Joyous Gard

The castle begins its story as the Dolorous Gard, the Castle of Sorrow. In the great French prose romance of Lancelot, composed in the early thirteenth century, it is a stronghold gripped by evil enchantment, held by a wicked knight named Brandin of the Isles, and so feared that its towers are said to have no equal between England and Ireland. Into this place comes a young knight who does not even know his own name: the White Knight, raised from infancy beneath the waters of a lake by the Lady of the Lake, the enchantress who stole him from his dead father's kingdom. The young man conquers the castle alone, breaks its enchantments, and frees the prisoners rotting in its dungeons. Within its walls he finds a tomb slab on which is written that only he who takes this castle may read what lies beneath, and when he lifts the stone he sees his true name for the first time: Lancelot du Lac, Lancelot of the Lake, son of King Ban of Benwick. He renames the castle Joyous Gard, and it becomes his home, the one place on earth that belongs to the knight who belongs to no one.

Joyous Gard earns its fame as a refuge for queens. When Guinevere, Arthur's queen and Lancelot's secret love, is condemned to burn at the stake - accused of poisoning the knight Sir Patrise with an apple meant for Sir Gawain - Lancelot rides to the pyre, cuts down the guards, and carries her away to his castle. Later, when the jealous knights Agravain and Mordred, Arthur's kinsmen hungry to destroy Lancelot, trap the lovers in the queen's chamber, Lancelot fights his way out and again takes Guinevere to Joyous Gard. In that rescue he strikes down many knights of the Round Table, among them the unarmed brothers Gareth and Gaheris, whom he loved and did not see in the press of battle. Arthur and Gawain, Gareth's eldest brother, bring the king's army to besiege Joyous Gard. The castle holds. Lancelot refuses to come out against his king, takes the defenders' blows without answering, and when the Pope commands that the queen be returned, Lancelot himself rides out with her, lifts her onto her horse before the whole host, and accepts banishment to France rather than shed more blood for a wall.

The castle gives shelter to other lovers as well. When Sir Tristan, the peerless knight of Cornwall, and Isolde, the Irish princess bound by a love potion to the man she cannot marry, flee the rage of Isolde's husband King Mark, Lancelot lends them Joyous Gard for their hiding place. There the two live a season of strange peace, hunting by day and feasting by night, while the whole of Britain talks of the knight and the lady behind Lancelot's walls. In Malory's telling it is one of the few untroubled chapters either lover ever knows, a borrowed joy inside walls built for exactly that.

The castle's last chapter is a funeral. After Arthur falls at Camlann and Guinevere dies a nun at Amesbury, Lancelot, who has become a priest and a hermit, sickens of grief and dies between prayers. His kinsmen and companions, the last faithful knights of the broken Round Table, find his body smiling in death, and they set it in a horse-litter and carry it fifteen days across the country to Joyous Gard. There the Archbishop of Canterbury sings the mass, and Lancelot is laid in the choir of his own castle, in the ground he won as a nameless boy. Malory ends the tale with the note that has kept treasure-hunters busy for five centuries: this castle, he writes, is called Joyous Gard, and some men say it was Alnwick, and some men say it was Bamburgh.

Both named castles are real. Bamburgh Castle stands on a basalt crag above the North Sea, once the seat of the kings of Northumbria, and Alnwick Castle, still the home of the Dukes of Northumberland, guards the river below it. Readers and romantics have argued for each ever since Malory wrote, and the argument is itself a kind of monument: of all the castles in Arthurian legend, only Joyous Gard was thought real enough to claim a place on the English coast. In modern retellings the castle keeps its meaning - the one true home of the knight who served a court that was never quite his - a fortress named for joy that finally held nothing but love, loyalty, and loss.