Broceliande

Broceliande first appears in writing around 1160, in the Roman de Rou of Wace, a Norman poet chronicling the dukes of Normandy. Wace had heard the Breton tales: that in Broceliande there was a fountain called Barenton beside which fairies could be seen, that hunters who blew their horns there encountered wonders, and that the whole forest breathed enchantment. So he went to see for himself. He found the fountain and the great stone, he blew no horn, he saw no fairy, and he came home, as he admits, feeling a fool for having looked. That confession is the forest's perfect introduction: the marvels of Broceliande reveal themselves to knights on quests, not to sightseers.

The fountain gets its full legend in Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, the romance composed around 1180 by Chretien de Troyes, the master poet of Arthurian France. At Arthur's court the knight Calogrenant tells how he rode into Broceliande, found the basin of gold hanging from the fairest pine ever grown, and poured water from it onto the emerald stone below. At once the sky split: thunder cracked, hail and wind lashed the forest, and when the storm passed, birds filled the tree with song and a knight in black armour thundered out of the wood to defend his fountain. He unhorsed Calogrenant and sent him home on foot. Yvain, the king's knight and Calogrenant's cousin, steals away to avenge the shame, pours the water, survives the storm, and mortally wounds the fountain's defender, Esclados the Red. Chasing the dying man to his castle, Yvain is trapped between two portcullises and saved by a lady's magic ring; he falls in love with the dead knight's widow, Laudine, and wins her, becoming the new defender of the fountain in Broceliande.

The forest's deepest secret belongs to Merlin, the prophet and enchanter who guided Arthur's father. In the French prose romances of the thirteenth century, Merlin rides into Broceliande and meets at the fountain a beautiful young huntress named Viviane, the girl the world will know as the Lady of the Lake. She beguiles him into teaching her his arts, and he, who can see the whole future and still walks into it, shows her spell after spell, including the enchantment that binds without chains. When she has learned all, she works that spell upon him: in one version she seals him in a tower of air in the forest, visible to no one but her; in another she lays him under a great stone in Broceliande's depths. The forest that taught him nothing and kept everything becomes his last address. It is also the childhood home of Lancelot, the greatest knight of the Round Table, raised beneath the waters of Viviane's lake in the same enchanted wood.

Broceliande's strangest corner is the Valley of No Return. Morgan le Fay, Arthur's half-sister and an enchantress of terrible power, was betrayed by a lover, and in her rage she wove a spell over a valley in the forest: no knight who had ever been false in love could ride out of it. The flowers bloomed, the streams sang, and the unfaithful of Britain wandered there for years, more than two hundred of them, until Lancelot - the one great knight who had never broken a vow of love - rode in and shattered the enchantment. The vale is still shown in Brittany today, a moor of golden gorse above the forest of Paimpont.

For the forest is real. Since the later Middle Ages, readers have identified Broceliande with the woods of Paimpont, west of Rennes, and the Bretons have mapped the legend onto the land: the Fountain of Barenton still rises in a clearing by a slab of stone, the Valley of No Return still glows with heather, and an ancient oak stands where Merlin's tree is said to have grown. Whether the poets found the magic in the forest or the forest borrowed the magic from the poets, no one now can say, and the Bretons see no need to choose.