She demands that Lancelot marry her, and when he refuses, she asks to become his paramour. Lancelot wins the joust, and Elaine becomes hopelessly in love. She asks him to affix her emblem to his helmet, which Lancelot gallantly agrees to do. This story is recounted in greater detail in Thomas Malory’s fifteenth century Morte d’Arthur, which more people are familiar with, although Tennyson said he was unfamiliar with this work when he published the early version of “The Lady of Shalott.” In this version, a young virgin named Elaine le Blank or Elaine of Astolat encounters SirLancelot making ready to enter a joust and notices that carries no lady’s insignia on his armor. Tennyson softened her name to Shalott because he felt it sounded more poetic. The lords and ladies of the court, along with the Knights of the Round Table, rushed outside the castle to meet the barge, learning through the letter the cause of the unfortunate lady’s death. The unmanned vessel bore her straight to Camelot and King Arthur’s Court. Tennyson said he found this obscure character in a collection of thirteenth century medieval Italian romances under the name “The Lady of Scalot.” This lady pined for the love of Lancelot, for reasons that are unclear, and as she approached her death from lovesickness she asked her father to lay her in an elaborate barge upon the sea with a letter explaining the cause of her demise and denouncing Lancelot as vile, presumably for refusing her love. What is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem about the doomed lady based upon? “The Lady of Shalott,” by John Waterhouse.The “Lady of Shalott” is replete with references to Camelot, yet retellings of Arthurian legends, in novel or screen form, rarely mention this personage, nor is she named in medieval or Renaissance Arthurian tales.
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