Lancelot
Lancelot (or Launcelot; French: Lancelot du Lac, English: Lancelot of the Lake, German: Sir Lancelot Lancelot or from the source ) is a legendary figure of the medieval Arthurian romances. His life was described differently depending on the narrator. The stories about him have become so strongly diverged that there are several basic patterns.
Life
One version is the following: He is the son of King Ban of Benwick, who is forced to flee from his kingdom after its conquest by King Claudus with his wife Elaine. As a child, Lancelot is during this escape from his mother left on a lake and there, robbed of the fairy Viviane, the Lady of the Lake and the guardian of the mythical town Avalon. He grows up in their water kingdom, the forging of the magic sword Excalibur by the young Arthur.
The grown-up Lancelot, Gawain is next to the most famous of the twelve knights of the Round Table of King Arthur. His unconditional, undying love depends on Guinevere (also Ginevra, Gwenhwyfer or Ginover ), the wife of the king. He is unworthy By this fateful, adulterous love, to search for the Holy Grail.
Lancelot's liberation of the kidnapped queen from the farm is the theme of courtly verse romance Le Chevalier de la charrette ( The cart Ritter) by Chrétien de Troyes ( in the 1170s ). In Germany Ulrich told of Zatzikhoven between 1190 and about 1225 in a verse novel a distinctly different story about Lanzelet.
Lancelot in the literature
Really important for the history of literature was created in the first third of the 13th century extensive Old French prose romances ( Lancelot en prose ), which attaches a universal tale of the Arthurian world events and doomsday to Lancelot's history. Lancelot becomes the " crystallization figure" for many key motifs of the Arthurian novel - not least by his son Galahad, who is chosen to bring the quest for the Holy Grail at the end.
During the 12th century, in the stories about Lancelot still exists much freedom and known by only a few fixed points of his career, led the great cycle of the " Prose Lancelot " to a codification of the entire Arthurian legend. Almost all later Arthurian seals, to Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d' Arthur ( around 1470 completed ), ultimately based on its content structure.