The Mythologizing of Charles T. Wood

in Stories of the Ladies of the Lake from the Middle Ages to Beyond

Maureen Fries, SUNY/Fredonia (emerita)

When the Congregatio de Silvescendo (a title, by the way, my computer does not recognize) invited me to participate in this salute to the worthy Charles T. Wood, and gave me the subject you see on the program, I began to spend much of my waking and some of my dreaming hours investigating various approaches to the possible connections between Charlie and the royal ladies whose collective name supplies the other term of my title. Not until a very bad made-for-television quasi-Arthurian movie, Merlin, appeared the nights of April 26-27 of 1998, however, did the opportunity of my conscription into this celebration become as clear as the seer's familiar crystal. If Sam Neill could be a (however bizarre) avatar of Merlin, then why not Charlie Wood, who has a much better title by name alone to the honor? The earliest evidence of the sage's at least quasi-historical existence, after all, is as Myrddin silvestris, the Vita Merlini's survivor of the Battle of Arfderydd who wanders the Caledonian Forest inspired to prophecy by madness, and whose Latin cognomen translates as "of the wood," or perhaps even "woody." Rumor, indeed, suggests that the subject of our celebration answered in his youth to the nickname "Woody." As will presently appear, Charles's first name is also a significant part of my argument. But his last name alone suggests a barely concealed nom d'academe pointing to his initial connection with both Merlin and Lake Ladies. Through recently discovered documents ancillary to and sometimes corrective of conventional Arthurian sources, I have been able to trace for Charlie a long career in which -- like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, but presumably without the confusing sex changes the latter endured -- our honoree has traversed the centuries as an unsung Arthurian hero specializing in the championship of watery women.

Rather than a lake, it was a magic spring which occasioned the entrance of Charlie into Arthurian myth. As an ur-woodsman he was an accidental eavesdropper on the bard Taliesin's account of transporting Arthur to Avalon for healing by Morgan le Fay. Ravished by the story and maddened with lust for the Fay, our hero too ran wild in the Caledonian forest until -- by his washing in and drinking of the newly-flowing spring which had recently cured Merlin -- he too was cured, of lust as well as madness. Then, contrary to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, it was Charlie and not Merlin who suggested that Merlin's sister Ganieda, who had accompanied him to the forest and supplied him with a large observatory and a staff of astronomers, should inherit his power as prophet. This early championship of a female living by the magic Caledonian spring was to lead inevitably to other, similar adventures.

The first of these involved Charlie not only with the original Lady of the Lake but with her protégé, Lanzelet. Not yet Guenevere's lover, he is the eponymous and picaresque hero of the romance translated into German from an Anglo-Norman original (left behind by Henry II's courtier and sometime hostage to Austria, Hugh de Morville, and trnasported by who knows what means to Switzerland) by Ulrich van Zatzikhoven at the turn of the twelfth century. This Lady had kidnapped the baby Lanzelet and raised him among the ten thousand maiden-subjects who, without men, occupied her sea-kingdom: there, she taught him knightly virtues and simple non-knightly combat so that he might kill her son's enemy, Iweret. That Lanzelet is able to intuit the skillful chivalric weaponship by which he is able to accomplish this task has previously been ascribed to the traditional hero's innate mastery of the tools he needs for successful warfare. But a recently discovered MS gloss reveals that it was Charlie, attired in appropriate underwater drag (a mermaid's tail is mentioned) but -- remember -- with no sex change, who secretly taught Lanzelet all he needed to know. A superb swordsman and no mean arm with a lance, he was thus the first chivalric coach to successfully enable the greatest career of any Arthurian knight as well as the gentlemanly obliger of the Lady, without her knowledge (a graceful touch), so that she was able to take credit for his success. Indeed, Lancelot himself never knew the truth -- if he had we may presume, instead of calling upon the Lady herself at that crisis of his later career (recorded by Chretien de Troyes) when he found himself blocked off between two gates--"'Lady, lady, so help me God, no I have great need of your succour'" -- he would have called upon Charlie.

In another context, Charlie proved himself able to cope with the amorous wiles of the Lady and her avatars (I am including the variously named Viviane, Nenyve and Nimue under the latter rubric) much better than Merlin himself. The Vulgate Estoire de merlin indicates this power in a prophecy of the goddess Diana (the archetypal model for the Lady and, significantly, a well-known frequenter of Woods). The Lady's prenatal patron she tells Viviane's father that his daughter will "'be sought after by the wisest, most learned man on earth, that he may show her the greatest part of his learning, and that he may teach her everything she asks'" (281). This plain reference to Charlie is, however, polluted by a scribal addition, "'all through the power of necromancy'" (281), so that the referrent seems to be Merlin instead. (Charlie's talents, while manifold, surely do not include the darker aspects of occult knowledge). But the evidence tells us that it was certainly Messire Wood and not the redoubtable magician who helped this Lady in her first lesson in simple magic, how to make (an appropriate) river appear. When she is further able to transform a hawthorn bush into the tower where she then imprisons Merlin, it is by heeding Charlie's humanitarian plea that she returns there, most nights, to sleep with him. Notably, Charlie himself is never imprisoned by the Lady, nor is his reputation for wisdom impugned like that of Merlin, of whom the Estoire relates, "He taught her so much that he was later taken for a fool -- and he still is" (416).

In another part of the Vulgate, the Lancelot, the Lady -- now Ninian(n)e -- is said to have "cast a spell on her groin which, as long as it lasted, prevented any one from deflowering her and having relations with her" (Part 1, 12). Today I share with you the news of a recently discovered variant MS, in which -- for the first time, and after many centuries -- Charlie is given his due as the developer of this groin-protector, as part of his career-long, nay, lifelong devotion to the ideal of chastity, as well as recognized as the creator of the "broadest and deepest" part of the lake where (the Lancelot, like the Lanzelet, tells us) the eponymous hero was raised (Part 1, 12), and the real architect responsible for its very "splendid and beautiful" buildings (Part 1, 19). It is obviously due to his (and not just the Lady's) care that Lancelot himself is so "beautifully developed" that "no one could have found fault with him" (Part 1, 18-19). To Charlie we must now also ascribe the Lady of the Lake's conversion to Christianity and her explication of its connection with knighthood, which (she herself admits) she is not worthy to expound upon: "for the church cannot take up arms to revenge herself or return harm for harm; and this is why knights were created'" (Part 1, 59(

This Christian conception of knighthood, unfortunately, is not a uniform belief of all Ladies of the Lake, as appears in a MS in which Charlie plays no part, the fourteenth-century Italian Tavola Ritonda. Although the Dama de Lago here saves Arthur from enchantment (LX, 146), she entices through a series of magical spells first Tristano and then Lancilotto into a (not unexpectedly lakeside) pavilion, where she urges them to "'think of nothing beside [sic] a good time and lovely pleasure . . . that is, you together with the two queens [Isota and Ginevra}'" (267-269). Then she enchants the palace so that neither Artu nor his knights can see the double love-nest for fifteen days -- aster which, taking her leave, she urges the two pairs of lovers to blame her and excuse themselves, since the "'care[s] nothing for the king and his power'" (272). Without the good influence of Charlie, her commitment to a Christian sense of morality, to say nothing of the concern for the welfare of King Arthur and his Round Table which ought always to animate her actions, seem jeopardized by -- in the bon mot of a famous jurist -- the ambience of the hot blood of southern Italy (the heating of which is obviously foreign in every way to Charlie).

This ambivalent portrait of the Lady becomes increasingly problematic with her portrayal in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, where her name and important aspects of her character seem to be in (largely situational but fairly constant) flux. What Malory does not tell us is that our own Charlie was -- in his continuing advocacy of chastity -- Nenyve's chief helper in her battle to maintain her maidenhood against Merlin's attempts to take it from her. Still, he thought her final punishment of Merlin -- using the magic he taught her to imprison him forever under a stone -- too extreme, and regretted the failure of this efforts toward a gentler, kinder settlement. To Charlie's (until now hidden) credit, too, is the giving of Excalibur to Arthur as well as the taking it back: the reason, in case any of you have wondered (and it would be surprising if you hadn't), that only the arm and hand of the sword-giver-and-receiver appear from the lake is that the body below the surface is not that of the Lady but of her (however, still un-sex-changed) ubiquitous friend. The white samite in which the arm is clad is obviously designed to conceal the perhaps hairy (I have no direct knowledge) but definitely male arm.

That same male continues to be the chief aider and abettor of the Lady's efforts to aid the King and his Round Table. He is there, although hidden when Arthur retrieves Excalibur from Morgan le Fay's lover Accolon (87( -- it was he who at a propitious moment made it fall from the latter's hand, although (as usual)he let the Lady take the credit. In the narremes of the deflecting of the intended harm from the mantle Morgan sends to sow discord in Arthur's court (93), the enlisting of Tristam to free Arthur from the clutches of the sorceress Aunowre whose head the Lady suspends "by the heyre" from "hir sadill bowe" (301), the identification of the real poisoner of Sir Patrise whom Guenevere has been charged with slaying (617), a self-effacing Charlie is always there. He participates, too, in the lady's ever-creasing service to Arthur's knights (once she has disposed of Merlin), for instance her clever protection of Sir Severause La Beuse and Lancelot from hurting each other (665). But, with his usual admirable tact Messire Wood refrains from intruding himself into the Lady's adventure with Sir Pelleas, only watching discreetly as she inflicts upon the cruel Lady Ettarde the hopeless love to which the latter had condemned that knight (103). Only afterward, when the Lady takes Pelleas to her kingdom, weds him and joins with him in a mutual love all their life (104), does he aid her in protecting her chosen mate from harm in tournaments and especially from never encountering in combat her original protégé and still favored Lancelot, so that he lives with her "unto the uttermuste of hys dayes in grete reste" (717). This is surely to Charlie's credit, since he was by then more than a little in love with her himself.

In the Lady's adventures subsequent to Malory, Charlie often continued to find little or no place for himself. Such works as, for instance, Spencer's Faerie Queene or Ben Jonson's masque for the celebration of Prince Henry's Barriers -- even though in the latter the Lady is one of the speakers -- afforded little scope for his by now attenuated function, nor did Wordsworth's use of the Lady as Nina, who saves the putative bride of Galahad from a Merlin-instigated storm, nor Tennyson's initial connection of Nimue with Merlin's disembodied "Gleam." Indeed, the evil and manipulative Vivien of that poet's Idylls of the King filled Charlie with puzzled sadness -- he was hard put to recognize in her any connection to the benevolence of the traditional Lady of the Lake he had honored and aided for so long. Only in a few modern cases could Charlie find the kind of mythic role he had previously enacted.

Among these modern examples let me mention one novel, one film and one extraordinary piece of public service. The film is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which should have offered a chance for the Lady to regain her previous importance. When Charlie pointed this out to John Cleese et al, however, his offer of help was spurned. Thus, in the finished product, the Lady is merely a mocked verbal presence. When the pompous, priggish, Pythonic Arthur responds to the alleged members of a highly dubious anarcho-syndicalist commune who have questioned his right to kingship that "'the Lady of the lake, her arm clad in the purest white samite, held aloft Excalibur,'" a rather silly (and also) sexually ambiguous communard punctuates the bizarre riff in which he replies to the King with the slurs that "'strange women lying about in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government,'" whether or not a "'watery tart threw a sword at you'" or a "'moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me.'" We can all appreciate, I think, that this production had by then become something to which Charlie could not, in all decency, offer his (whether hairy or not, white samite-clad or unadorned) arm. A different problem arose with Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, in which the Lady of the Lake becomes a dynastic cognomen for a feminist dynasty of Earth Mother-worshipping priestesses, including Morgan le Fay as well as the traditional Nimue, Nineveh and Vivian[n]ne -- almost every traditional female except for the non-magical Guinevere. Here Charlie--although a little aghast at the sheer number of women involved--was willing to lend his aid, but found Bradley's unremittingly prolix narrative so dense that he could not find a place to enter it.

By this time, in any case, he had used up all the magic in his last name, Wood, and was forced to draw upon his first name for a final foray. The serendipitous identify of his name with that of Charles, Prince of Wales, led him to a defense of the latest Lady of the Lake, the tragic and, tragically, too soon dead Princess Diana, who has no been laid to rest on an island in a lake on her family's ancestral estate. Is it coincidence that she was named -- as her brother Earl Spencer stressed in his funeral eulogy -- for the goddess who had not only inspired the woodsy (Woodsy?) and water-connected original Lady but also in propria persona had, in the Estoire de Merlin so many Arthurian works and hundreds of years before, prophesied that "the wisest, most learned man on earth" would seek the Lady out? That seemed a bitter irony for this latest Diana, since no one had ever accused either the Prince or any of her lovers of wisdom. But, although her story had all too suddenly and too soon been cut off, she acquired in Charlie, posthumously, a truly "wisest...[and] most learned" champion.

In place of a proper narrative, unfortunately, he discovered only sad shards of often (always?) shoddy commemoration, which he resolved to destroy in honor of this Lady's beauty and humanity. Here are a few quotations from the tawdry pieces of so-called memorabilia he found. "The world grieves as one, united as an angelic light goes out forever....Now The Franklin Mint invites you to share in this loving tribute....The back of this fine porcelain plate will feature the beloved Letter by Saint Paul to the Corinthians, spoke by Prime Minister Tony Blair at her funeral." (No mention of Diana's picture on the front of the plate is necessary, since a winsome image of her occupies over half the advertisement, in only slightly less than actual size.) "A beautifully sculpted, hand-painted figurine capturing the 'Princess of the People'....crafted of cold-cast porcelain....[is]a Danbury Mint exclusive." (Again, an almost real size pictorial image occupies almost half the space.) Not to be outdone by the various mints, The Royal Mail -- now with the originally withheld approval of Earl Spencer -- offers five "official stamps bearing portraits of the late Princess Diana....[each] framed by a border of purple, traditionally the symbol of royalty," and this time in their actual size.

If even Earl Spencer has given in, we have no idea how effective Charlie's latest heroic attempt to aid -- in this case posthumously, and this time against more maudlin and meretricious forces than ever before -- the reputation of a deserving female. We can only hope that the fate of this latest womanly reputation will not discourage the gallantry toward not only the numerous and endlessly various Ladies of the Lake but also toward all ladies displayed in the career of Charles T. Wood, who nevertheless will certainly remain -- for those female medievalists lucky enough to have known and, yes, loved him --our own and always beau chevalier.

Copyright © Maureen Fries; all rights reserved. Used here with permission.

This talk has now been published as Maureen Fries, "The Mythologizing of Charles T. Wood in Stories of Ladies of the Lake from the Middle Ages to Beyond," STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE TEACHING, vol. 8, issue 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 5-14. The editor, Robert L. Kendrick, adds this note:

"We are especially fortunate in this issue to have a critical, article by a long-standing friend of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching and Teaching the Middle Ages. Maureen Fries was an early contributor to RALPH and maintained her support of SMART throughout her life. We have the good luck to publish posthumously "The Mythologizing of Charles T. Wood." Special thanks are due to Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst, co-executors of Maureen's literary estate, for authorizing and preparing the article for publication. Like Maureen's other scholarship, this article is lively and provocative, and will lead us to new insights about the period."