Queen Margawse

Margawse begins as a child of Tintagel, the sea-beaten castle of Cornwall where her father Duke Gorlois keeps her mother Igraine, the fairest lady in Britain. She is one of three daughters of that house, sister to Elaine and to Morgan le Fay, the enchantress who will haunt Arthur's reign. When King Uther Pendragon takes Igraine by Merlin's trick of disguise and Gorlois dies in the war, the daughters of Tintagel are married away to seal the new peace: Elaine to King Nentres of Garlot, and Margawse to King Lot of Orkney and Lothian, the proud ruler of Scotland's northern isles. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle she is simply Anna, Arthur's sister; in the older Welsh tradition the mother of Gawain is a lady named Gwyar, a name that means blood, as if the language itself knew how her story would end. From Orkney she watches her husband lead the eleven rebel kings against the boy Arthur, and when the rebels are broken and reconciled, she rides south to the young king's court, some say as her husband's eyes and ears.

What happens at that court is the secret wound of the whole legend. Arthur, in the first flush of his kingship, takes the beautiful northern queen to his bed. Neither of them knows she is his half-sister, daughter of his own mother Igraine, and from that unknowing night Margawse conceives Mordred. The prophet Merlin later tells the king that a child born on May Day will be his destruction, and Arthur does the one deed that stains his youth: he orders every noble child born that May Day to be set in a ship and cast out to sea. The ship founders on the rocks, the infants drown, and one boy is thrown up alive by the waves - Mordred, carried back to Orkney and raised among his mother's sons. Margawse never tells her husband the truth of the child's blood, and Lot raises as his own son the boy who will one day bury the king.

Widowhood finds her soon enough. King Lot is struck through the helm by King Pellinore in the press of battle, and Margawse sends her sons one by one to Arthur's court, where Gawain rises to be the first knight of the Round Table and the Orkney clan becomes its proudest house. But the queen does not fade into a dowager's quiet. In the French prose romances that Malory drew upon, she takes for her lover Sir Lamorak, the son of the very Pellinore who slew her husband, a knight counted among the three best in the world. The affair is treason within treason: a queen bedding the house her sons have sworn to destroy. Her son Gaheris, riding to her castle, finds the two in her bed. He drags his mother naked from the sheets and strikes off her head with his sword, sparing Lamorak only because no knight may slay a naked man, and sends the lover away with his mother's blood on him.

The killing of Margawse detonates the feud her sons had tried to bank. King Arthur himself is shamed and enraged that a queen of his blood should die unjudged, and the Orkney brothers close ranks: Gawain, Agravain, and Gaheris later catch Lamorak at a tournament and hack him down together, while young Gareth refuses to stain his hands. The house of Lot, founded on her marriage and poisoned by her secrets, spends the rest of the legend tearing at the Round Table from within, until her hidden son Mordred finishes the work her hidden night began. In T. H. White's modern retelling she is the pale enchantress of the cold northern castle, teaching her neglected sons witchcraft over a boiling cauldron, a mother whose love curdled into the doom of her line.