1When Arthur is first mentioned in the early thirteenth-century French romance Yder, the young knight Yder has saved the king’s life, but without knowing the identity of the person he has rescued. When, the following day, he asks someone who that stranger was, the reply is an entirely traditional and expected encomium :

• 1  A. Adams, ed. and trans., The Romance of Yder, Cambridge, Brewer, 1983, p. 29.

« Ço est li rois Artur », dist cil.
« Est », dist Yder, « vallet ? » « Oil,
Li preus, li sages, li cortois,
Qui d’ennor ad passé les rois,
Cels qui furent e cels qui sunt :
De cels qui emprés lui vendront
N’en sera nuls ne vaille meins ;
N’en di pas trop ke tant est pleins
De valur e de corteisie
Ke nus n’en ment qui bien en die. » (v. 35-44)1

2Such praise is a standard Arthurian trope, and there is in principle very little to surprise us about it. Numerous romances go to great lengths to speak of Arthur’s greatness, even as many of those same romances set out to dramatize his flaws.

3This romance, however, offers a special case, because here Arthur, according to traditional assessments, is not just flawed but genuinely evil. If those views are correct, the praise quoted above should soon begin to ring hollow : it is clearly not the portrait of an evil or despicable man.

6Two episodes in particular appear to sponsor critical condemnations of Arthur. One concerns Arthur’s intense jealousy ; and jealousy, as the narrator reminds us, is a cruel thing (« Cruele chose a en gelosie », v. 5244). Roughly two-thirds through the romance, Yder returns to court after a triumph, and

Li reis e li barons qui l’ouent
En sont joiant e tuit le loent ;
De lor joie sunt tuit joios
Fors solement Keis l’envios. (v. 5129-32).

8The second of the passages that seem to convict Arthur occurs when he goes in search of adventure, taking with him Gauvain, Yvain, Yder, and Kei. Yder ventures ahead of the others to fight two giants or monsters ; the smaller of the two is fifty feet tall or more, v. 5502-03). The other knights arrive to find him victorious, sitting beside the giants’ bodies. Adams’s translation informs us that Arthur and Kei would have preferred that he be dead (v. 5671). Specifically, the Old French rendering reads, « Li reis quide qu’il seit grevez / E Keis, mes il fust mort lor voil : / Tost en eussent fait le doel » (v. 5670-72). She translates that as « Arthur thought he [Yder] was wounded, and so did Kei, but they would have liked him to be dead ; they would have grieved for him at once «. Here is the romance’s most explicit expression of Arthur’s jealousy and perhaps of his evil nature. Yet the passage is problematic and, I suspect, corrupt.

9Obviously, both editing and translating are at the same time acts of interpretation. In this passage, if we accept the editor’s punctuation, we have to concur with Busby’s contention about the evil that Arthur incarnates. Yet, punctuated differently (as « mes il fust mort, lor voil tost en eussent fait le doel »), the passage reads : « but if he had been dead [or, literally, « were he dead »], they would have wanted to grieve for him immediately. »

11If it is agreed that Arthur is not the entirely evil villain of the romance, then just what are his flaws, beyond irrational jealousy ? In fact, the king does not always do the wrong thing, but often he neglects the right thing or does things in the wrong order, by which is meant that he is irresponsible and forgetful and that he rarely has his priorities correctly ordered.

13Before long, Arthur is reminded of Yder and asks that the young man be brought to him. Informed that Yder has left, Arthur announces that he, the king, has shamed himself by forgetting about the young man who saved him. He sends twenty men to seek Yder, promising them rich gifts if they bring him back to court. Just when we have evidence of Arthur’s failings, he seeks to redeem himself : he does so too late, of course, but with good intentions. His forgetting Yder, then regretting it and sending men to search for him, suggests that Arthur could be forgetful, distracted, or perhaps even irresponsible – but his actions argue against the contention that he is simply evil.

14The text later offers a sequence that reflects and almost duplicates the one in which Arthur had to choose between defending a lady’s castle and fighting Talac. Yder’s ladylove, Guenloie, decides to besiege Talac’s castle ; since the latter is now Arthur’s vassal, the king will surely – so Guenloie thinks – come to his assistance, and just as surely he will bring Yder with him, enabling her thus to see the man she loves (v. 3399-551). But Arthur refuses to help Talac, or more precisely, he postpones the deed because, he says, he must first go and avenge the shame he has suffered at the hands of the Black Knight, now besieging the castle of the « orgoillose pucele » (v. 3485).

16So we are left with the question : who is the villain in this romance ? To my mind, it is not Arthur, or certainly not only Arthur – not even primarily Arthur. Unsurprisingly, on the other hand, Kei surely qualifies. At one point, he stabs Yder in the back – literally – and at another time he poisons him. He is resentful and hateful. Far from being the usually harmless (albeit irascible and sarcastic) gadfly of the court, Kei clearly represents here the nadir of chivalric behavior and character, lacking any redeeming social value. At the other end of the spectrum are Gauvain and Yvain. (Uncharacteristically for the French tradition, Gauvain appears to be an authentic hero in this work.)

17Between these two poles – Kei at one end, Gauvain (and Yvain) at the other – stand Yder and Arthur. Yder often appears to be something of a Perceval figure, remarkably talented for chivalry, but unknown and untried when the romance begins. On more than one occasion, it should be noted, he also demonstrates a prodigious talent for self-pity indicative of immaturity.

18And then there is Arthur. As my comments have demonstrated, it would be both impossible and senseless to paint him as an admirable character. I would argue, however, that he often has benevolent intentions, as when he wishes to express his gratitude to Yder for saving him ; but he is distracted and forgetful, and it occurs to him to thank Yder only after the latter has left court. In addition, his intense jealousy is unarguably a destructive force. In official matters, he appears disengaged and erratic, and he is strongly decisive only when he is doing the wrong thing : acting out of jealousy or inverting his priorities and postponing legitimate obligations.

20But it cannot be said that everything concerning the court is evil. At most, part of it is. The court contains the full range of human behaviors, from Kei’s treachery and hatred to Gauvain’s near perfection. The problem is precisely that the court, while not in itself evil, also does not function as a force for good. The romance and the court have no ideological core. Other romances, even as they dramatize Arthur’s failures, generally maintain a sense of the Arthurian ideal, and that provides an anchor, a mooring for the text and the court. But in this text, the court has been cut conspicuously loose from its mooring in the ideal of Camelot and the Round Table. It has no anchor to stabilize it.

21The court, I suggest, is not evil as much as it is simply adrift. It is a space within which events are often severed from their expected consequences. Of course, we can easily enough argue that Arthur is by no means what he should be or even what he is described as being. He is indecisive and irresolute, and he is tormented by jealousy and in serious need of lessons in anger management. As a result the court is largely without direction. All of that is patently obvious, but whereas it surely contradicts the description, quoted at the beginning, of Arthur as a great and inspiring monarch, a paragon of valor, wisdom, courtliness, and honor surpassing all others, it does not make either the king or the court unequivocally or irremediably evil.

22An evil Arthur is by no means inconceivable, but I would argue that the Arthur of Yder is far more complex and intriguing than he would be as a simple villain – or perhaps even as a genuine hero. Primarily, he is inconsistent : his characteristics range from magnanimity and generosity to disengagement and distraction to jealousy and rage. (Indeed, this may well be the most complex Arthur to be found in French romance.) And since the court is a reflection of the king, his flaws have shaped (or perhaps misshapen) the court so that it is no longer an ideal, but just a place. It provides the sense of a center in little more than a geographical way ; the knights (except for Gauvain, Yvain, and sometimes Yder) are not a brotherhood, but merely a loose collection of individuals, almost of strangers. In fact, apart from those I have mentioned, the author names only about fifteen knights of the Round Table, and fully a dozen are names that occur only in this romance. The experience, for anyone who knows the Arthurian tradition, is a shock of non-recognition. There is not only a faithful and loving Guenevere – itself already something of a novelty – but a king who, although praised, is at very least erratic and clearly flawed. And he presides – more or less – over a Round Table whose members include such « illustrious » knights as Bedouer, Gastinel, Gasoudenc, Guhu, Buhout, and Buflout. Yet, if his court and many of his knights appear to lack distinction and consistency, I would still maintain that Arthur himself does not incarnate evil. He simply fails to be the standard-bearer and enforcer of good, and as a result, he is the leader of a decaying ideal : a rudderless Camelot that is no more than the locus of random, fragmented, and almost alien experience.