Igraine

Arthur's mother has a name older than the romances. The Welsh genealogies of the heroes call her Eigr, the daughter of Amlawdd Wledig, a British prince, which makes Arthur the cousin of Culhwch and kin to half the saints and warriors of Wales. The French romances softened Eigr into Ygerne and Igraine, and Geoffrey of Monmouth Latinised her as Igerna. Beyond her name and her marriage the Welsh tradition is silent; everything we know of her character, her choices and her fate belongs to the storytellers, and almost all of it hangs on a single night.

Geoffrey of Monmouth introduces her around 1136 as Igerna, wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, a woman whose beauty surpassed all the ladies of Britain. Uther sees her at the high feast he holds in London after his victories, and his desire is instant and public: he loads her with gifts, singles her out, and cannot take his eyes from her. Gorlois reads the danger and leaves court without the king's leave, which in that world is rebellion. Uther makes war on Cornwall, ravaging the land, and Gorlois, outmatched, places Igraine for safety in Tintagel, the fortress on its sea-girt rock that no assault can take, and holds himself at the castle of Dimilioc. The siege that follows is fought less for a dukedom than for a woman, and Igraine, locked above the sea, is its helpless prize.

What follows is the hinge of the whole legend. Uther, wasting with longing, confesses his desire to Merlin, and Merlin, who has seen what that longing will produce, consents to help him. By his craft he gives Uther the face and form of Gorlois, and disguises himself and the king's chamberlain Ulfin as the duke's knights. That night the false Gorlois rides to Tintagel, the guards open to their lord, and Igraine receives her husband home. In the likeness of Gorlois, Uther lies with her, and Arthur is conceived. In the small hours a messenger comes with terrible news: the real Gorlois, sallying from Dimilioc, has been killed. Igraine finds herself in a single night a wife, a widow and the mother of the future, and only later does she learn that the man in her bed was the king. Geoffrey records the facts with a chronicler's calm; the romances and the moderns have been arguing about them ever since.

Malory tells it with more intimacy and more consequence. His Igraine, widowed and wedded with speed to the victorious Uther, grows great with child, and when the king asks her by the faith she owes him whose the child is, she answers honestly that a man came to her in her husband's likeness on the very night of his death. Uther tells her the truth, that it was himself, by Merlin's counsel, and Malory says the queen made great joy when she knew who was the father of her child. Her daughters by Gorlois are married into the great houses of the north: Margawse to King Lot of Orkney, Elaine to King Nentres of Garlot, and the youngest, Morgan, placed in a nunnery and then given to King Uriens, learning necromancy on the way. The son is given up: by the oath Uther swore, Merlin takes the infant Arthur and hides him with Sir Ector. Igraine's reward is a long absence. She re-enters the story years later, when the realm doubts the unknown youth who drew the sword from the stone, and Merlin fetches Igraine herself to court. Before the barons she declares openly how Uther, in the likeness of the duke, begot him, and Sir Ector bears witness how he nursed the child, and Arthur embraces the mother he has never known.

Nor is her part in the tragedy finished. When Margawse, her eldest daughter, comes to Arthur's court as King Lot's wife, Arthur, not knowing she is his half-sister, lies with her, and begets Mordred. The deception at Tintagel thus answers itself a generation later: the son begotten in ignorance on a deceived wife begets in turn, in ignorance, upon his own sister, the knight who will destroy the Round Table. Igraine stands at the head of both lines, the line of Arthur and the line of Mordred, the bright crown and the black.

The later tradition has treated her variously. Tennyson lets her daughter Bellicent tell the tale, of the mother courted in Gorlois's shape and the birth no man could prove, and makes the mystery of Arthur's parentage the doubt that haunts his reign. Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon gives Igraine her own voice at last: raised in the old religion, bound to a duke she respects and then to a king she did not choose, mother of Arthur and of Morgaine, she becomes the pivot between the dying pagan world and the Christian one. The film Excalibur stages the deception at Tintagel with stark power, and the BBC's Merlin inverts the ending altogether, killing its Ygraine in childbirth as the price of the magic that conceived Arthur, so that Uther's grief becomes the reason he bans sorcery from Camelot. Across eight centuries the versions disagree about everything except the essential: there is no Arthur without Igraine, and the golden age is born out of her deception.