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PRINCE VALIANT ANNOTATIONS

The references used herein are to the Fantagraphics volumes. The volumes referenced are those books.

For instance, "1. Panel 1." means page 1, panel 1; and "83. Panel 2." indicates page 83, panel 2.

VOLUME ONE: THE PROPHECY.

1. Panel 1. The King of Thule, introduced in the very first panel of Prince Valiant, would not receive his name (Aguar) until #344 (see below). It would not be revealed until #80 how he came to lose his kingdom. (Indeed, Foster never provided the details anywhere in the strip as to exactly how Sligon deposed Aguar and seized his throne.)

The name of Thule first appears in the writings of the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia (now Marseilles) in the 4th century B.C., who described it as a land six daysEjourney north of Britain, beyond which lay a frozen sea. Scholars and historians are divided as to whether the Thule of which Pytheas spoke was Norway or Iceland (Barry Cunliffe, in his The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek, has argued for Iceland); what is certain is that "Thule" since Pytheas’s time has come to represent a distant, romance-tinged land at the edge of the world, generally associated with the far north. Foster most likely chose that name for Val’s homeland precisely because of those poetic connotations, so appropriate for the tone that he desired for Prince Valiant.

Foster would eventually identify Thule as Norway. However, as we shall see, its depiction in the early days of the strip does not fit this location.

Panel 3. The fact that Aguar, his family, and his remaining followers should have reached the English Channel by dawn after boarding a ship the previous night - and boarding it while still in flight from the pursuing followers of Sligon - is the first sign (see the annotation for #1, Panel 1 above) that Foster had not specifically imagined Thule as being Norway at this stage of Prince Valiant. Assuming that they had set sail from Thule itself (as the context suggests), it is unlikely that they could have reached the Channel in a single night, if Thule was indeed Norway. (Of course, Foster might simply have not given any thought to travel times when he was writing this scene.)

Panel 5. Foster here depicts the Britons as "half-savage" and dressed in animal skins; they could easily be the sort of ancient Britons that one would find in the illustrations of an old-fashioned history book, making ready to repel a landing by Julius Caesar and his legions. Certainly they resemble them more than they do the inhabitants of a conventional Arthurian Britain in a legendary Age of Chivalry. (Of course, they are living on the outskirts of Arthur’s kingdom, rather than at Camelot itself.)

Panel 6. Aguar and his ship pass the river Thames. Since they had two panels earlier sailed past the famous white cliffs of Dover, and would evidently be wrecked in what is now East Anglia (since they travel northwards from their landing-place to the Fens), they are clearly journeying northwards up the southeastern coast of Britain.

2. Panel 7. The Fens are (or were) a marshy region in England, lying to the immediate southwest of the Wash, on the western border of East Anglia. During the Roman occupation of Britain, the Romans made an attempt at draining them, but after their departure, the Fens soon reverted to marshland. More recently, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, they have been drained again, and converted into farmland.

The most famous event in the history of the Fens took place during the reign of William the Conqueror (1066-1087), when a rebellious Saxon nobleman named Hereward the Wake used them as his home base during his brief struggle against the Normans (operating from the monastery of Ely, then an island in the middle of the Fens). Hereward’s story soon became colored with the customary overlay of romance, turning him into a larger-than-life figure; he even became the hero of a historical novel by Charles Kingsley. It is tempting to wonder if Foster may have chosen the Fens as the place of refuge for King Aguar and his family (including the young Prince Valiant) because of the story of Hereward (although they came to the Fens to escape Sligon’s reach rather than to fight against him). From there, it is also tempting to wonder if Horrit’s presence in the Fens just might have been inspired by a particular incident in the Hereward legend (see the annotation for #6, Panel 9, below).

An even stronger parallel to Aguar’s time in the Fens (though one that may be coincidence) is the case of Alfred the Great (871-899). In early 878 (shortly after Twelfth Night, i.e., January 5), the Danes made a surprise attack upon Alfred’s kingdom of Wessex and overran most of it; King Alfred and a handful of followers fled into the marshes of Athelney in Somerset, where they managed to build up enough of a force to challenge the Danes to battle after Easter that same year and defeat them at Edington, followed by a truce in which the Danes agreed to withdraw from Wessex. (This was the period when, according to legend, Alfred inadvertently burnt the cakes of a woman in whose home he had taken refuge.) Aguar’s period of exile in the Fens lasted longer than Alfred’s period of exile in Athelney, but other than that, the similarity between Aguar’s story and Alfred’s is even stronger than that between Aguar’s story and Hereward’s. In all fairness, though, we have no evidence that Foster was at all influenced by the reign of Alfred the Great when he told of Aguar and Val’s time in the Fens, so the likeness between the two may be accidental.

But perhaps the strongest source material for Val’s boyhood adventures in the Fens came from Foster’s own life, for he was an eager outdoorsman. His biographer, Brian M. Kane, has suggested that a particular inspiration for the Fens was the bull marshes near the Red River, where Foster had undertaken a fowling expedition when he was eighteen (see the annotation for #182, Panel 4, below, for further information).

3. Panel 3. The "half-seen monster" is the first hint of the prehistoric beasts which Foster portrayed as inhabiting the Fens in the strip (see #4-5 and #8). Foster had originally imagined Prince Valiant as a fantasy strip (though as he himself admitted, as time went on Val and his family and friends became so realistically characterized that the fantasy elements no longer fitted in well and he chose to remove them), and his depiction of the Fens as a "lost world" is clearly part of that.

Panel 9. Prince Valiant is first named within the actual strip. Foster was not initially fond of the name, which he considered to be an unsubtle character description masquerading as a name; indeed, his initial choices for Val’s name were first "Derek, son of Thane", and then "Arn". Both of these Joseph V. Connolly, the president of King Features Syndicate, turned down, proposing "Prince Valiant" instead. (Foster must have retained a fondness for the name "Arn", however, for he used it for two characters in the strip - Prince Arn of Ord and Val’s oldest son - as well as for one of the two young protagonists of Prince Valiant’s companion strip in the 1940’s, The Medieval Castle.)

Panel 11. Our first glimpse of Horrit and Thorg. Years later, Foster would reinterpret this scene and portray the "strange couple" as being the parents of the "half-savage native boy" introduced in the first panel of # 4 instead (see # 1346, Panel 3).

4. Panel 7. The dinosaur that pursues Val and his friend through the Fens is, of course, perhaps the worst anachronism in the entire strip. Dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous Period, 65 million years ago; none of them survived into human times, let alone recorded history. A dinosaur in 5th century Britain, therefore, is clearly impossible.

5. Panel 12. Foster would later on reintroduce Val’s tutor into the strip twice, once during King Valgrind’s attempted coup (#346-8) and once on the occasion of Aleta’s first arrival in Thule (#512). He also gave him the name Erland on both of those occasions (on this page, he is nameless).

6. Panel 9. It is tempting to wonder whether Horrit the witch’s presence in the Fens might have been influenced by the legend of Hereward the Wake (see the commentary on #2, Panel 7). It is said that, at one point, the Normans employed a local witch to aid them in their assault upon Hereward’s base in the Fens, pushing her forward on a wooden tower as she uttered spells and curses directed against Hereward and his followers; Hereward’s men merely set fire to the tower, burning her with it. We have no proof that Foster had this story in mind when he decided to place a witch in the Fens for the young Val to encounter (the only similarity between Horrit and the witch in the Hereward legend is their home), but in light of his tendency to get ideas for his strip from medieval romance and historical novels, it is possible.

8. Panel 8. Again Hal Foster pits Val against a prehistoric monster (the giant turtle) more likely to have been found in the Mesozoic Era than in the 5th century. (Indeed, the damp and chilly climate of Britain is hardly appropriate for large cold-blooded reptiles to live in.)

10. Panel 3. Here begins Horrit’s prophecy. It fits the early tone of Prince Valiant, where magic could be depicted as real (see the note to #3, Panel 3 above) that all (or nearly all) of her words come true. Much of Horrit’s foretelling might be seenn as self-fulfilling (since her words inspire Val to leave the Fens, seek adventure beyond them, meet King Arthur and his knights, and see so much of the world), but it is much more difficult to explain away her prediction of Val’s mother’s death. (Although, Horrit merely tells Val that a terrible woe awaits him without being specific as to what that woe is, leaving open the possibility that she was merely making use of the traditional fortune-teller’s trick of describing the future in such vague terms that almost any eventuality could appear to fulfill that prophecy; Horrit’s words could appear to have come true just as well if it had been Aguar who had died instead, for example. Foster probably did not see it that way when he drew and wrote this page, however.)

Of course, Horrit’s prophecy (repeated on many occasions throughout the strip) that Val would never know contentment would have been a safe enough prediction, since Foster would periodically state throughout Prince Valiant that it is all but impossible for humans to know contentment.<./p>

Panel 6. King Arthur is mentioned and seen for the first time in Prince Valiant (other than in the strip’s full title), as is Queen Guinevere.

It is still uncertain as to whether there was a real King Arthur or not. Some historians believe that he was based on an actual figure in the 5th or 6th century A.D., a British leader who fought against the invading Saxons; others believe him to be entirely mythical. This controversy is ultimately unimportant as far as Prince Valiant is concerned, however, for its King Arthur is clearly the Arthur of medieval romance (though linked to the real history of 5th century Britain in his clashes with the Saxons). Foster explained, in discussing his depiction of Arthur and his court, "If I drew [King Arthur] as my research has shown, nobody’d believe it. I cannot draw King Arthur with a black beard, dressed in bearskins and a few odds and ends of armor that the Romans left when they went out of Britain, because that is not the image people have." (Kane, p. 76.)

Arthur first appeared in the writings of Dark Age Wales as a shadowy figure, generally portrayed as a mighty warrior. The 9th century Historia Britonnum (The History of the Britons) - popularly ascribed to a monk named Nennius, although many historians now doubt that he actually wrote it - described him as the leader of the Britons in their struggle with the Saxons, who defeated the Saxons in twelve great battles, culminating in a climactic encounter at Mount Badon. Other writings, however, portray Arthur in a mythical rather than historical or pseudo-historical setting. For example, the poem Preiddeu Annwn (The Spoils of Annwn), gives a fragmentary account of how Arthur voyaged to Annwn (a sort of Welsh fairyland), taking with him three shiploads of men; only seven of them returned with him. The prose tale of Culhwch and Olwen has Arthur ruling over a court composed not only of conventional heroic warriors, but also "tall-tale" figures who can drink up the sea, shoot a wren in Ireland while standing in Cornwall, or flatten mountains by merely standing upon them; he and his followers come to the aid of the young Culhwch when he seeks to wed the beautiful Olwen, by fulfilling the tasks that Olwen’s curmudgeonly father, the giant Ysbaddaden, sets him, tasks that bring them into conflict with giants, witches, and the monstrous wild boar Twrch Trwyth.

In or around 1136, Arthur assumed a more familiar form when Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a book entitled The History of the Kings of Britain, which claimed to be a history of Britain from its first settlement by Brutus the Trojan, a great-grandson of Aeneas, to the death of King Cadwallader in 689, but which was mostly Geoffrey’s own invention (though often embroidering real history, or what Geoffrey and his contemporaries believed to be real history). Arthur formed the climax of Geoffrey’s pseudo-history, as a mighty ruler of epic stature who presided over a court of unparalleled splendor at the City of the Legion (now Caerleon), and who not only defeated the invading Saxons and Picts, but also conquered Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Gaul, and was even on the verge of adding the Roman Empire to his domain when brought down by the treachery of his nephew Mordred. Geoffrey was the first person (so far as we know) to give Arthur a complete biography from birth to death, and his book solidified the legendary king in the imagination of western Europe, and maybe even beyond (only a few decades later, in the 1170’s, an anonymous writer described Arthur’s fame as having spread even as far as Egypt, Antioch, and Palestine among other places, though he may have been exaggerating). It also became the basis for almost all later versions of King Arthur’s story.

Succeeding writers would embroider Geoffrey’s account of Arthur, adding fresh elements to it. Among these were the Sword in the Stone, the Round Table, Camelot, Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair, and the Quest for the Holy Grail (none of which appear in Geoffrey’s work). This process culminated in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, written around 1470, which crystalized the legend into its current form. Interest in Arthur declined in the 17th century (partly due to the Stuarts embracing his legend for propaganda purposes, making it unappealing to the Parliamentary forces seeking to challenge the notion of the divine right of kings), but was revived in Victorian times (thanks, in particular, to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King), and still holds strong today.

For the modern English-speaking world, King Arthur has become perhaps the most famous legendary hero of medieval Europe (only Robin Hood could seriously compete with him for that title), and a symbol of the Age of Chivalry, not so much as it really was but as people like to imagine it to have been. Even with the present shift in Arthurian fiction towards "the search for the historical Arthur", that is, the hypothetical 5th or 6th century British military leader who may or may not have existed, pop culture treatments still focus on Arthur as a figure representative of the Middle Ages of the imagination. It is in that role that Prince Valiant depicts him (and the "search for the historical Arthur" was less prominent in fiction when Foster began the strip in 1937 than it is today).

Guinevere appears to have been introduced into the Arthurian cycle early, as Arthur’s queen and consort. (In one of the Triads - a collection of figures or events in Welsh legend grouped in threes - it is even stated that Arthur had three wives all named Guinevere!) Geoffrey of Monmouth included her in his History of the Kings of Britain as Arthur’s wife and the most beautiful woman in all of Britain; while she occupied only a small role in his account of her husband’s reign, later versions of the legend expanded upon it, focusing in particular on her unfortunate love affair with Sir Lancelot.

Horrit’s description of Guinevere as a "flighty wench" might be a reference to the notorious infidelity of Arthur’s queen. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s work, she becomes Mordred’s consort after his usurpation of the throne, and was apparently not reluctant to do so. (Though, in fairness to her, during the civil war between Arthur and Mordred that follows, she flees to a nunnery at Caerleon, where she spends the rest of her days; it is uncertain, however, whether her motivation is remorse or merely fear of her husband’s anger.) Succeeding versions of the story also made use of this; Layamon’s Brut, a late 12th century adaptation of Geoffrey’s work in Anglo-Saxon verse (more precisely, an adaptation of Wace’s Roman de Brut, a Norman-French verse adaptation of Geoffrey), makes Guinevere an outright traitor alongside Mordred. The romances (in contrast to the pseudo-chronicles) rejected Guinevere’s union with Mordred, replacing it with her amour with Sir Lancelot (which would twice appear in Prince Valiant, in #504-05 and in #1387-92); this tragic adultery had become one of the central elements of the Arthurian legend by Malory’s time, and is still familiar today. (Until recently in Wales, a young woman with loose moral standards would be nicknamed a Guinevere.)

Panel 7. While Foster (as mentioned above) had evidently adopted an attitude of "magic is real" in Prince Valiant’s world at this point, his depiction of the dragon and unicorn that Horrit speaks of as a crocodile and a rhinoceros (encountered in #17 and #262 respectively) shows that he had limits on the amount of fantasy to incorporate into the strip. The griffon (presented here apparently as an eagle) never made an appearance, but one can make out, just behind the African tribesman, what is apparently the Irish elk that Val would see in #584. The African tribesman would himself appear during Val’s trip to Africa in Boltar’s company (#260-63), but Val never encountered the Chinese (as represented by the robed man to the right of the African and Horrit’s mention of "yellow [men]") during Foster’s run of the strip. During the MurphysEtime on Prince Valiant, however, Val did indeed make a journey to China to establish trade relations between it and Britain.

10. Panel 7. Foster’s description of Britain as a "hostile north country" whose poor climate brought about the death of Val’s mother is another hint (see the commentary on #1, Panel 1) that he did not initially envision Thule as being Norway (from whose perspective Britain certainly could not be described as "north").

Much later on in the strip (in #744, Panel 4), Foster revealed that Val’s mother was of Roman descent, which would certainly fit with her being used to a warm, sunny climate. (Though she appears to have weathered life in Thule, before Sligon’s coup, well enough.) We never learn, however, how a Roman noblewoman came to marry a king from far-off Thule, in the distant north of the known world.

12. Panel 12. This marks the first entrance of Sir Lancelot, the first character from the Arthurian legend to actually cross paths with Prince Valiant.

Although Lancelot is one of the most famous characters in the Arthurian cycle, he appeared relatively late in its development. So far as can be told, there is no mention of him in either the early Welsh legends about Arthur (unless he is to be identified with a certain Lleanlleawg the Gael, as a few Arthurian scholars such as Roger Sherman Loomis have suggested), nor in the pseudo-chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth and his successors. He first recognizably appears in Arthurian literature in the late 12th century, particularly in the French verse romances of Chretien de Troyes. In Chretien’s works, Lancelot was portrayed as one of the leading knights of Arthur’s court, though second to Gawain (who was then seen by the romancers as the leading knight of the Round Table). His most prominent role is in Chretien’s Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart where he comes to the rescue of Queen Guinevere after her kidnapping by the evil knight Sir Meleagant, undergoing the humiliation of riding in a cart part of the way to Meleagant’s homeland of Gorre. The story established Lancelot and Guinevere as lovers, a concept that soon became one of the Matter of Britain’s central threads.

In the early 13th century, the French Prose Lancelot gave Lancelot a formal biography. It made him the son of King Ban of Benoic (or Benwick), who, like Aguar, was driven from his kingdom into exile (by the invading King Claudas). Unlike Aguar, however, Ban died shortly after he lost his kingdom; the Lady of the Lake then raised the infant Lancelot. (Lancelot gained his traditional title, "Lancelot du Lac" or "Lancelot of the Lake", because she fostered him; he bears that title in Prince Valiant, though the strip never alluded to this upbringing, and even depicted King Ban on several occasions as still alive.) She taught him the necessary skills of a knight, and then, when he was old enough, sent him to Arthur’s kingdom to be knighted. There he performed many heroic deeds, such as capturing the haunted castle of Dolorous Garde (which he renamed Joyous Garde and made into his personal stronghold) and defeating the invading Duke Galehaut of the Long Isles (not so much through force of arms as through winning Galehaut’s friendship). During this time, he and Guinevere also fell in love, with eventual disastrous consequences not only for the lovers, but also for Arthur and his kingdom. Lancelot’s great prowess of arms made him the foremost knight of the Round Table, surpassing even Gawain. But his adulterous love brought about his downfall. When Lancelot embarked upon the Quest for the Holy Grail, his sin with the Queen prevented him from achieving the Grail (ironically, the Grail was achieved by Lancelot’s illegitimate son Galahad, who was begotten partly as a result of his father’s love for Guinevere); he made an effort to forswear his old desire for her afterwards, but soon backslid, and became so careless about his affair with her that Gawain’s younger brother Agravain, who hated Lancelot out of envy, learned about it and exposed it. A civil war quickly followed between Arthur and Lancelot which led to the deaths of Arthur and most of his knights; smitten with remorse, Lancelot became a hermit for the rest of his days and died repentant, his sins at last forgiven by Heaven.

Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur made use of the Prose Lancelot’s story of Lancelot; Malory omitted the early stages of Lancelot’s life, but dealt in full with the latter portions, including how he was tricked into sleeping with Elaine of Corbin and thereby begetting Galahad upon her, his failure to achieve the Holy Grail, and how his love affair with Guinevere helped destroy the Round Table, concluding with an account of Lancelot’s repentance and becoming a holy hermit at Glastonbury. Since Malory is the leading primary source for the Arthurian legend in the English-speaking world, Lancelot has since come to be one of the most familiar figures in this cycle; indeed, he is probably the only knight of the Round Table whose name everyone has heard of. It is thus entirely appropriate that he would be the first knight from Arthur’s court whom Val should meet.

14. Panel 9. Foster never fulfilled this prediction.

16. Panel 1. Sir Gawain, perhaps the most prominent Arthurian character in Prince Valiant, now enters the strip.

Gawain was a relatively early addition to the Arthurian legend. In the story of Culhwch and Olwen, one of Arthur’s leading warriors (alongside Cai and Bedwyr, who would become Kay and Bedivere in more familiar forms of the story) is a certain Gwalchmei son of Gwyar, described as being Arthur’s sister-son; Arthurian scholarshave generally agreed that this is a Welsh version of Gawain. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Gawain first appears under his familiar name, depicted as Arthur’s nephew, the son of his sister Anna by King Lot of Lothian. At the age of twelve, he is sent to the household of Pope Sulpicius (an invention of Geoffrey’s rather than a real historical figure), who knights him. When Arthur goes to war with the Romans (see the annotation for #185, Panel 4), Gawain fights valiantly for him throughout. He is slain, however, in the first battle with Mordred, at Richborough in Kent.

Geoffrey’s successors began fleshing out Gawain’s character further as the legend continued to develop. In Wace’s Roman de Brut, Gawain appears for the first time in Arthurian literature (so far as we know) as an elegant courtier rather than merely another warrior; when Duke Cador of Cornwall urges Arthur to make war upon the Romans, Gawain counters his words with a speech in favor of peace, describing it as a time when young men have the leisure to engage themselves in courtly love and song. Chretien de Troyes followed this interpretation of Gawain, depicting him as not only the leading knight of the Round Table (surpassing even Lancelot), but as also polished and cultured, as famed for his courtesy as his valor - and a definite ladiesEman. On the surface, Chretien’s Gawain seems an admirable figure; however, there are many hints that underneath his sophistication lies a hollowness that will keep him from rising to the heights that the title characters of Chretien’s romances will attain.

Chretien’s successors built upon these hints to diminish Gawain (especially as Lancelot took over his position as the chief knight of the Round Table). They expanded upon his philandering tendencies, depicting him as an inconstant seducer; his frivolity blinds him to spiritual matters, preventing him from achieving the Holy Grail in the Prose Lancelot (just as Lancelot’s adultery barred him from the Grail). Furthermore, in the Prose Lancelot’s final division, Mort Artu (The Death of Arthur), Gawain develops an even more serious flaw than superficialty and fickleness: vengefulness. When his younger brothers are accidentally slain by Lancelot while the latter is rescuing Queen Guinevere from being burnt at the stake, Gawain immediately vows vengeance upon Lancelot. This vow keeps the civil war between Arthur and Lancelot going even after the quarrel over Guinevere is resolved through the Pope’s intervention, thus ensuring the fall of Camelot. Later French prose romances added a feud between Gawain’s family and that of King Pellinore; after Pellinore slew Gawain’s father King Lot in battle, Gawain responded by slaying both Pellinore and his son Lamorak, even though they were his fellow knights of the Round Table.

Gawain’s reputation in England fared better, and he was the hero of many Arthurian poems there, especially the 14th century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. However, Sir Thomas Malory, when he wrote Le Morte d’Arthur, adopted the unfavorable portrayal of Gawain in the French works as harsh and vengeful, presumably in order to make Lancelot seem more heroic by comparison. Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his Idylls of the King, also depicted Gawain in an unflattering light, though returning to Chretien’s notion that his dominant failing was frivolity rather than violence. In "Lancelot and Elaine", for example, Gawain, assigned by Arthur the quest of tracking down Lancelot, who has won the prize at a tournament but left before he could claim it, goes reluctantly (because his errand will take him away from the festivities), attempts unsuccessfully to seduce Elaine of Astolat when he meets her, and when he learns of her connections to Lancelot, gives her the prize to present to him and returns to Arthur’s court; there Arthur rebukes him for his disobedience in not carrying his mission through to the end.

The Gawain of Prince Valiant clearly owes much to the Gawain of Tennyson (and possibly that of Chretien de Troyes, though we do not know whether Foster had ever read any of Chretien’s works or even heard of them) in his characterization as a light-hearted, flirtatious figure, who enjoys the company of ladies but is always careful to avoid commitment - and who, indeed, views matrimony as a fate worse than death. Foster makes him more sympathetic than his counterpart in Tennyson, while still showing his faults. Barely any hint of his tendencies to blood-feud enters the strip, however (except for two references to his quarrel with Lancelot, in #318, Panel 7, and #1024-29); the vendetta with Pellinore’s family never appears in Prince Valiant. (Presumably its presence would have clashed with Foster’s depiction of Gawain’s chief flaw being over-sophistication rather than vengeance.)

In this stage of the strip, Gawain displays only a few hints of the figure that he would eventually become. While he has a sense of humor from the start, he is portrayed during the period that Val serves as his squire as a relatively serious, responsible figure, with no trace of the lady-killing or tendency to comical misfortunes that would be his leading character traits during the bulk of Prince Valiant. (Even Gawain’s original costume varies from its familiar form; here he wears a simple white surcoat, rather than the fancy green surcoat with jagged edges that would later on become his regular apparel.) Presumably Foster held these character traits back since they would have clashed with Gawain’s then-function of mentor to the young Prince Valiant; once Val had graduated from squirehood to knighthood, Foster was free to turn Gawain into the "comic relief" foppish flirt that he is most familiar as to Prince Valiant fans.

17. Panel 5. The "great sea-crocodile" is clearly a rationalization of a dragon, though an unconvincing one. The wet and chilly British climate would hardly be conducive to its health and vitality; nor is there any explanation as to how the crocodile had arrived in Britain to begin with. Presumably Foster was still thinking in terms of the "jungle/lost world adventure" genre that he had worked on when drawing Tarzan.

19. Panel 1. This is the first appearance of Camelot, King Arthur’s most famous residence, in Prince Valiant. While Arthur had several courts in legend (including Caerleon and Carlisle), Camelot is the most immediately familiar of them all to a modern audience, and it is not surprising that Foster gives it such prominence.

Camelot first appeared in Arthurian literature in the late 12th century, in Chretien de TroyesELancelot. Originally, it was portrayed as merely one of several castles of Arthur, with his predominant court being Caerleon (which had been introduced in that role by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his The History of the Kings of Britain - see the annotation for #86, Panel 9). However, as time went on, Camelot grew more prominent in the romances, until it would eclipse all of Arthur’s strongholds in the popular imagination. It was here, according to Malory, that Arthur married Queen Guinevere and set up the knights of the Round Table, and from here that the knights of the Round Table embarked on the Quest of the Holy Grail. Tennyson aided the process, portraying Camelot as a magnificent city with an otherworldly atmosphere. The famous 1960 Lerner-Loewe musical, Camelot, cemented this reputation - particularly thanks to its title song’s celebration of the perfect weather that blessed Arthur’s kingdom.

Foster even ignores (except for the tournament at Caerleon in #87-89) King Arthur’s other traditional homes, portraying the great king as dwelling almost exclusively at Camelot except while on a campaign. This is contrary to medieval custom, where kings and powerful noblemen had several castles, spread out all over their lands, and would regularly travel from one to another in a series of journeys known as a progress, both to better oversee the state of their realm and to avoid eating up all the food in one part of the kingdom. No trace of this activity appears in Foster’s depiction of Arthur, however.

Foster does not immediately locate Camelot on the map, but would later, in #37, Panel 8, place it at Winchester, following Malory’s identification. (Nowadays, the most popular location for Camelot in Arthurian fiction is South Cadbury in Somerset, a hill-fort dating back to the Iron Age. The Tudor antiquarian John Leland mentioned that the locals believed it to be Camelot, and an archaeological dig conducted by Leslie Alcock in the late 1960’s revealed that during the late 5th and early 6th centuries, the hill was occupied by a wealthy chieftain, raising speculations that this chieftain could have been a historical original for King Arthur. However, this excavation was still thirty years in the future when Foster first brought Val to Camelot in 1937, and thus South Cadbury had not yet made itself familiar to the general public. Foster might not even have heard of it at the time that he was beginning Prince Valiant.)

Panel 2. This is one of two times in Prince Valiant where Arthur’s full name, "Arthur Pendragon", is given. (The other is in #1432, Panel 3.) Everywhere else in the strip, the name "Pendragon" is applied to Arthur’s father Uther, first mentioned here.

Uther first appears in early medieval Welsh poetry, but only as a vague name, that tells us nothing about how the composers of those poems or their audiences saw him. The word uthr in Welsh means "terrible" (not in the sense of "monstrous" or "horrible", but in the sense of "inspiring awe or wonder"), and some Arthurian scholars have speculated that Uther was portrayed as Arthur’s father in legend because somebody mistook a description of Arthur in Welsh as "Arthur the terrible" for "Arthur son of Uther".

Geoffrey of Monmouth fleshed out Uther in his History of the Kings of Britain, giving him a life-story just as he did for his son Arthur. In Geoffrey’s story, Uther was the youngest of the three sons of King Constantine, who became the ruler of Britain after the end of the Roman occupation; his two older brothers were Constans and Aurelius Ambrosius. After Vortigern usurped the British throne and murdered Constans, Ambrosius and Uther, then only boys, fled across the Channel to Brittany, where they found sanctuary with their kinsman, King Budic. When they grew to manhood, they returned to Britain and overthrew Vortigern; Ambrosius then became King of Britain while Uther became his leading general.

Not long afterwards, Ambrosius was poisoned by a Saxon in the employ of Pascent, Vortigern’s only surviving son. Uther was leading the British army against Pascent’s forces at the time, when he beheld a fiery star shaped like a dragon in the sky; astonished, he sent for Merlin, and asked him what this omen meant. Merlin explained that it was a sign of Ambrosius’s murder and a foretokening of Uther’s becoming king and the future deeds of his son Arthur, then as yet unborn. Uther was so impressed that he took on the title of "Pendragon", which, according to Geoffrey, meant "dragon’s head" in ancient British. (It actually means "Chief Dragon" or "Dragon-King" in Welsh.) He also had two golden statues made of the dragon; he kept one with him and took it on his campaigns, and gave the other to the church at Winchester.

Needless to say, Uther became King of Britain after Ambrosius’s death. Shortly afterwards, he fell in love with Igraine, the wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, leading to a war between himself and Gorlois over her; in the course of the war, Uther begot Arthur upon Igraine with Merlin’s help. (See the annotation for #849, Panel 1, for the details.) During the latter part of his reign, Uther fell ill and the Saxons took advantage of his bedridden condition to renew their inroads into his kingdom. At last Uther decided to take the field himself, even though he could only command his troops from a horse-litter; he fought the Saxons at St. Albans and defeated them soundly. The vanquished Saxons still got their revenge, however, by poisoning Uther’s favorite spring of drinking water, thereby bringing about his death. He was buried at Stonehenge (where his older brother and predecessor, Aurelius Ambrosius, had already been laid to rest).

Later versions of the Arthurian legend held to Geoffrey’s account, though with minor alterations and additions here and there. Most noteworthy of these was the verse romance Merlin by Robert de Boron, which renamed Ambrosius "Pendragon" and had Uther take on the name of "Pendragon" after his brother’s death, as a way of honoring his memory.

Foster in Prince Valiant regularly made the PendragonsEdragon King Arthur’s heraldic symbol. In the medieval pseudo-chronicles and romances (and in many of the textbooks on heraldry written during this period, which included the "ascribed arms" of the knights of the Round Table, as well as of various biblical and classical worthies), however, Arthur’s device was usually not a dragon. Geoffrey of Monmouth had him bear an image of the Virgin Mary upon his shield, while Arthur’s "ascribed arms" either followed Geoffrey in this regard or gave him three or thirteen golden crowns upon a blue or red background or field (blue in French works, red in English works, most likely because the field of the French kingsEcoat of arms was blue, and the English kingsEred). Nevertheless, Geoffrey allowed Arthur a certain amount of "dragon-heraldry"; in his account of Arthur’s arming himself before facing the Saxons in battle at Bath (Geoffrey’s adaptation of the Battle of Badon), he portrays the king donning a dragon-crested helm, and during the Roman war, Arthur has a standard depicting a golden dragon.

In the relatively recent Arthurian literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, the notion of Arthur’s symbol being a dragon became all the more prominent. Alfred Lord Tennyson made a number of references to it in his Idylls of the King; for example, these lines in "Lancelot and Elaine" where Arthur is presiding over a tournament:

.... to his crown the golden dragon clung,
And down his robe the dragon writhed in gold,
And from the carven-work behind him crept
Two dragons gilded, sloping down to make
Arms for his chair.... (lines 432-36).

When King Arthur returns to Camelot from dealing with a nest of bandits in "The Holy Grail", Percivale (the narrator) says "up I glanced, and saw/ The golden dragon sparkling over all" (lines 262-63). Tristram describes Arthur to Isolt in "The Last Tournament" as having "his foot... on a stool/ Shaped as a dragon" (lines 666-67). When Guinevere recalls her journey to Arthur’s court to be married to him in "Guinevere", she remembers seeing "The Dragon of the great Pendragonship,/ That crown’d the state pavilion of the King" (lines 395-96). Later in the same poem, as Guinevere watches her husband ride away from the nunnery at Almesbury, Tennyson says of the king’s helmet "To which for crest the golden dragon clung" (line 590), and describes Guinevere seeing "the Dragon of the great Pendragonship/ Blaze" (lines 594-95).

Mark Twain also alluded to Arthur’s dragon device in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when he described the banners upon Camelot’s walls as having "the rude figure of a dragon displayed upon them" (p. 21), while T. H. White in The Once and Future King made Arthur’s coat of arms "or, a dragon rampant gules" (p. 330). Fiction writers delving into the search for the historical Arthur have done the same; the overall result has all but eclipsed the "official" blazon of Arthur’s arms in medieval writings and art. It is likely that the interest in the "historical Arthur", in the context of the wars between the Britons and the Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries, contributed to this trend; the traditional symbol of the Welsh is a red dragon (see the annotation for #1774, Panel 4 for further information), which would be appropriate for a man hailed by them as one of their greatest leaders.

Panel 6. Merlin, King Arthur’s famous wizardly advisor, makes his entrance in Prince Valiant, seated on Arthur’s right, though he plays no active role in this scene.

Merlin is so strongly associated with King Arthur and his court in the popular imagination that it must come as a surprise to discover that his earliest manifestation in literature not only has no direct links to the Arthurian legend, but that he was not even a contemporary of the great king. Merlin first appeared, under the name of "Myrddin", in early Welsh poetry written during the Dark Ages. He was said to have been the court bard to Gwenddolau, a king who supposedly ruled somewhere in the far north of Britain. After King Gwenddolau was slain at the Battle of Arderydd (from the evidence, an actual battle which took place around A.D. 573, approximately fifty years or so after Arthur’s traditional time), Merlin went mad with grief over his death (and perhaps, according to hints in the poems, out of guilt at having somehow caused the battle, though it is not recorded as to exactly how he helped bring it about). He fled into the Caledonian Forest (the woodlands of southern Scotland), where he spent the rest of his life uttering prophecies of things to come.

Myrddin soon became famous in Welsh legend for his prophetic visions, and predictions of the future came to be ascribed to him. When Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote The History of the Kings of Britain, he incorporated Myrddin into his story, but renamed him "Merlin" (most likely to keep his readers from linking the famous seer’s name to the French word merde). Instead of portraying him as the madman of the Caledonian Forest, however, Geoffrey gave Merlin the role of a boy prophet from the Historia Britonnum named Ambrosius who confronted Vortigern at Dinas Emrys, even fusing the names together to name him "Merlin Ambrosius" (a name which Merlin bears in this very panel, and which would be mentioned in Prince Valiant several times thereafter).

According to Geoffrey, King Vortigern of Britain needed the blood of a boy without a father in order to build a castle, and discovered just such a boy, Merlin, in Carmarthen. (See the annotation on #1774, Panel 8, for the details.) Merlin, the son of an incubus by the daughter of the King of Demetia (southwestern Wales), calmly prevented Vortigern from killing him and proceeded to utter a series of prophecies covering first actual historical and legendary events in Britain between his time and Geoffrey’s (the coming of Arthur, the final victory of the Saxons, the Norman Conquest, and even the drowning of Henry I’s son Prince William in the White Ship in 1120), followed by a series of increasingly vague future events ("future" from Geoffrey’s perspective as well as Merlin’s) all the way down to an apocalyptic conclusion in which the heavens are thrown into confusion. After Vortigern’s death, Merlin entered the service of his successors, Aurelius Ambrosius and his brother Uther. He advised Ambrosius to obtain the ring of stones known as the GiantsEDance from Mount Killaurus in Ireland, personally moving them to Britain when the BritonsEefforts to budge the stones had failed and setting them up on Salisbury Plain as Stonehenge. (See the annotation on #1062, Panel 7, for more about this story.) When Ambrosius was poisoned, Merlin, beholding a fiery star shaped like a dragon in the sky, told Uther both of his brother’s murder and of how the dragon-star foretold the greatness of both Uther and his son Arthur (see the annotation on Panel 2, above). It was also Merlin who helped Uther gain access to Igraine, the Duchess of Cornwall, upon whom he begot King Arthur (see the annotation for #849, Panel 1).

After assisting Uther in his pursuit of Igraine, Merlin vanished from Geoffrey’s story, playing no further part in it and never interacting with Arthur at all. (Geoffrey did write a second book about Merlin, Vita Merlini or The Life of Merlin, but this was a retelling of Merlin’s madness and flight to the Caledonian Forest, based on the Welsh fragments mentioned above - although it contains a scene where Merlin recalls helping to convey the fatally wounded King Arthur to Avalon for healing.) Later writers, however, apparently became fascinated enough with Merlin to expand his role further. The crucial step was taken by Robert de Boron around the year 1200, in his romance entitled Merlin; this adapted the story of Merlin’s exploits as found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain but expanded upon them. After the conception of Arthur, Merlin has the future king secretly conveyed to a minor nobleman named Antor (called Sir Ector in Malory) who raised him as his own son; he also helped set up the famous test of the Sword in the Stone which led to Arthur’s becoming King. Other romancers continued Merlin’s story beyond there to have him advise the young Arthur on many occasions, including helping him attain his sword Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, until he was smitten by the charms of Nimue, which led to his undoing (see the commentaries on #871 and #1141). Sir Thomas Malory included most of these acts in the early portion of his Le Morte d’Arthur, thus making them canon to later generations.

Even after Malory, Merlin continued to appear in many literary works. Medieval and early modern writers were fond of applying various prophecies to him (such as having him predict the career of Joan of Arc in the early 15th century) or, as the Age of Reason drew on, attributing mock-prophecies to him in a satirical fashion. Merlin became all the more prominent in British and American literature after the Arthurian Revival of the Victorian Age, making prominent appearances in both Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (in the latter, portrayed by Twain in a less-than-sympathetic light as a charlatan embodying the forces of superstition who was constantly at odds with the Yankee, always losing to him until the final chapter). T. H. White’s The Once and Future King also gave a large role to Merlin (whose name White spelt "Merlyn"), and added two new elements to his legend that have become almost part of the "Arthurian canon" by now: the notion that Merlin lived backwards (providing a novel explanation for his gift of prophecy), and his function as Arthur’s boyhood tutor, preparing him for his future role as king. (Merlin does not play this part in the original medieval texts - he has no contact with Arthur between entrusting him to Sir Ector’s care and supporting him after he becomes king - though there are foreshadowings of this role in Edmund Spenser’s semi-Arthurian poem The Faerie Queene.) Since that time, Merlin has played a major role in modern-day Arthurian fiction, particularly Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy (see the annotation for #1776, Panel 6).

Foster follows the traditions of popular culture in having Merlin still at Arthur’s court during its noontide glory; in Malory, Merlin departs the court permanently almost immediately after Arthur’s wedding and the foundation of the Knights of the Round Table. The great wizard’s ensnarement by Nimue would not take place for many years in Prince Valiant - but it would come about in the end, all the same.

20. Panel 7. This is the first mention in Prince Valiant of the "invading Northmen". If these are meant to be Vikings (as is most likely the case) rather than Saxons, then this forms another anachronism in the strip (though not one as great as the inclusion of medieval castles and knights in 5th century Britain - which is a time-honored tradition of Arthurian romance, anyway). The Viking raids on Britain did not begin until near the end of the 8th century. The first recorded raid was in or about 789, when three Viking ships landed in the south of England. The Reeve of Dorchester, who was the nearest royal official, came out to meet them and attempted to conduct them to a nearby town, but they slew him and his attendants. (Magnus Magnusson in his book The Vikings speculates that these particular Vikings had actually come only to trade with the local Englishmen, and that their fight with the reeve and his men was motivated by their annoyance towards the meddling officials that were trying to hustle them off to town when all that the Vikings wanted to do was to sell their goods and have a few drinks.) Four years later, in 793, more Vikings raided the northern monastery of Lindisfarne and sacked it (according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, this event was foreshadowed by sightings of dragons in the heavens), ushering in a series of raids and invasions upon the British Isles, and mainland Europe as well, that would last for over two hundred years. This was still three hundred years in the future at the time that Prince Valiant is set (the latter half of the 5th century A.D.).

Sir Negarth’s pardon and reformation fit in well with the conventions of Arthurian romance. While some robber-knights in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur were simply slain in battle, others were frequently spared on the condition that they go to King Arthur’s court and yield themselves to him. For example, Sir Gareth, Gawain’s younger brother, on his first quest, defeated Sir Ironside, the Red Knight of the Red Lands, and sent him to beg mercy to King Arthur; Arthur pardoned him and made him a knight of the Round Table. Tennyson likewise made use of the motif in his Idylls of the King, where the villainous knight Sir Edyrn is likewise, after his defeat, sent off to Arthur’s court, where:

... being young, he changed and came to loathe
His crime of traitor, slowly drew himself
Bright from his old dark life, and fell at last
In the great battle fighting for the King. (The Marriage of Geraint, lines 593-96).

Indeed, in #83, Panel 7, we will learn that Negarth is eventually admitted to the Round Table, a true mark of his reformation.

22. Panel 1. Foster’s description of the squires who taunted Val as "rough soldiers" suggests that they are not squires in the same sense as he (youths of noble birth training for knighthood), but "professional squires", either soldiers of non-aristocratic background or members of noble families not wealthy enough to become knights and had to spend their entire lives as squires. (Beric, who would serve as Val’s squire from #292 to #407, is another example of such a figure.)

23. Panel 1. This is the first time in Prince Valiant that Arthur’s kingdom is called "England". This is another anachronism, for England was named after the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes collectively known as Saxons who settled in Britain during the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., and who were traditionally portrayed as Arthur’s enemies; this makes it extremely inappropriate to give the name "England" to Arthur’s realm. (The name also ignores the fact that Arthur was, traditionally, king over the entire island of Britain; England is not synonymous with Britain, but represents only part of the island. Wales and Scotland - both of which were traditionally part of Arthur’s kingdom, and where, indeed, local legends about Arthur and his associates are far more numerous than in lowland England - are part of Britain but not part of England.) To be fair to Foster, however, his depiction of Arthur’s kingdom was based almost exclusively on its portrayal in medieval romance, rather than the real Britain of the 5th and 6th centuries, and the application of the name "England" to it is no worse than the presence of knights, jousting, and stone castles, none of which existed in Britain during that same period of history.

24. Panel 3. The Round Table now appears in Prince Valiant.

The earliest surviving mention of the Round Table in Arthurian literature is in Wace’s Roman de Brut, although, since Wace describes the Table as "so reputed of the Britons" (Wace and Layamon: Arthurian Chronicles, p. 55), it may have already appeared in previous works about Arthur and his knights that have been lost. Wace explains that Arthur specifically had the Round Table made in that shape so as to make all the knights at it equal, and prevent discord among them over precedence. Layamon’s Brut expanded upon this, by telling how at one of Arthur’s feasts, his knights quarreled over who was to sit where, a quarrel that degenerated into an actual battle. Arthur forced his followers to seat themselves and make peace, but to avoid a repeat of the incident, he obtained the services of a skilled craftsman from Cornwall who built the Round Table for him as a permanent solution to the problem.

As the Arthurian legend continued to evolve, the Round Table took on a deeper significance. In Robert de Boron’s Merlin, the Round Table was now depicted as having been made by Merlin as a spiritual successor of both the table where Jesus Christ and his disciples ate the Last Supper, and the table at which Joseph of Arimathea and his companions were served by the Holy Grail. Instead of seating all of the knights at court, it was restricted to a select order. Merlin originally made the Table for Uther Pendragon, though later on Arthur would make use of it as well for his knights. In both the Prose Lancelot and Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the Round Table passed into the possession of King Leodegrance of Cameliard, Queen Guinevere’s father, after Uther Pendragon’s death; when Arthur married Guinevere, Leodegrance gave the Round Table to him as part of her dowry. The Knights of the Round Table met each Pentecost at Arthur’s court, during which time they repeated their oaths: to never commit murder or treason, to grant mercy to all who asked for it, to always aid ladies and damsels in need of assistance, and to never fight in a wrongful quarrel for any reward. Malory described the Round Table as seating a hundred and fifty knights (in practice, only up to a hundred and forty-nine knights, thanks to the nature of the Siege Perilous - see the entry on Panel 4 below), but this number varies from one medieval account to another (see the commentary for #1375, Panel 5).

The exact form of the Round Table varies throughout Prince Valiant, reflecting inconsistencies found in Arthurian art. In this scene, the Table is portrayed as not solid to the center, but ring-shaped, in order to allow the servants to bring food to the feasting knights; this is the form that the Round Table takes in many medieval depictions of it. On the other hand, in #484, Panel 8, the Round Table is shown as being solid to the center (and used as a council table rather than a dinner table, unlike here). In #1065-66, the Round Table is also drawn as solid rather than ring-shaped; in #2229, Panel 3, there is a hole in the middle of it, but surrounded by wood on all sides, allowing no means of gaining access to the center.

A famous replica of the Round Table hangs in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, dating to the late 13th century. It bears a portrait of Arthur (most likely painted during Tudor times, particularly since it strongly resembles Henry VIII), and the names of twenty-four of Arthur’s knights written around the rim. (This version, by the way, is also solid all the way through, rather than ring-shaped.)

Panel 4. Note the Siege Perilous beside Gawain’s chair, the first of its two mentions in Prince Valiant (for the other, see the entry for #1375, Panel 5). The Siege Perilous was the one chair at the Round Table which had to remain empty for almost the entirety of King Arthur’s reign; any knight who seated himself in it (apart from the one for whom it was specifically made) would immediately be consumed in infernal fires. (In the French romances that came to comprise the Vulgate Cycle, such an event had happened twice. Once, shortly after the Round Table was set up in Uther Pendragon’s reign, a particularly arrogant knight dared to sit there, in defiance of Merlin’s warnings, and immediately died. Later on, a nephew of King Claudas - cf. the annotation for #2152, Panel 1 - named Sir Brumart, while drunk, foolishly vowed to sit in the Siege Perilous; forced to abide by his words, he went to Arthur’s court, seated himself in it, and met the inevitable fiery death, commenting aloud in his final moments that it was the fate that he had justly earned through his folly.)

It eventually became clear that the Siege Perilous was specifically reserved for Sir Galahad alone (although in the earliest versions, it was connected to Percival instead). In Malory, the morning of the day on which Galahad came to court, the following inscription appeared upon the Siege: "Four Hundred Winters and Four and Fifty Accomplished After the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ Ought This Seat to be Fulfilled". Sir Lancelot, beholding this writing with the rest of the court, realized that it had indeed been four hundred and fifty-four years since the Passion (i.e., the Crucifixion), meaning that the Siege Perilous’s destined occupant would soon arrive. And later that same day, Lancelot’s own son Galahad came to Camelot and seated himself in the Siege Perilous without any harm to himself; the Siege itself now bore the inscription: "This is the Siege of Sir Galahad the Hawte [High] Prince". Galahad departed forever from Arthur’s court the following day on the Quest of the Holy Grail, however, leaving the Siege Perilous to remain forever empty afterwards.

The exact reason for this trait of the Siege Perilous remains uncertain in the medieval texts; the earlier versions, linking the Round Table to the table at which Jesus and his disciples partook of the Last Supper, portrayed the Siege Perilous as symbolic of the seat of Judas Iscariot, suggesting that its nature was a reflection of Judas’s treachery. Later on, however (perhaps after the Siege became reserved for Galahad), the Siege Perilous was now viewed as equivalent to Jesus Christ’s own chair, which could only be occupied with impunity by one who possessed at least some measure of Jesus’s purity.

Incidentally, the presence of the Siege Perilous at the Round Table threatens the original point of the Table’s being round (as found in Wace and Layamon), as a means of keeping the knights equal. One could easily argue that the Siege Perilous, as reserved for the noblest and holiest knight of all time, is the head of the table no matter what shape the Round Table is, and that those who sit next to it are especially favored. Indeed, in Malory, Merlin mentions to Arthur during the installation of the Round Table that even the seats next to the Siege Perilous are reserved only for those knights "that shall be most of worship" (apparently; the text is not too clear on this point), and gives King Pellinore either one of those seats or a seat adjacent to them as a mark of his worthiness, a move which angers the young Gawain (already hostile towards Pellinore for slaying his father); this suggests that the knights of the Round Table are not so equal in this setting as they are in Wace and Layamon’s interpretation. For that matter, Malory makes no mention of the Round Table’s shape being a means of equalizing the knights; instead, he states that "Merlin made the Round Table in tokening of [the] roundness of the world" (people in the Middle Ages knew that the world was round; the notion that they believed the world to be flat until Columbus’s voyage in 1492 is a modern myth, invented by Washington Irving), a concept also used by the anonymous author of the Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail who was his source. One is tempted to wonder whether the medieval writers understood that the Siege Perilous threatened the equality of the Round Table and therefore decided upon a different rationale for the table’s shape.

25. Panel 7. This is an early instance of the style that Prince Valiant would adopt throughout the strip, and which sets him apart from the traditional knight of chivalric romance; he defeats his opponents more through cleverness and subtlety than through mere prowess of arms, becoming almost an Arthurian Odysseus.

26. Panel 2. This scene is true to the traditions of Arthurian romance (as found in Malory, at least), where defeated knights were customarily sent back to Arthur’s court, to yield themselves up to him (or, on some occasions - such as in the case of those knights whom Lancelot overcame - to Queen Guinevere).

37. Panel 8. Foster for the first time explicitly places Camelot at Winchester.

38. Panel 1. The Tournament of the Queen’s Diamonds is evidently an allusion to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. In "Lancelot and Elaine", Tennyson tells of how Arthur, while he wandered Britain before he became King, came upon the skeletal remains of two brothers who had slain each other, one wearing a crown set with nine diamonds. He took away the crown and, after he assumed the throne, decreed a series of annual tournaments at each one of which his knights would compete for one of the diamonds. Sir Lancelot was victorious at all nine of these tournaments, and won all of the diamonds; it was duringthe last of these tournaments that he met Elaine of Astolat and wore her sleeve during the melee. This so aroused Queen Guinevere’s jealousy that when he presented her with the diamonds, she threw them all into the river nearby. They were thus "the Queen’s Diamonds" only for a brief moment, and certainly not while the tournaments for them were taking place - but nevertheless, Foster was most likely referring to the event in "Lancelot and Elaine" when he wrote and drew this scene.

Panel 4. Foster borrowed Morgan Todd from the Welsh chivalric romance Geraint and Enid, found in the Mabinogion. Morgan Todd (or Morgan Tud) is there portrayed as Arthur’s chief physician, who tends the wounded Edern son of Nudd after he is sent to Arthur’s court by Geraint, and later on similarly treats the wounded Geraint following his many adventures in Enid’s company. Arthurian scholars have speculated that Morgan Todd might have been derived from Morgan le Fay, who was noted for her healing magic, thanks to the author of Geraint and Enid becoming confused about her gender.

Panel 5. Ilene, Val’s first love, is introduced. It is a pity that we do not know whether Foster had foreseen from the start, when he first drew this page, that her romance with Val would end in tragedy. (By the time that Foster killed her off, he had realized that she would have held Val back from continuing his adventures and so had to be removed for the good of the strip - cf. the note on #81, Panel 9 - but we do not know whether he understood this from the start.)

40. Panel 3. The villainous knight in red armor is a familiar "stock character" of Arthurian romance; with at least two outstanding examples. The first was the Red Knight of Quinqueroi Forest in Perceval by Chretien de Troyes, who rode into Arthur’s court, sent the king a message of defiance, and carried off a cup from his table (spilling its contents over Queen Guinevere to add to the insult); the young Perceval promptly challenged him to battle and slew him with a javelin in the eye. The second was the Red Knight of the Red Lands (whose real name was Sir Ironside), in Sir Thomas Malory’s tale of Sir Gareth in Le Morte d’Arthur, who besieged the castle of the Lady Liones and overcame and hung every knight who challenged him in an attempt to break the siege, until Gareth, on his first quest, defeated him and sent him to Arthur’s court to yield himself. (There Ironside reformed and became a knight of the Round Table.) And like the Red Knight of Prince Valiant, both of these Red Knights were overcome by young would-be knights on their first adventures. (Perceval’s unconventional method of slaying his Red Knight even parallels Val’s own fondness for unorthodox methods of defeating his opponents.)

Another, much darker, Red Knight appears in "The Last Tournament" in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Rumored to be a former knight of the Round Table who had left it because of disillusionment at the increasing corruption in Camelot (Tennyson himself identified him with Sir Pelleas, a young knight who was betrayed by Sir Gawain in a love affair), the Red Knight set up a rival court in the north of Britain and sent an insolent message to Arthur, defying him and announcing that while his own followers were brigands and murderers, at least they did not pretend to be anything other than that, in contrast to the hypocrisy of Arthur’s knights. Arthur led an army to defeat him, but the actions of his men proved the Red Knight to be speaking the truth; against the king’s orders, they slaughtered all of the Red Knight’s household without mercy and burnt his castle to the ground.

43. Panel 2. The depiction of a "holy hermit" tending the wounds of a fallen knight is another familiar feature of Arthurian romance that Foster uses here. These appear often in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, many of them portrayed as retired knights who retreated into solitude at the end of their worldly careers. (Sir Lancelot himself became a hermit after the passing of Arthur, spending the last seven years of his life in this state, as did many of his kinsmen and adherents.)

Panel 7. Val bears Ilene’s favor, again making use of the conventions of Arthurian and chivalric romance, where a knight taking part in quests or tournaments would carry with him a token representing his lady and bestowed upon him by her. The most famous example of this in the Arthurian cycle is Lancelot bearing the sleeve of Elaine of Astolat in a tournament, hoping to thereby disguise himself all the more effectively from the other participants. Nor was this convention confined to literature. In 1319, according to John Leland, a knight named William Marmion was given a splendid helmet by a lady at a feast in Lincolnshire, on the condition that "he should go into the daungerest place in England, and there to let the heaulme to be seene and knowen as famuse"; he wore it into battle against the Scots in the northern marches. Two hundred years later, King James IV of Scotland (1488-1513) bore a turquoise ring as a token from the Queen of France when he invaded England in 1513 (only to be slain at the Battle of Flodden).

Panel 8. Foster faithfully followsArthurian tradition again; villainous knights in chivalric romance were frequently portrayed as hanging their defeated adversaries from trees near their homes. Sir Ironside, the Red Knight of the Red Lands, displayed this custom in particular, much to the horror and revulsion of the young Sir Gareth. (This would have been all the more horrible from the point of view of a medieval knight, since hanging was an unaristocratic fate, reserved for commoners alone; it would be an utter disgrace for a knight, a man of noble birth, to undergo such a death. Noblemen who were condemned to death under the law were customarily beheaded.)

46. Panel 3. Val’s demon mask would have an impact lasting beyond his use of it against the ogre of Sinstar Wood and his followers. In 1972, the famous comic-book illustrator Jack Kirby began a comic book series for DC Comics entitled "The Demon", whose title character bore a striking resemblance to Prince Valiant’s disguise; Kirby stated that the resemblance was deliberate on his part, as a tribute to Foster. Appropriately enough, the Demon had roots to the Arthurian legend himself, being a former servant to Merlin.

VOLUME TWO: THE SINGING SWORD.

53. Panel 5. Ilene’s father receives his title for the first time as Thane of Branwyn. The title of "thane" is most familiar to modern-day readers through William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, where all the Scottish nobles are thanes (until the end of the play, when Malcolm promotes them to earls), but it originated among the Anglo-Saxons rather than among the Scots. "Thane" is a variation of "thegn", an Old English term for a king’s retainer or servant. Since kingsEretainers were generally of high rank, it soon became a noble title, especially among the early Scots.

(Because of the word’s roots, "thane" would be an inappropriate title for members of the pre-Saxon Arthurian nobility - but again, this fits the anachronistic nature of Arthurian romance.)

56. Panels 5-6. Morgan le Fay, one of King Arthur’s best-known adversaries, makes her first appearance in Prince Valiant.

Although Morgan le Fay is most familiar as an enemy of Arthur’s, she did not always have that role in the legend. Early mentions of her, such as in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, portray her as an ally, a beautiful fairy or enchantress who dwelled on the isle of Avalon, received Arthur when he was brought there after the Battle of Camlann, and willingly tended his wounds. Gradually, however, this interpretation darkened. In the Prose Lancelot, Morgan was depicted as hostile towards Queen Guinevere (who had once broken up an affair that Morgan had been conducting with Guinevere’s cousin Guiomar), and made several attempts to expose the queen’s own affair with Sir Lancelot to King Arthur. A slightly later French romance, the Suite de Merlin, portrayed Morgan le Fay as hostile towards Arthur himself; Malory used this concept as well, ensuring that it would become a cornerstone of the modern world’s interpretation of the legendary sorceress.

In Malory, Morgan was the (apparently youngest) daughter of Arthur’s mother, Igraine, by her previous marriage to the Duke of Cornwall. After the Duke of Cornwall was slain fighting against Uther Pendragon, Uther married the widowed Igraine and had her older two daughters, Morgause and Elaine, married off to King Lot of Lothian and Orkney and King Nentres of Garlot; Morgan, however, was too young to be wedded then, so she was put to to school in a nunnery, and afterwards married to King Uriens of Gore (see the annotation for #83, Panel 7), to whom she bore a son named Uwaine. While at the nunnery, Morgan somehow learned magic and later decided to use it to destroy Arthur so that she could seize his throne. She duped him into fighting a knight in her service named Sir Accolon of Gaul, arming Accolon with the real Excalibur and Arthur with a worthless duplicate; fortunately, Arthur’s life was saved through the intervention of the enchantress Nimue. Morgan’s treachery was then revealed, but she managed to steal Excalibur’s scabbard, which prevented its wearer from losing any blood, and threw it into a lake, escaping Arthur’s pursuit by temporarily transforming herself and her attendants into stone. She made a second attempt to murder Arthur by sending him a magical cloak which would burn up whoever wore it (evocative of EuripidesEMedea); Nimue again came to Arthur’s rescue by advising him to have Morgan’s messenger wear the mantle first, resulting in her (the messenger’s) fiery death.

Afterwards, Morgan shifted her tactics to kidnapping or attempting to murder many of Arthur’s knights, particularly Sir Lancelot. In "The Tale of Sir Lancelot du Lac", she and three fellow sorceress-queens, the Queens of North Galis (North Wales), Eastland, and the Outer Isles, came upon Lancelot asleep under an apple tree and bore him away to Morgan’s castle, the Castle Chariot, as their prisoner. (This scene probably inspired Foster’s account of how Morgan kidnapped Gawain.) They then asked him to choose one of them as his lover; Lancelot refused all of them in order to remain faithful to Guinevere, and was afterwards rescued by the daughter of King Bagdemagus on the condition that he assisted her father in a tournament against the King of North Galis (which he did). Morgan also made a few unsuccessful efforts at exposing Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair. After the final battle, however, she apparently repented of her evil deeds and was one of the women who took Arthur away to Avalon for healing (apparently the original interpretation of Morgan as an ally to Arthur resurfacing).

Panel 7. The name of Dolorous Garde is derived from Arthurian romance. The original Dolorous Garde indeed had a sinister reputation in the Prose Lancelot, where it first appeared,, but it was not actually a home of Morgan le Fay’s. It was a haunted castle plagued with dark enchantments, until the young Sir Lancelot, on one of his first adventures, conquered it and freed it from its curse. He afterwards renamed it Joyous Garde and made it his home, until he was finally banished from Britain in the civil wars that ended Arthur’s reign. (Joyous Garde never appeared in the main text of Prince Valiant. It did once appear, however, on one of a series of trading stamps that appeared in the strip in its early years, depicting various figures and sites from Arthurian legend, as well as weapons, armor, people, and events from real medieval history.)

57. Panel 5. Foster had presumably forgotten when writing this story that Morgan was the sister of Gawain’s mother Morgause, meaning that Gawain would be Morgan’s nephew and that her attraction to him would be incestuous; one could always argue, of course, that Morgan probably would not be the least bit concerned about that issue. (These family ties, however, would later on be mentioned in Prince Valiant, in #763, Panel 6, and #1152, Panel 4.)

58. Panel 3. Gawain’s comment on the fates of Morgan’s past husbands is Foster’s invention, yet echoes (perhaps unintentionally) a scene early in Malory. Morgan le Fay, during her attempt to kill Arthur through Sir Accolon, plotted also to kill her husband King Uriens so that she could marry Accolon and they could rule Britain together. She attempted to slay him with his own sword as he slept, but their son Uwaine caught her in the act and stopped her. Morgan persuaded him to spare her by pretending that she had been temporarily possessed by the Devil; Uwaine gave her the benefit of the doubt, but removed every weapon from the bedroom to keep her from making a second effort at murdering his father.

Panel 6. It appears that at this point, Foster still saw magic as real in the world of Prince Valiant (indeed, much of the content of the story of Val’s encounter with Morgan le Fay would only make sense if this was so), but the visions can easily be explained away as the products of a hallucinogenic drug in Val’s wine. (Foster not only left the door open for that explanation here, but even rationalized it as such years later.)

60. Panel 7. Merlin’s instructions to Val echo a traditional law of magic in legend and primitive belief, the Law of Contagion; in order to enchant a person, one must have an object in some way connected to that person (such as a strand of hair, for example).

64. Panel 1. It is clear from this scene that Foster viewed Morgan’s guards and servants as actual demons, again part of his early notion of magic being real in Prince Valiant. Decades later in the strip, when Val would cross paths with Morgan again (#1752-58), Foster would provide a more rational explanation for their uncanniness (though one that does not explain their response to the cross).

66. Panel 8. This is the first mention of Vikings in Prince Valiant by that name. As mentioned above (in the commentary on #20, Panel 7), their raids on 5th century Britain are anachronistic.

A note on the word "Viking": "Vikings" referred only to the actual raiders from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark who attacked various portions of Europe in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries. It did not apply to those peoples in Scandinavia who did not embark upon such journeys.

70. Panel 7. The Singing Sword is introduced here into the strip, carrying out the function of the famous sword with its own exalted lineage that a knightly hero is almost required, by the traditions of the genre of chivalrous romance, to bear. It would become to Prince Valiant what Excalibur was to King Arthur, Durendal to Roland, and Gram/Nothung to Sigurd/Siegfried.

The name "singing sword" has become a much-used one in Arthurian popular culture since then, although I do not know how much of this was thanks to Prince Valiant. (One of its best-known roles was its appearance in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Knighty Knight Bugs (1958), where the famous animated rabbit was assigned by King Arthur the task of recovering the Singing Sword from the Black Knight - played by Yosemite Sam - and his pet dragon; the sword was portrayed here, of course, as literally singing.)

I have so far been able to locate only one use of the "singing sword" concept prior to Prince Valiant, in Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (a book which Foster may very well have read - see the commentary on #259, Panel 6 below). In the opening story, "Weland’s Sword", the god Weland (Kipling’s adaptation of Wayland Smith, the legendary master-smith of English folklore) comes to England to be worshipped; when his followers abandon him after their conversion to Christianity, Weland is reduced to shoeing horses, unable to return home to Asgard until someone thanks him for his services - something that none of his customers ever do. Puck (the same Puck featured in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) learns of Weland’s plight and wishes to help him; after he sees Weland’s most recent customer, a local farmer, refuse to give thanks for his horse being shod, he proceeds to lead the ungrateful man’s horse all about the countryside until morning, when a young nobleman named Hugh comes upon him; after hearing the farmer’s story, he rebukes him for refusing to give thanks, leads him back to Weland’s forge and makes him show some gratitude (albeit of a begrudging kind). Hugh follows the farmer’s words with some heartfelt thanks of his own, thus freeing Weland at last; in his joy, Weland decides to repay Hugh for his kindness and forges a splendid sword for him. This sword displays the habit in the following two stories, "Young Men at the Manor" and "The Knights of the Joyous Venture", of letting out a strange groaning or singing sound at dramatic moments, awing Hugh and his friends. We do not know if this sword was the inspiration for the Singing Sword, but again, since Foster had probably read Puck of Pook’s Hill, it is possible.

71. Panel 5. While Valhalla has become a term referring to the afterlife in general, it is especially appropriate here as the final destination of a Viking slain by Val in battle. In Norse mythology, Valhalla (Old Norse for "the Hall of the Slain"), was Odin’s feasting-hall in Asgard, the realm of the gods. It was a place of enormous size, with more than six hundred and forty doors, each one of which was wide enough to allow nine hundred and sixty men to march through it. Any warrior slain in battle was brought here by the Valkyries, Odin’s handmaidens, and became the einherjar, warriors sworn to serve Odin in the afterlife. Each day they fought each other in fierce battle, and were then magically restored to full health and feasted in the hall upon roast pork (provided by the boar Saehrimnir, who was always magically restored each night so that he could feed the einherjar again the following morning) and mead provided by a goat named Heidrun. The einherjar would fight for Odin at Ragnarok, the final battle of the gods against the frost giants and monsters, though there they would all be slain.

Panel 7. Brian M. Kane, in his biography of Hal Foster, stated that Val’s stand against the Vikings on the bridge in Dundorn Glen was inspired by a scene in Howard Pyle’s novel Otto of the Silver Hand. In Pyle’s story, Baron Conrad of Drachenhausen, having just rescued his young son Otto from the dungeon of his enemy Baron Henry of Trutz-Drachen, holds a narrow bridge against the pursuing Henry and his knights while his own men take Otto to a friendly monastery where he will be safe. (Conrad was less fortunate than Val; he and Henry slew each other.)

72. Panel 7. This is the first hint in Prince Valiant that Thule is in Scandinavia.

74. Panel 11. Val’s message to Arn, "Nor-east to Jutes Land", suggests that Foster may not have seen Thule as being in Norway at the time that he drew this page. The Jutes were one of the Germanic tribes collectively known as Saxons who were invading Britain during the 5th century, and came from northern Denmark (a portion of which is still known as Jutland to this day). If "Jutes Land" is taken literally here, this would suggest that Foster was imagining Thule in Denmark rather than Norway at this stage in the strip. (Val’s early travels in Thule would also support this location, as we shall see.) Both Denmark and Norway lie northeast of Britain, so the "Nor-East" part of Val’s message fits both equally well.

77. Panel 3. The description of Thagnar’s ships as made from "Danish cedar" may also be a sign that, at this stage in Prince Valiant, Foster might have seen Thule as being in Denmark rather than Norway.

81. Panel 4. Arn’s mention of "that uneasy bauble that sets [sic] so heavily on [Sligon’s] head" evokes the famous line in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part Two, "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" (Act III, Scene i, line 31), though we do not know if the allusion was intentional on Foster’s part. (The line in Shakespeare’s play was also applied to an usurper: in this case, its speaker, Henry IV, who had gained the throne by deposing Richard II, just as Sligon had gained his throne by deposing Aguar.)

82. Panel 7. Despite both Prince Valiant and popular belief, Vikings never actually wore horned helmets in battle (which would, for obvious reasons, have been impractical in a fight). Such helmets did exist, but only for ceremonial occasions.

Panel 9. Foster explained in an interview once why he had to have Ilene die: "I had to kill her off. As I saw her, she would have made a good wife. She’d have [Val’s] slippers waiting when he came home but she wouldn’t like it if he went out slitting throats." (Kane, p. 119.) So, in the interests of Val being allowed to continue his adventures, Ilene had to be written out. Foster still received a torrent of mail from indignant readers protesting his decision.

83. Panel 2. Val and Arn are able to make their journey from Thule towards western Europe without any mention of crossing the sea between Norway and Denmark; this could be yet another sign that Foster did not envision Thule as being in Norway at this point. Another such example of Val travelling dry-shod from Thule to mainland Europe appears in #119, Panel 2. (There is a parallel here - though I do not know whether Foster was aware of this or not - to many of the Arthurian romances, where knights are portrayed as traveling from Britain to Brittany without any mention of crossing the Channel.)

Panel 7. With the exception of Negarth, the knights of the Round Table whom Val names here are all traditional figures from the Arthurian cycle. (Negarth’s presence on the list suggests that his reformation had proceeded to such an extent that he had now been given a seat at the Table.)

Sir Kay first appears in the early Welsh legends concerning Arthur under the name of Cai, and was portrayed as one of his foremost warriors. In the poem Pa Gur, Arthur praises Kay’s prowess, speaking in particular of his battle against Palug’s Cat, a giant wildcat that had been ravaging the isle of Mona (now Anglesey). In Culhwch and Olwen, Kay is not only one of Arthur’s leading champions, but provided with superhuman gifts; he can grow to the size of a tree at will, go without sleep or hold his breath under water for nine days, and exudes such warmth that he can remain dry even in a rainstorm. He successfully carries out many near-impossible tasks in this tale, such as slaying the giant Wrnach with his own sword or seizing the beard of the robber Dillus; unfortunately, after Kay performs the latter feat, Arthur composes an irreverent little poem about it which so enrages Kay that he forswears Arthur’s service forever.

Geoffrey of Monmouth ignored Kay’s magical gifts, but kept the notion of his being one of Arthur’s leading followers. In his History of the Kings of Britain, Kay is portrayed as Arthur’s seneschal, a title that he would henceforth bear throughout the future development of the Arthurian legend, and also as Duke of Anjou (a role that would not be as long-lasting). He fights valiantly for Arthur in the Roman war that serves as the climax to the great king’s reign, but is slain in the chief battle, fighting against the Medes.

Verse romances such as those of Chretien de Troyes proceeded to build further on Kay’s role, fleshing out his characterization. He appears in them as a sharp-tongued man, who seldom has a polite word for anybody and whose abrasive manners generally result in his getting soundly thumped by the person whom he had just insulted. Often, Kay would serve as a foil to the more courteous Gawain; he would be set a task by Arthur, approach it in his usual blunt fashion, and meet with a humiliating defeat, after which Gawain would take a more diplomatic approach to the same problem and meet with success. (It is tempting to wonder whether Kay’s above-mentioned umbrage towards Arthur over the satirical verse regarding his victory over Dillus could be an embryonic version of his churlish nature in the literature of the High Middle Ages.) In spite of this almost comical role, Kay retained his high position at court and Arthur’s favor throughout the tales (if at times in a manner that could lead the reader to question Arthur’s judgment regarding Kay).

Robert de Boron’s Merlin introduced the concept of Kay as Arthur’s foster-brother (perhaps to explain Kay’s importance at court, despite his rudeness), telling how his father Antor (the Sir Ector of Malory) was entrusted by Merlin with the guardianship of the young Arthur. (Indeed, the medieval French accounts of this event went on to state that Kay’s own mother was given the task of nursing Arthur in his infancy, and displaced Kay so hastily from her breast in order to begin suckling the future king that Kay spoke for the rest of his life with a stammer.) De Boron’s poem also introduced the story (better known to us through Malory) of how Arthur served as Kay’s squire at the time that he drew the Sword out of the Stone, and how Kay initially tried to take advantage of this event to pretend that he had been the one who had performed this great feat; after it became clear that the credit for that deed really belonged to Arthur, Sir Ector begged his foster-son as a boon to make Kay his seneschal, which boon Arthur granted.

In Malory, Kay appears as a valiant and courageous knight in his early appearances, fighting effectively in Arthur’s battles. (His finest moment came about during a war between Arthur and five invading kings, who surprised his camp by the Humber with a night attack. Arthur, Kay, Gawain, and Sir Griflet were trapped with Queen Guinevere by the bank of the Humber, when Kay noticed that the five kings had made the mistake of approaching Arthur on their own, without any followers, and suggested an immediate assault upon them. When Gawain argued that this attack would be foolhardy, "for we are but four and they be five", Kay replied that if Arthur, Gawain, and Griflet would each slay one of the kings, he would slay two - which he did. Both Arthur and Guinevere praised Kay afterwards for his valor and fulfillment of his vow.) Afterwards, however, he quickly degenerated into the more curmudgeonly figure of the French romances. He bestowed rude nicknames upon Sir Gareth and Sir Brewnor le Noire when they first came to court (one can’t help thinking that the young Prince Valiant at Camelot got off easy, in only being taunted by the other squires and not by Kay!), and displayed in general such a sour disposition that the other knights were only too eager to unhorse him in a joust whenever possible. (On one occasion, however, Lancelot took pity on Kay and exchanged armor with him when they crossed paths while out seeking adventure. The knights who came upon Kay in Lancelot’s armor thereafter hurriedly shunned any confrontation with him, while those knights who encountered Lancelot in Kay’s armor decided to challenge the insufferable seneschal to a passage of arms, only to find themselves hurled to the ground.)

Sir Percival was the original hero of the Grail cycle (before the invention of Galahad), first introduced in Perceval by Chretien de Troyes. His father and older brothers had all been slain in battle or tournaments, and Percival’s mother, wishing to preserve him from harm, fled to the woods with him and brought him up to be ignorant of knights and warfare. But one day Percival saw a group of knights riding through the forest; believing them to be angels, he eagerly greeted them, and upon learning about who they were, immediately set off for Arthur’s court to become a knight. Due to his ignorance of the outside world, he had several misadventures that came about through his misunderstanding of chivalric customs, but finally became one of Arthur’s knights. In the early versions of his story, Percival would eventually (apparently; Chretien never finished Perceval, so we do not know his original intent; this had to be guessed by his continuers) achieve the Holy Grail; with the Prose Lancelot, however, that role was shifted to Lancelot’s son Galahad, though Percival would also achieve the Grail on a smaller scale, alongside both Galahad himself and Bors. After Galahad’s death and the Grail’s ascension to Heaven, Percival became a hermit and died shortly afterwards.

This panel is one of only three occasions when Percival is mentioned in Prince Valiant, the other two being #1860, Panel 2, and #2227, Panel 1. In all three cases, he was treated as just another name among the champions of King Arthur’s court.

Sir Tristram was originally not part of the Arthurian cycle, but was gradually drawn into it. Tristram (or Tristan, as he was called in the early versions of his story) was the nephew of King Mark of Cornwall, whose sister married the King of Lyonesse (originally interpreted as either Lothian or Leonais in Brittany, but later on, in early modern times, re-imagined as a once-mighty kingdom off the coast of Cornwall that was destroyed by a great flood, leaving behind only the Scilly Isles). As a youth, he came to his uncle’s court just as King Mark was facing a challenge from a mighty Irish warrior known as the Morholt; Mark had refused to pay tribute to Ireland, and the Irish king had sent the Morholt to meet one of Mark’s knights in single combat to decide the issue. The Morholt was so strong that none of Mark’s men were willing to face him; Tristram volunteered to serve as his uncle’s champion, and slew the Morholt in the ensuing fight. But the Morholt had wielded a poisoned spear in the battle and wounded Tristram with it; King Mark’s physicians, examining the wound, told him that he could only find a cure for the poison in the Morholt’s homeland of Ireland. Tristram went thither in disguise (under the singularly unimaginative alias of Tramtrist), where the Irish king’s daughter Isolde (or Iseult), a skilled healer, tended him and nursed him back to health. The two of them developed feelings for each other, but when the Irish king discovered that "Tramtrist" was really the man who had slain the Morholt, Tristram had to flee back to Cornwall.

After learning from his nephew about Isolde’s beauty, Mark decided to take her to wife and sent Tristram back to Ireland to arrange the proceedings. Isolde’s mother, aware that her daughter was not eager to marry Mark, gave her a love potion that she and Mark were to drink on their wedding night; however, Tristram and Isolde inadvertently discovered it on the sea voyage back to Cornwall, drank it, and fell hopelessly in love with each other. Thereafter, they kept up a constant secret affair at Mark’s court; several times King Mark would become suspicious, but the lovers always found a way of convincing him that there was nothing going on between them. At last, however, Mark finally found the proof that he needed, and banished Tristram from his court. (For the end of Tristram’s story, see the annotation for #383, Panel 2.)

As mentioned above, originally the story of Tristram was independent from the Arthurian legend. But such was the popularity of the Matter of Britain that Tristram, Isolde, and Mark were eventually drawn into it (although they never became as firmly rooted in it as other additions to the cycle such as Merlin). In these later versions, Tristram comes to King Arthur’s court after being exiled from Cornwall and becomes a knight of the Round Table, second only to Lancelot according to Malory. (While Tristram’s inclusion in the Arthurian legend was mainly a product of the High Middle Ages, there is an earlier - if bizarre - tale connecting the two, a Welsh Triad which lists Tristram as one of the Three Great Swineherds of Britain. According to it, Tristram looked after King Mark’s pigs while the swineherd who usually tended them delivered a message to Isolde for him, and protected them so well that when Arthur, Kay, and Bedivere tried to carry off the pigs, Tristram thwarted them at every turn.)

Malory’s inclusion of Tristram in his Le Morte d’Arthur helped anchor him all the more in the Arthurian cycle. Edmund Spenser gave him a brief appearance in Book Six of The Faerie Queene, and Tennyson focused one of his Idylls of the King, "The Last Tournament", around Tristram and Isolde, portraying them as foils to Lancelot and Guinevere (while Lancelot and Guinevere have a genuine tragic nobility amid their adultery which allows them to finally leave their sin for higher and holier things, Tristram and Isolde are shallow and scoff at Arthur’s ideals). More recently, the pre-Arthurian aspects of Tristram’s tale have been rediscovered by writers of the 19th and 20th centuries, who have produced many tales about him that omit Arthur and his court (the most famous of these being Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde).

Tristram would play a fairly prominent role in Prince Valiant (almost as often in the foreground as Lancelot and Gawain) thereafter, until Foster finally killed him off in #383.

Uriens was the King of Gore (its location is not given in Malory or his predecessors; but since he is generally agreed to be based on the historical King Urien of Rheged, a Dark Age kingdom in northern Britain centered around Carlisle, Gore might be equated with Rheged) and Arthur’s brother-in-law, who married his half-sister Morgan le Fay. Originally Uriens was hostile towards Arthur, being one of eleven kings who rebelled against him in the early years of his reign (another being King Lot of Lothian and Orkney, Gawain’s father), but made his peace with him afterwards; Arthur even gave him a seat at the Round Table. He never participated in Morgan’s schemings against Arthur, and indeed, was almost murdered by her once (see the annotation on #58, Panel 3, above). This is the only occasion on which he is mentioned in Prince Valiant. (At least, I think that this is a mention of "Uriens", assuming that the letter which begins his name in the text is an angular "U" rather than a "V".)

84. Panel 5. There were two Sir Ectors in the Arthurian legend. The first of these was Sir Kay’s father and Arthur’s foster-father; Merlin gave Arthur into his keeping while the latter was still a baby, and Ector raised the future king as his own son until Arthur revealed his true heritage through his feat with the Sword in the Stone. The second (known as Sir Ector de Maris to differentiate him from the first Sir Ector) was the half-brother of Sir Lancelot. In Malory, after Lancelot died in retirement at Glastonbury, Sir Ector de Maris delivered a famous lament for him that is widely considered one of the finest pieces of prose in Le Morte d’Arthur.

Since the only other occasion on which Sir Ector is mentioned in Prince Valiant (#100, panel 3) clearly identifies him as the first Sir Ector, I assume that the "kindly Sir Ector" in this panel is Arthur’s foster-father rather than Sir Ector de Maris.

This panel also contains the first mention of the invasion of Britain during Arthur’s time by the Saxons and Angles, an actual ongoing event in the 5th and 6th centuries that would become a major problem for Arthur and his knights throughout much of Prince Valiant. The fact that Ector refers to the Angles being driven out of "England" is a bit jarring, though, since England received its name from the Angles.

Panel 6. This is the first mention of Sir Lancelot’s traditional French background. Foster equates his homeland with Brittany, the portion of France that looms most prominently in Arthurian legend (thanks not only to its proximity to Britain, but also to its settlement by Britons who emigrated there in the 5th and 6th centuries, hence its name). Malory, on the other hand, identified Lancelot’s homeland (called Benwick in his Le Morte d’Arthur) as either Bayonne or Beaune, both of which are in southern France.

Panel 8. The description of King Bors as Sir Lancelot’s father is a mistake of Foster’s; King Bors was actually the brother of King Ban (Lancelot’s father in Malory) and thus Lancelot’s uncle. King Bors was also the father of Sir Lionel and Sir Bors de Ganis, both of whom were important knights among Lancelot’s kinsmen; Bors de Ganis was even one of the three knights who achieved the Holy Grail (alongside Galahad and Percival). Sir Bors never appeared in Prince Valiant, although Sir Lionel received one brief mention near the end of Foster’s time on the strip, in # 2227.

85. Panel 2. It would be wonderful to know if Foster, when he wrote this scene, had in mind Lancelot’s own misfortune of being in love with the same woman as one of his closest friends - especially since that love would result in a tragedy just as terrible as the potential outcome he describes for the Val-Ilene-Arn triangle (or maybe worse, since Lancelot’s tragedy destroyed an entire kingdom).

Panel 5. The Solent is the channel between the Isle of Wight and the British mainland, an appropriate place to sail through when going to Winchester (where Foster locates Camelot).

86. Panel 8. The custom of "an untried knight" bearing white arms with no design upon his shield is another traditional element in Arthurian romance used here by Foster.

Panel 9. Caerleon was one of Arthur’s leading courts in medieval legend, originally far more prominent than Camelot. It first appears in an Arthurian context in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, where Arthur held a great court at the climax of his reign; Geoffrey enthusiastically describes the splendors of Caerleon, which he names the City of the Legion (a literal translation of "Caerleon", which had, in Roman times, been the headquarters of the Second Augustan Legion), in Book Nine, Chapters 12-14, which would become the basis for the depictions of Arthur’s court in medieval literature afterwards. Even in Malory, Caerleon remains an important home for Arthur, entering his work before Camelot is first mentioned.

This is the only time that Arthur would be shown holding court at Caerleon (or, indeed, anywhere other than Camelot in peacetime) in Prince Valiant, and on the occasion of Val’s second visit there (#1138), Caerleon would be described in far less glamorous terms.

87. Panel 8. This description of Tristram as "greatest of all warriors save only Launcelot" comes from Malory, who makes Tristram second only to Lancelot among the knights of the Round Table; the third was Sir Lamorak (who is never mentioned in Prince Valiant).

91. Panel 8. Val discovers the skeletal remains of the dinosaur that had attacked him in #4-5. Foster does not mention how it had died. Had it been unable to free itself from the trap that Val had set for it in their past encounter, and starved to death? Or had it met its end some other way?

Years later, perhaps troubled by the anachronism of a dinosaur surviving into historical times, Foster would engage in a bit of retrocon when Val was telling his son Arn about his youthful adventures in the Fens (#1346, Panel 4), and have him describe the dinosaur as having dwelt in the marsh "in olden times", presumably meaning the Mesozoic Era.

92. Panel 7. Horrit now gives the Singing Sword a more specific name (though one that would seldom be used in the strip), that of "Flamberge". A flamberge is a sword with wavy edges, also known as a "flaming sword".

This is the first mention of Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword. It (apparently) makes its entrance in Arthurian legend in Culhwch and Olwen, where Arthur, making a list of his prized possessions, includes in it his sword Caledfwlch. Geoffrey of Monmouth named it Caliburn, and included it among Arthur’s gear during his description of Arthur arming himself for the Battle of Bath; he mentioned that it was forged on the isle of Avalon. The French romances would later on alter the sword’s name to "Excalibur". (A few of them, including those of Chretien de Troyes, make Excalibur Gawain’s sword rather than Arthur’s; from this, it has sometimes been argued that Arthur’s connections with it are illusory. However, no trace of this link between Excalibur and Gawain can be found in either Geoffrey of Monmouth or Malory, who serve as the primary sources of Arthurian legend for the modern-day English-speaking public; in their works, Excalibur is Arthur’s sword throughout. Thus, even if Excalibur was Gawain’s sword rather than Arthur’s from the point of view of the average medieval romancer and his audience, the modern-day public has understandable and even justifiable reasons for associating it with the famous king.)

When the Sword in the Stone first entered the Arthurian legend (in Robert de Boron’s verse romance Merlin), it was identified with Excalibur. However, later versions of the story made the two of them separate swords; in this account, used by Sir Thomas Malory (and thus made familiar to an English-speaking audience), Arthur broke his original sword fighting King Pellinore, and Merlin took him to see the Lady of the Lake. The Lady of the Lake gave him Excalibur, which rose up from the middle of her lake, held by an arm clad in a sleeve of white samite; Arthur rowed out to the arm and took the sword. With it came a scabbard which Merlin described as worth ten Excaliburs; whoever wore it would never bleed. (The scabbard was eventually stolen from Arthur by Morgan le Fay; she threw it into a lake, from which it was never recovered.)

Arthur bore Excalibur thereafter until after he was wounded by Mordred in his last battle (oddly, Arthur slew Mordred with a spear rather than with his famous sword). Dying, he told Sir Bedivere, his last surviving knight, to throw Excalibur into a nearby lake. Bedivere, concerned at thus disposing of his king’s great sword, twice pretended to have done so while hiding it, but when Arthur asked him what he had seen, Bedivere replied that he had seen only the waters rippling. Arthur thus knew that he was lying, and the third time, Bedivere at last did as Arthur had commanded him. The arm rose up from the lake, caught Excalibur, and sank below the surface of the water with it. Bedivere reported this to Arthur, who thus knew that Excalibur had been returned to the Lady of the Lake.

Panel 8. Foster’s description of Horrit’s predictions of Val’s future as "what may not be told here" serves a double purpose; it makes the aforesaid future appear all the more ominous if it cannot be described, and it preserves suspense.

VOLUME THREE: KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE.

95. Panel 4. Foster makes a slip in his mention of "we are but twenty"; in #92, he had described Aguar as having thirty followers in exile.

96. Panel 5. For the first time, Prince Valiant witnesses a Saxon invasion of Britain.

Foster differs from the traditional accounts of Arthur’s Saxon wars in portraying the Saxons as raiders from overseas. In the pseudo-chronicles, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the Saxons were already established in the east of Britain, thanks to Vortigern, when Arthur became king; while history is less certain about the details of the Saxon arrival in Britain, it is usually agreed that they had established permanent settlements and even kingdoms by the time that Arthur is usually held (if he was based on a real person) to have lived, the late 5th and early 6th centuries. Foster, on the other hand, implies that the Saxons are still overseas raiders who have yet to establish any lasting residence in Britain; throughout the early years of the strip, whenever they came to Britain, Arthur would always drive them back to the sea. Only later on in Prince Valiant would they begin to be portrayed as settlers.

100. Panel 5. Ulfius and Brastias (mentioned only here in Prince Valiant) were two knights from Uther Pendragon’s generation. Ulfius was a friend and confidant to Uther; when Uther made war upon Duke Gorlois of Cornwall because of his desire for Gorlois’s wife Igraine, Ulfius served as Uther’s advisor. In particular, it was he who suggested that Uther send for Merlin and obtain his help; when Merlin magically disguised Uther as Gorlois to allow him access to Igraine’s chamber, Ulfius accompanied the king and the wizard, disguised as Jordan, one of Gorlois’s knights. After Arthur became king, Ulfius loyally served him as he had done Uther, and was made his chamberlain.

Sir Brastias was originally one of Duke Gorlois’s knights; Merlin impersonated him while accompanying the disguised Uther to Tintagel. Brastias survived Gorlois’s death and, oddly enough, entered Uther’s service afterwards, followed by Arthur’s after Uther’s death. Arthur appointed Brastias Warden of the Northern Marches. Ulfius and Brastias fought valiantly for Arthur when he was faced with a rebellion from King Lot of Lothian and Orkney and his allies, and also went into Gaul on a diplomatic mission to obtain help from Kings Ban and Bors.

Sir Bedivere was, like Sir Kay, one of the first knights to enter the Arthurian cycle, appearing in the pre-Geoffrey of Monmouth Welsh legends under the name of Bedwyr. He played a leading role in the adventures of Arthur and his warriors in Culhwch and Olwen, where he was depicted as a close friend of Kay’s and an expert spearman, although apparently (the text’s wording is not too clear here, unfortunately) having only one hand. Geoffrey of Monmouth made him Arthur’s cupbearer (a function which later romancers, such as Malory, transferred to Bedivere’s brother Lucan) and the Duke of Normandy; he also had him slain in the same great battle with the Romans as Kay.

Bedivere’s most famous feat in Arthurian legend (which Foster was presumably referring to when he described how Bedivere "served his king to the end") was returning Excalibur to the lake after Arthur’s final battle (see the entry for #92, Panel 7 above). It should be noted, however, that Bedivere did not always have this role; in the earliest known version of the story, in the Prose Lancelot, the knight who performs this deed is Sir Girflet - who appears under the name of "Griflet" in Malory. Indeed, as long as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s depiction of Bedivere as being slain in Gaul while fighting the Romans was considered canonical, the act could not be assigned to him. The identification of Bedivere with the knight who threw Excalibur into the water was first made - so far as we know - by the Stanzaic Le Morte Arthure, a medieval English poem in the late 14th century which was one of Malory’s sources. Malory followed the Stanzaic Le Morte Arthure in ascribing this function to Bedivere, and Tennyson followed Malory when he wrote "The Passing of Arthur" in his Idylls of the King, thereby cementing it in the popular consciousness.

Modred or Mordred (Foster uses both spellings at different times) first appears in the Annales Cambriae (a Dark Age Welsh text, meaning "The Annals of Wales" in English) under the name of Medraut, where it is stated that both he and Arthur were slain at the Battle of Camlann. The text does not say whether they were enemies or allies, but the Welsh legends preceding Geoffrey of Monmouth generally portrayed them as adversaries; according to the Triads, two of the three greatest ravagings ever committed in Britain were Arthur and Medraut raiding each other’s fortresses (suggesting that in this body of legend, Medraut was viewed, not as a traitor or rebel, but a rival chieftain politically independent of Arthur). It was Geoffrey of Monmouth who (presumably) formed the more familiar interpretation of Mordred, making him Arthur’s nephew, the son of King Lot of Lothian by Arthur’s sister Anna and brother to Gawain. In Geoffrey’s work, Arthur left Mordred in charge of his kingdom while he went to Gaul to fight the Romans; Mordred rebelled, usurped the throne, and took Guinevere to wife. Arthur, learning of Mordred’s treachery, returned to put down his rebellion, and they fought in the Battle of Camlann, where Mordred was slain and Arthur badly wounded.

Mordred’s role was gradually fleshed out as the legend continued to develop. The Prose Lancelot introduced the notion of Mordred being actually Arthur’s son, the result of an unwitting liaison between Arthur and his own sister, with his evil stemming from his incestuous conception. (Foster would subtly refer to this story a few times in Prince Valiant, most noticeably in #1546, Panel 3.) It also had Arthur and Mordred fight each other personally in the final battle, with Arthur slaying Mordred but being mortally wounded in the process; in Geoffrey’s account, Mordred is slain in the early stages of the Battle of Camlann by an unknown hand and Arthur receives his mortal wound from Mordred’s followers in their efforts to avenge their leader’s death. Malory would include both of the Prose Lancelot’s additions in his Le Morte d’Arthur, solidifying them as part of the familiar story.

Mordred’s treasonous plottings would resurface in Prince Valiant many times as the strip progressed, turning him into a recurring nemesis to Val and his family as well as to Arthur.

101. Panel 2. Horsa, the leader of the Saxons, was a traditional figure in the legends about the coming of the Saxons to Britain in the 5th century. According to the accounts given in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Historia Brittonum, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and amplified in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, the first Saxons to arrive were led by two brothers named Hengist and Horsa. They landed at Thanet in Kent (this event was traditionally dated to 449, but historians no longer take that seriously) and made a pact with the British king Vortigern; he agreed to give them land, if they in turn would help defend Britain from various invaders, especially the Picts. For a while, Hengist and Horsa lived up to their agreement; however, after a time, when more and more Saxons had emigrated to Britain under their leadership, they turned on Vortigern and his people and made war upon them. Horsa was slain early in the fighting, though the details of his death vary; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has him slain at Aylesford in Kent in 455, while Geoffrey of Monmouth (and the Historia Brittonum, which was his source material for the early Saxon wars) had Horsa slain at Epiford by Catigern, a son of Vortigern’s (to be more precise, Horsa and Catigern slew each other). Hengist lived on, though, and fought for many more years. The early legends say nothing about his death other than that it took place; Geoffrey of Monmouth, however, had Hengist taken prisoner when he fought Aurelius Ambrosius at Conisburgh in Yorkshire and, at the urging of Bishop Eldad of Gloucester, executed as the early medieval equivalent of a war criminal.

Historians are still divided as to whether Hengist and Horsa were real people or mythical. Since the two brothers first appear in written records a few centuries after they were supposed to have lived, when there would have been time enough for the real events of the 5th century to have become embroidered by legend, and their names are both Old English words for "horse", many scholars have suspected that Hengist and Horsa were really euhemerized gods, perhaps an Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) of classical mythology. Others, however, believe that Hengist and Horsa could have been real. The scarcity of contemporary sources for this period of history means that we will probably never know the truth.

Foster would regularly make Horsa the leader of the Saxons, having him face King Arthur and Prince Valiant in battle at least three more times. His choice of Horsa for this role is surprising, however, since all the stories about Hengist and Horsa portray Hengist (who would not even be mentioned in Prince Valiant until #1394, Panel 6) as the more prominent of the two brothers. It was Hengist rather than Horsa whom the rulers of Kent claimed descent from (through his son Aesc), and it is Hengist rather than Horsa who handles the negotiations with Vortigern and the deployment of the Saxons throughout Britain in legend, Hengist whose daughter Vortigern marries, Hengist who outlives Horsa and even (in Geoffrey of Monmouth) has the far more detailed death. Why Foster should have made Horsa rather than Hengist Arthur’s great opponent in the Saxon wars of Prince Valiant must remain forever a mystery.

(For that matter, Horsa’s identity as Arthur’s foe is another deviation from legend; in Geoffrey of Monmouth, he was slain before Arthur was even born. However, as we shall soon see, Foster places Arthur earlier on the timeline than tradition generally does.)

The dragon is again shown as Arthur’s symbol. Tennyson introduced the concept of lions as Lancelot’s heraldic device in his Idylls of the King, speaking in "Lancelot and Elaine" of "Sir Lancelot’s azure lions, crown’d with gold" (l. 659); in medieval accounts of the coats of arms of the knights of the Round Table, Lancelot’s blazon was one or three red bends (diagonal stripes) upon a white field. Tristram, on the other hand, was generally attributed a lion on his shield in medieval heraldry (perhaps as a play on the name of his homeland, Lyonesse).

Panel 3. Sir Dagonet is another canonical figure, as is his function as King Arthur’s court jester. According to Malory, Dagonet was knighted by Arthur himself, and entertained him at tournaments. His knighthood was evidently purely honorary, for he was clearly no warrior (on the few occasions that he fought anyone in Malory, he lost every single time). His most noteworthy jest was when he disguised himself as Sir Lancelot in order to strike fear in the heart of the cowardly King Mark of Cornwall (a joke actually organized by Sir Dinadan); the joke went sour, however, when Sir Palomides (after rebuking Mark for his ignominious flight) unhorsed Dagonet so soundly that his neck was almost broken.

Tennyson gave Dagonet a major role in "The Last Tournament" in The Idylls of the King, where he provides a mocking commentary on both Arthur’s ideals and Tristram’s adulterous affair with Isolde, until the end of the poem when, as the civil war that will destroy Camelot begins, the court jester sadly tells Arthur "I shall never make thee smile again" (line 756). William Shakespeare mentioned him briefly in Henry IV Part Two, where Falstaff’s senile friend, Justice Shallow, recalls having played the part of Dagonet in "Arthur’s show" in his youth (Act III, scene ii) - indicating just how much of a hopeless mediocrity Shallow must have been even then!

103. Panel 5. Foster was perhaps overly generous in having Prince Valiant immediately admitted to the Round Table upon receiving knighthood. In the medieval romances, a seat at the Round Table was a rare and select honor that had to be earned by many deeds after becoming a knight; even Lancelot was not immediately admitted to it upon receiving his spurs, but had to undergo several adventures first.

105. The clothing and armor of the people of Thule on this page and the ones following, while having a northern flavor, are in the same medieval style as that of Arthur’s court, with little of the Viking Age about them. Apparently Foster had originally intended Thule to be more courtly and less wild than he would later on portray it.

108. Panel 9. Alfred de Gerin’s name is another sign of how Thule, at this stage in Prince Valiant, was far more "chivalric" in style than it would later become; "de Gerin" is a Norman-French surname, not likely to have been found in Viking Age Norway. (Though "Alfred" is an Anglo-Saxon name in origin, best-known for having been borne by Alfred the Great.)

110. Panel 3. King Ban was Sir Lancelot’s father in Malory. He was the King of Benwick (despite Foster, located not in Brittany but in southern France, at either Bayonne or Beaune); when King Arthur was having trouble with eleven rebellious kings early in his reign, he formed an alliance with King Ban and his brother, King Bors, who came to Britain with an army. Merlin concealed them in the forest of Bedegraine (now Sherwood Forest of Robin Hood fame) near the site of the battle between Arthur and the rebellious kings; after Arthur and his enemies had fought each other vigorously for some time, Kings Ban and Bors burst out of the woods as reinforcements, taking the eleven kings by surprise and turning the tide against them.

In the Prose Lancelot, King Ban died not long afterwards, when his old enemy King Claudas conquered his kingdom and sacked his last remaining castle; Malory makes no mention of this, and neither does Foster, who throughout the strip portrays Ban as still alive.

112. Panel 1. The presence of a friar as the officiating churchman at Alfred and Claris’s wedding is another anachronism. Friars did not appear until the beginning of the 13th century, when St. Francis of Assisi founded the Franciscans in 1210 and St. Dominic founded the Dominicans six years later. (This means, incidentally, that the presence of Friar Tuck in those Robin Hood stories set during the reign of Richard the Lion-hearted - 1189-99 - is also anachronistic. Although it is worth pointing out additionally that the notion of Robin Hood being a contemporary of Richard the Lion-hearted and John Lackland is a relatively late development in the legend, probably largely due to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe; the earliest Robin Hood tales placed him during the reign of one of the Edwards - either Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-27), or Edward III (1327-77). Friar Tuck did not enter the tales of Robin Hood, for that matter, until the 15th century.)

Unlike monks (who lived in a monastery and stayed there), friars wandered about the countryside; they were founded in part as a protest against the wealth and luxury that were increasingly filling the monasteries and an attempt to return to the more spiritual, less worldly roots of Christianity (though, as such works as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales make clear, they soon developed a reputation for worldliness themselves). The Franciscans (or Grey Friars) would preach open-air sermons, while the Dominicans (or Black Friars) focused on combating heresy.

The presence of any Christian churchman, whether friar or not, contradicts the later depiction of Thule as still pagan, worshipping the Norse gods, and again suggests that Foster had not yet realized how "Viking Age" he would later on make Thule.

Panel 8. The tournament is yet another sign of how much Thule at this stage in Prince Valiant differed from its later portrayal through the bulk of the strip. (Indeed, in #1529-30, it would be revealed that Aguar’s Viking subjects do not even comprehend tournaments, and Val’s attempt to introduce the concept to them results in merely a chaotic free-for-all.)

115. Panel 7. Father Time includes "fortresses unconquerable" among his trophies; might this be a foreshadowing of the siege and fall of Andelkrag (described in the text as a "fortress unconquerable"), only a few pages later in the strip?

116. Panel 7. Note the apparent death from old age of Val’s horse, now reduced to bones, as a side-effect of Val’s own aging - which is evidently reversed when Val’s own youth is restored to him.

117. Panel 3. Val’s horrified cry that his adventure in the Cave of Time could not possibly have happened might be Foster’s way of allowing room for a rationalist approach, suggesting that it was only a hallucination (maybe linked to the wine).

118. Panel 2. The traveler’s report provides a definite chronological setting for Prince Valiant’s adventures for the first time in the strip. Attila the Hun is the first character in the strip (though he never appeared on stage in it) who was an undeniably real historical figure (as opposed to King Arthur and Horsa, whose historicity has still been unproven). Furthermore, the traveller is clearly referring to Attila’s invasion of northern Italy in 452 (although Attila never actually took Rome in the course of his campaign).

Attila, one of the best-known figures in the history of 5th century Europe, was the nephew of the great Hunnish king Ruga. When Ruga died in 434, Attila’s older brother Bleda succeeded him as ruler of the Huns, with Attila as his second-in-command. After Bleda’s own death in 443 (there is some speculation that Attila might have helped bring it about, though no definite proof), Attila became the new king of the Huns, and began his career by threatening the Eastern Roman Empire and exacting tribute from it (he even marched on Constantinople at one point, but had to retire when his troops were afflicted with illness), before turning his attention to the Western Roman Empire (see #119, Panel 7 for the details).<./p>

Incidentally, by placing Prince Valiant in the early 450’s, Foster places King Arthur’s reign somewhat earlier than the legends have generally located it. When Arthur is specifically placed on the timeline by the medieval writers (which did not happen very often), it was usually in the early 6th century; the Annales Cambriae dated his victory over the Saxons at the Battle of Badon to 518 and his death at the Battle of Camlann to 539. Geoffrey of Monmouth dated the Battle of Camlann and Arthur’s subsequent passing to 542. Sir Thomas Malory stated that Sir Galahad sat in the Siege Perilous 454 years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, thereby dating the event to roughly A.D. 485, and thus locating Arthur somewhat earlier in time than the pseudo-chronicles. However, no medieval writer, to the best of my knowledge, ever placed Arthur in the 450’s, at least, not explicitly. (In a set of trading stamps that accompanied Prince Valiant about this time, Foster stated on one that Arthur’s reign was from 420 to 460. In this same series, he also dated Val and Aguar’s exile to Britain to 425, and the Battle of the Fens, Val’s knighting, and Aguar’s subsequent recovery of Thule to 433. This clearly contradicts the chronological fix of having Attila’s march on Rome take place only shortly after Aguar’s restoration - and also clashes with Foster’s statement in the main body of the strip - in #104, Panel 6 - that the exile to Britain lasted for twelve years rather than eight.)

Panel 3. It is tempting to wonder if, when Foster chose the name "Andelkrag" for the magnificent castle of Prince Camoran, he had been influenced by "The Madness of Andelsprutz", one of the short stories of the noted Irish fantasy writer Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany (1878-1957). Dunsany’s tale revolves around the mighty city of Andelsprutz, which comes to a tragic end after it falls into madness (not the inhabitants of the city, but the city itself); Andelkrag does not suffer a similar fate (unless one believes the almost-suicidal final actions of its defenders to be insanity), but the similarity of the two names, and the application of both to a once-mighty city or fortress which suffers a cataclysmic downfall, suggests such a connection. This connection is all the more probable since Foster had read and enjoyed Lord Dunsany’s works (having been introduced to them through his friend, Charles F. Armstrong), and, by his own admission, often drew inspiration from them for Val’s adventures. We shall see more of these further on.

119. Panel 2. Note that Val rides from his father’s kingdom into the lands surrounding Andelkrag with no mention of a sea-crossing between Norway and mainland Europe (where Andelkrag evidently is). This is still another indication that Foster may not have initially envisioned Thule as being in Norway. (For earlier signs, see the note on #83, Panel 2.)

Panel 4. While Foster portrays the Hunnish hordes that Val battles in this portion of the strip as comprised entirely of Huns, in actual history, Attila’s forces were swelled by Germanic tribesmen who were attracted into his service through the promise of booty. In fact, it is believed by historians that Attila’s Germanic followers outnumbered his Hunnish followers during his invasion of western Europe (particularly since Attila had sent a large portion of the Huns to ally with the Armenians against the Persians at the time).

Panel 7. Emperor Valentinian is the historical Valentinian III, Western Roman Emperor from 423 to 455. He was the nephew of Honorius, the previous Western Roman Emperor (395-423), who reigned during Alaric the Goth’s sack of Rome in 410; his mother, Galla Placidia, was Honorius’s sister.

Foster’s account of Valentinian’s "shameful peace" with Attila is actually inaccurate, though based on real history in a confused way. Valentinian’s sister, Honoria, had planned to depose her brother and replace him with her chamberlain and lover Eugenius; Valentinian had discovered her plans, however, executed Eugenius, and sent Honoria to Constantinople, where she was placed under the supervision of Pulcheria, the older sister of the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II (408-450), a pious woman with a strong taste for prayer and fasting. Partly to escape Pulcheria’s strict regimen and partly to further her own political power, she sent a messenger to Attila, bearing her ring and a proposal of marriage. Attila, finding the idea of marrying into the imperial family of Rome much to his liking, accepted, requesting half the Western Roman Empire for a dowry; Theodosius, upon discovering Honoria’s scheme, sent her back to her brother, who refused to agree to the marriage. Attila promptly invaded the Western Roman Empire. After sacking a few cities in Gaul, he was turned back temporarily at the Battle of Chalons in 451 (see the annotation for #187, Panel 5), but the following yea