hat was new, its ribbon not old—hung at her back…. A plait crossed the hat and dangled down from her, as far as the mule [she was riding]. It [the plait] was so long, and black, tough, none too lustrous, soft as a pig’s back hair. She was nosed like a dog. Two boar’s teeth stuck out from her mouth, a good span in length. Each eyebrow thrust, plaited, past her hair-band…. Cundrie had ears like a bear’s….Her countenance was hairy….

There are other details in Wolfram's description, but those are the ones I tried to include in my drawing, if only through the merest suggestion. (In a head-on view, it was difficult to manage her braid of coarse hair hanging across the fine hat that dangles against her back, though I did at least arch up the tip of the peacock feather to be glimpsed over her shoulder.)

A note or two about Cundrie. Wolfram borrows the basic character, including her initial messenger function and a number of her ugly features, from Chrétien de Troyes's late twelfth-century romance Le conte du Graal (Perceval), the original literary account of the Grail. Wolfram expands her role and her context, however, in his additions (and conclusion) to Chrétien's unfinished work, and Wolfram provides her with a name. Both authors agree on an unusual point, however: while she is quite hideous to behold, she is also a model of upright virtue.

This point is unusual because the prevailing approach to appearances in medieval romance is to associate beauty with goodness and virtue while ugliness is associated with baseness and evil. The hideous Cundrie in fact arrives to throw cold water on the joy felt at Arthur's court upon the return of Parzival, celebrated not only as a paragon of knighthood but as a beautiful specimen of young manhood. Cundrie announces that this seeming great guy is in fact a bit thick and unfeeling, and he has had the misfortune to be thick and apparently unfeeling under circumstances that threaten to doom a whole populace. Oops!

So, yeah: looks can be deceiving. Interestingly, this trope recurs in other Grail narratives. In the thirteenth-century Old French prose Quest of the Holy Grail (and in Sir Thomas Malory's fifteenth-century Middle English adaptation, The Tale of the Sankgreal), Perceval is one of the three knights who successfully "achieve" the Grail quest, along with Lancelot's kinsmen Sir Bors and the impeccable Sir Galahad (and I'm using that adjective in its theological sense as well as its ordinary sense). While the virginal Galahad is impervious to sexual temptation (though he has a strong bond with Perceval's equally virginal sister), Sir Bors and Sir Perceval both get tempted toward error in instructively different ways that have to do with what meets the eye.

Perceval is the object of a would-be seduction by a devil in the guise of a beautiful woman; he resists just in time to avoid damnation, at which point the true appearance of the devil is revealed in all its ugliness. Sir Bors is offered a choice between serving two beautiful women: one attired in gleaming white, the other in gloomy black. Everywhere else in the Quest, white and black signify in the traditional Western fashion that associates white with purity, goodness, virtue and black with corruption, evil, sin. But here, for a change, the polarity is reversed, no doubt because Bors is already more spiritually advanced on his knightly brethren and it wouldn't be much of a test to ask him to see evil in black, good in white (a test that Lancelot fails at one point, incidentally).

Bors gets it right, thankfully, and the tip-off for us readers that black is virtuous in this case is the echo of the line from Song of Songs where the beloved declares "I am black but comely"; the beloved in this case is routinely allegorized in Christian readings as the Church itself, and the white woman opposed to her in Bors's temptation is the whited sepulchre of the Synagogue. (Friendly reminder: I just report this stuff, I don't endorse it.)

And a few last art notes. This drawing is not the first time I have sketched an image of Cundrie or her French-language equivalent: I first used the description from Chrétien's work to provide the cues for one of the demons I drew for our Lynda Barry-inspired One Hundred Demons sketchbook project (anthologized as Demonstration, though that collection does not include the Cundrie figure). If I can find my old demons sketchbook, I may post that image as a postscript.

Where the sketchbook version was very cartoony, I deliberately sought in this case to make the outlandish description as plausibly human as possible. If the boar's teeth aren't a full span long, we might attribute that to Wolfram's tendency to exaggerate. But I have seen remarkably hairy countenances, including eyebrows that probably could have been braided if their bearers had wished to do so, and I think that this doggy nose is probably in the range of possibility, too.

Finally, I seem to have settled on a potentially very boring pattern for my Arthurian alphabet, what Isaac has aptly described as "the yearbook approach": head shots. In for a penny, in for a pound, though: I think I'll stick with that for the human characters in my mainstream "official" Alphabooks contributions, though I'm still holding out hope for a "second series" of drawings that might include more variety of figure and composition. (We'll see, but no promises—I didn't even manage to get this one done on schedule, and it was a single drawing!)

Arthurian Alphabooks: B is for Belakane

Belakane (aka Belacane): Queen of Zazamanc, wife of Gahmuret the Angevin, and mother of Feirefiz —who is himself the half-brother of the eponymous hero of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, where Belakane appears. (Zazamanc is a made-up land somewhere in the Middle East, not far from Baghdad, apparently.)

I wanted to include Belakane in my alphabet in part to thwart an all-too-easy tendency (for me) to fixate on the knights of Arthurian literature and legend, given that many other very interesting characters aren't knights at all (even if, as is almost unavoidable in Arthuriana, they have close ties to knights or knighthood). Belakane is also very unusual among non-Christian women of color in medieval European Christian texts. While the narrator makes frequent mention of her dark complexion by way of contrast with the conventional blond standard of female beauty in medieval romances, he also declares that she is thoroughly beautiful. Furthermore, several other romances that feature love affairs between pale Christian knights and dark-complected non-Christian queens or princesses all too frequently transform the heroine by not only converting her to Christianity but by blanching her skin tone (that is, if she isn't already pale in comparison to her dark brethren, a contrast taken as a token of her inner readiness to convert).

Belakane does suffer for her non-Christian confession—her husband loutishly abandons her with no notice while she is twelve weeks pregnant with their child, on the pretext that he now has misgivings about marriage with a non-Christian. But she isn't literally whitewashed, and she is one of several non-Christians in Parzival who are treated with a sympathy that is atypical of European medieval texts from Christendom, let alone a text as saturated in Christian matters as Parzival (which is a story of the Grail in its religious guise—though it's also in the guise of a magical rock, which, again, is atypical).

Not too many art notes this time: I was in a hurry to get a drawing done after the end of Shavuot but before midnight (which is bearing down on me as I type), so this drawing was the first go. I began the penciling with reference to a photograph of James Baldwin, believe it or not, because the image on the cover of my edition of Notes of a Native Son has a really arresting contrast of light and shadow which I have more or less transferred to Belakane.

One of the only details that Wolfram provides by way of description (other than saying that Belakane's skin is dark) is that her crown consists of a single ruby. I'm not sure how that works, so I've just crowned her crown with a very large jewel.

As for her mantle, what may look like random squiggles is more deliberate than it appears, because my splotchy spot blacks are meant to pick out a pattern of intertwining hearts and anchors that alternative their orientation up and down, up and down. Why hearts and anchors? Because the emblem of Gahmuret, the husband who abandoned Belakane, was an anchor, but Belakane loved him all the same.

Anyhow, that's my B drawing for the Arthurian alphabet. I was this close to drawing Balin (possibly with his brother Balan), but changed my mind at the last minute. Maybe I'll save them for an Alternative Arthurian Alphabet...

A is for Almost Arthur: Abortive Attempts

Isaac expressed some interest in my process drawings for yesterday's Alphabooks image of Arthur, so I'll post them here with some comments. (NB: If you are not interested in the minutiae of my drawing decisions, you may want to skim or skip this post—there are eight pictures all told.)

I started sketching loosely while thinking generally about the scene I wanted to portray, to see what sort of Arthurian face suggested itself without my trying too deliberately to draw something before my hand started moving. I don't have a scan of the pencils that resulted, but I have two different inked versions of those pencils. The picture below was my first attempt, drawn by tracing over the pencils on a separate sheet of paper—not tracing paper, however, so my view of the pencils was somewhat spotty. Nevertheless, this first drawing probably had the tightest inking of them all, with lots of bitty lines (maybe because I was trying to reassert my control of the brush after long desuetude):

 
The eyes were a problem, as you can see, and I can't really vouch for the mechanics of that brooch-thing. (I surprised myself by including the cloak and brooch, characteristic more of a Celtic-clad Arthur than the Frenchified/Anglo Arthur better known from mainstream medieval texts.) Arthur also didn't look mad enough, or tired and dirty enough. So I tried again freehand, and made this:

This one has its okay qualities, but Arthur seems too upset and not riled up enough. And again the eyes don't line up quite right, and they were a main concern of my effort to depict the conflicting emotions I wanted Arthur to express in a single face (rage/grief, exhaustion/resolution, the like). I also think this Arthur looks too old, and a bit too hairy. So I tried another one freehand, and made this:

A head-on view for a change—not altogether satisfying in its static quality, but I was trying to figure out how to arrange the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth, which I found to be the main expressive elements (duh, because they are a lot more mobile than, say, the forehead or the cheekbones or the chin and beard!). My sense was that, in order to capture Arthur's welter of emotions, I'd have to use a bit of asymmetry, with one eye more clearly angry (with a lowered brow, say) and the other more wounded or stricken (wider, perhaps), while the two corners of the mouth might bend differently, expose different amounts of teeth, etc. I also found I kept wanting to give Arthur a busted lower lip, though I didn't always draw it that way. This Arthur probably looks too young, to boot. But note that these freehand drawings have started to get freer with broad strokes of the brush—that was going to be the way forward, ultimately. But I wasn't there yet, so I had another go at inking the original pencils—inking them directly, this time, while still trying to use them as a loose guide rather than a firm directive. Here's what I came up with this time:

So this one (#4, if you're keeping score at home) is clearly close kin to the first, though I think this one is more successful. Arthur looks a bit more bedraggled, more angrily wary and less innocently startled. The big problem with these sibling pictures was the spacing of the eyes relative to each other. I tried to make corrections in ink (more evident in #1 than here)—an effort doomed to failure! But here again there are some nice fat swatches of black brushstrokes, in defining the hair especially. (And since I was using real waterproof India ink on a bristly brush, as opposed to the water soluble ink in the cartridges that I load into my brush pen, the black looked really nice on the page.) I was almost satisfied enough with this to send it to Alphabooks, but it still has an amateurish quality that bugged me. So I tried another one freehand, and made this:

Truthfully, this was more a facial study than a full-out effort. (I think its placement on the page relative to prior drawings meant I couldn't have finished the head even if I'd wanted to.) Here I was still trying to figure out how the essential expressive parts of the face needed to work. I kind of like this piece of Arthur, though it's too fragmentary to be really recognizable as Arthur without a label. (I am aware that the same could be said of the final drawing I posted to Alphabooks, however.) I thought I was getting closer to where I wanted to be, but I was still willing to try something a little different. So I tried another one freehand, and made this:

This one didn't work either. Like #2, it looks too old and too mournful—nowhere near angry enough. (This one might work for the earlier scene of Arthur on the field of battle against Lancelot in Benwick, when his heart is no longer in the fight and when he realizes just how far he has compromised his principles in going along with Gawain to wage war against his former best friend and lieutenant; the key scene for Arthur's realization is when Lancelot himself rehorses Arthur in the midst of the battle, an act of transcendent chivalry that baffles and frustrates Lancelot's allies even as it breaks Arthur's heart. But I digress!) The other reason why this one doesn't work is that it looks too much like Uncle Jesse from The Dukes of Hazzard. That would never do!  So I tried a much different tack, and made this:

I don't really care for this one, but it helped to draw a more youthful Arthur again, and I made at least a sketch of what he might look like in a crown, though you will note that the crown was an afterthought, added after the hair was sketched in, and I wasn't prepared to commit fully to a complete design. Also, it sits weird on the head. Also, the head itself is kind of weird.

One of the problems I faced throughout, besides the problem of how to convey Arthur's mixed emotions, was getting the age of Arthur where I wanted it. I think he looks too young in numbers 3 & 7, and too old in numbers 2 and 6. I actually like a lot of the fundamentals of 1 & 4, the images based on my original pencils, but the eyes were really bugging me, and I think I prefer a more broken nose in Arthur, and a head that's not quite as square as those are (though I'm not convinced that the one I went with for the blog/tumblr/Alphabooks isn't too long in the face).

And heck, for the sake of comparison here's another look at the one I finally settled on, sketch #8:

There's a Knight of a Dolorous Countenance for you!

Arthurian Alphabooks: A is for Arthur

As a card-carrying member of the International Arthurian Society (or, well, journal-receiving; we don't actually have cards), I have decided to attempt an Alphabooks alphabet that is altogether Arthurian. There are lots of options for many of the letters. A, for example, could be Agravain (troublesome brother of Sir Gawain), or Anna (one of several names attributed to Arthur's sister, or at least one of his sisters), or Accolon (who attempts to kill Arthur in a conspiracy with Morgan le Fay), or Amfortas (a Grail king). But come on—it's obviously got to be Arthur, though the image below may not obviously look like Arthur to you:

 
In fairness, it's not obviously Arthur to me, either, though I think it qualifies as an Arthur. One of the reasons I thought it might be interesting to attempt an Arthurian Alphabooks is because descriptions of characters are often limited, absent, or so conventional as to be unspecific. Another challenge is that some of the more prominent characters feature in decades' worth of narrative events, so that a drawing of Arthur needs to choose a particular age of Arthur: the boy ignorant of his patrimony (in most texts), the young king (who may or may not be bearded), the mature monarch, the dying warrior.

I wanted to focus on not just a particular age of Arthur but a particular moment, when, on the field of battle at Salisbury Plain, he catches sight of his traitorous son Mordred, still alive when almost everyone else has fallen. I made a number of attempts, which were interesting to me in two main ways: first, I discovered that I did have a basic sense of how I thought Arthur might look; second, I realized how devilishly difficult it was going to be to capture in a still image the range of feelings that I imagine Arthur to experience in that moment.

Anyhow, the drawing above is neither exactly what I thought Arthur might look like nor (even remotely) a successful rendering of a face that should register simultaneous regret, rage, hurt, hostility, etc., etc. (An actor would have better luck than a still image, I think.)

Still, I'm satisfied enough to post it here and to have sent it to the good folks at Alphabooks. I will also note that this drawing is the furthest from my original sketches, which were a lot tighter and controlled—and frustratingly stiff. This one I drew freehand with a brush heavily charged with ink, and I began with loose strokes focused on the hooded eyesockets and the drawn cheekbones. (In fact, the original sketch lacked visible eyes, relying just on the solid black area of the upper lids.) I then slowly built up the image, even turning the paper around several times to hold up to the light to check for symmetry and tones. It felt almost like sculpting in ink, and was a fun way to get reacquainted with a real brush dipped in real India ink. (I haven't used those tools in about eighteen months or more.)

Anyhow. My thanks to Isaac for single-handedly keeping the blog alive in a really rewarding fashion over the last long haul. Let's see how or whether I hang in there this time around.