Loyalty Builds Kingdoms

And disloyalty destroys them...

Arthur gets the sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake. N.C. Wyeth, 1922

The Arthurian saga is a dramatized meditation on the virtue of loyalty. Of course the rest of the knightly virtues are embodied with manly fulness in these adventures, but loyalty is a special concern—the possibilities that arise when loyalty is the law, and the disasters that follow when betrayal creeps in. Kingdoms are at stake.

One of the most iconic moments in all of folklore is a simple act of loyalty. When he first approaches the sword in the stone, young Arthur Pendragon stakes no claim to be king, nor does he even understand the significance of what he’s about to do. Arthur cares only for helping Sir Kay, who’s fighting in a tournament and has lost his sword. So the future king springs into action. “Arthur was wroth,” writes Thomas Malory, “and said to himself, I will ride to the churchyard, and take the sword with me that sticketh in the stone, for my brother Sir Kay shall not be without a sword this day.” This is the start of everything, a simple-hearted act of service to a brother. When a young man proves loyal, he proves worthy.

So Arthur shows the way, and others follow his lead. Years later, when Gareth of Orkney arrives at Camelot and requests to be made a knight, Arthur asks the young man if he understands what will be demanded of him. Central among those demands is loyalty: “My knights are sworn to vows / Of utter hardihood, utter gentleness, / And, loving, utter faithfulness in love, / And uttermost obedience to the King.” The words stick in the young knight’s mind, and he repeats them later as he does great deeds—in service of the king, and also in imitation of him.

Loyalty is put to an exacting test in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the greatest works of medieval literature. During one Christmas feast, a strange green giant bursts in upon the revelry at Camelot and challenges anyone bold enough to swing an axe at his neck, on the condition that he gets to return the favor one year later. A “Christmas jest,” he calls it. Arthur’s knights are too bewildered to answer the challenge—which he gleefully taunts them for. Finally Arthur has had enough of this discourtesy from the visitor and takes the axe himself. Even if this creates a massive problem for his realm, a properly hot-blooded king cannot let the Green Knight make a mockery of his court. Just as Arthur is about to decapitate the madman, Sir Gawain offers himself in his uncle’s place, arguing that his country could better afford to lose a knight than a king if this game goes wrong. The Green Knight’s challenge leads to an even more dangerous contest for Sir Gawain, which will once again test the knight’s loyalty, and even pit one loyalty against another. Gawain passes these tests as well as any mortal man could.

This is not the only time Gawain answered the call. In another tale, the king’s life depends on finding the answer to a riddle posed to him by a sorcerer: “What is it that women most want in the world?” Time is running out to find the answer when Arthur happens upon an old woman who claims to have what he needs. But Lady Ragnell won’t give it away so cheaply. In return she wants one of Arthur’s knights for a husband. Unfortunately this woman is not just old but also hideous—so hideous that Arthur cannot bring himself to ask any of his knights to go through with it. The king would rather die than request such a sacrifice!

Sir Gawain would never allow such a thing. The knight offers to marry Ragnell to save his king, and he even does his best to honor the lady, though it turns his stomach to do so. This time his act of loyalty doesn’t have any of the heroic glamor of volunteering oneself for danger; it’s all about a shocking level of sacrifice for his king. As a reward for his good conduct, Gawain learns on their wedding night that Lady Ragnell is not an ugly hag but instead a lovely young lady under the spell of that same wizard who threatened Arthur. Gawain’s act of loyalty saves Arthur’s life, and his honest attempt to keep his vow to Ragnell frees her from the enchantment.

Another display of loyalty comes with the Grail Quest, when Sir Percival—after many months of searching—comes upon a castle which he discovers to be in the possession of a lady he had loved years ago. She was married off young to a nobleman and he went to Camelot, but now her nobleman husband is dead and she offers Percival herself and her lands and fortune—just about everything a man could want. Her people beg him to wed their lady and be their lord. But just then Percival remembers the Grail Quest and “his vow burnt within him”—the vow he made to follow the Quest as far as he could. As lovely as the lady’s offer is, Percival cannot live with himself the consequences of being a knight who didn’t keep his vow.

With men like Gareth, Gawain, and Percival at his side, Arthur can build the greatest kingdom in the world. But just as loyalty builds Logres, disloyalty destroys it. The betrayal wrought by Lancelot and Guinevere does not remain personal and private. Soon their crime becomes everyone’s problem. People start to wonder what the kingdom is worth if the man on the throne is oblivious to his wife and best friend’s affair or too weak to do anything about it.

The rumors shatter a young idealist like Sir Pellias, who dedicates himself to destroying Arthur’s realm. This knight should have been the future of the Round Table, but instead he leaves to form his own anti-Round Table of adulterer knights, whom he says are truer than Arthur’s because they never claimed to be anything but false.

With betrayal in the air everywhere, one good man becomes disloyal simply by suspecting disloyalty in others. Sir Geraint begins to doubt his wife Enid, for no better reason than that she is friends with the queen, and their proximity may have caused Enid to “suffer a taint in nature” like Guinevere’s. So he takes her far from Camelot to escape the troubles. But his suspicions only intensify. On some level, Geraint seemingly wants Enid to be false: this temptation to imagine ourselves wronged can be almost intoxicating, as Geraint shows in his eagerness to seize upon a misunderstanding. His distrust literally drives him into a dark forest full of villains and a brush with death—which he and his wife only barely survive. Only after this does Geraint understand his errors. The two are lucky to be able to ride off and start again; many would not be so fortunate.

Not just ruining the lives of good and innocent people, Guinevere and Lancelot’s betrayal creates opportunities for the schemers to bring down everything Arthur has built. The work of a lifetime is undone in one season, thanks to disloyalty.