Lancelot

Lancelot du Lac — Lancelot of the Lake — is the great tragic hero of the Arthurian cycle, though he is not its oldest figure. He was invented by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes in the late twelfth century and grafted onto a pre-existing British tradition that knew nothing of him. The graft took so completely that it is now impossible to imagine the story without him.

His biography is the most fully developed in the cycle: raised by the Lady of the Lake, trained as a knight in a fairy otherworld, arriving at Camelot as the greatest warrior in the world, and immediately, irrevocably, falling in love with Guinevere. The love is adulterous, sinful, and fully acknowledged by both parties as destructive — and neither can stop. It is a story about being unable to choose between what you love, and what you are for.

Lancelot is also Galahad's father, conceived by enchantment with Elaine of Astolat, and it is his son who achieves the Grail that Lancelot — too stained by sin — cannot. In the final reckoning it is Lancelot's affair that Mordred uses to fracture the Round Table. He spends his last years as a hermit. When Guinevere dies, he refuses food and water and follows her within days — not suicide by action but by surrender, which amounts to the same thing.