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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 ELEVEN: INTRIGUES AT CAMELOT.
466. Panel 1. Val’s remark may be more influence from Lord Dunsany. In Dunsany’s "The Loot of Bombasharna", the pirate captain Shard carries off the Queen of the South, only to be faced with a distinctly cold response from her, a response that causes him to comment over and over "that he wished he knew more about the ways of Queens" (Wonder Tales, p. 23).
467. Panel 2. Genseric (also known as Gaiseric) was the king of the Vandals in the mid-5th century A.D. He and his people invaded North Africa in 430, and gradually gained control of it, finally entering Carthage without a fight in 439. He was noted for his intelligence and leadership skills.
Genseric’s impending attack on Rome took place in 455, only a couple of months after the murder of Valentinian III. This presents a discrepancy between the chronology of Prince Valiant and that of real history, for Val’s wedding to Aleta can hardly be taking place only two months after his visit to Rome in Gawain and Tristram’s company when he witnessed Valentinian’s assassination. Most likely, Foster simply did not worry too much about the chronological issues here.
Panel 3. While Prince Valiant locates Genseric’s headquarters at Tunis, in actual history, he resided in Carthage at this time. (One could always justify Foster’s change, of course, by arguing, as Gonzalo did in Act II, Scene i of The Tempest, "This Tunis, sir, was Carthage." However, the two cities, though lying close to each other, are not identical.)
468. Panel 1. Prince Valiant returns to the murder of Valentinian III, but this time ascribes his death to the hands, not of Aetius’s friends, but of "Senator Maximus" (whose full name was Petronius Maximus). Petronius Maximus was reportedly motivated not only by ambition, but also revenge; Valentinian had raped his wife.
Panel 2. Maximus’s proposal to Eudoxia, Valentinian’s widow (his own wife was dead by this time), is also historical fact, as is her deal with Genseric.
Panel 6. Foster makes an infamous slip of the pen here, in having Genseric and the Vandals land "on the banks of the Tigris", a river in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), a substantial difference from Rome; he had clearly meant to write "Tiber" instead. Foster later on commented on this, mentioning that only one of his readers caught this error, and wrote to him saying, "wasn’t that a helluva long march?" (Kane, p. 120.)
Panel 7. Leo the Great was Pope from 440 to 461. He was noted for his hard work in imposing his authority over all of the Western Roman Empire, and for being the first Pope to be buried at St. Peter’s, as well as for his confrontations with two barbarian rulers that threatened Rome (Attila and Genseric). His feast-day on the Roman calendar is November 10.
Panel 8. Pope Leo the Great had persuaded Attila the Hun to spare Rome in 452 - at least, according to legend. (Historians believe that Attila was more likely dissuaded from attacking Rome due to a bribe. See the entry for #119, Panel 7, for more details.)
469. Panel 2. Foster correctly follows history in his description of the negotiations between Pope Leo and Genseric.
Panel 3. Petronius Maximus’s death actually occurred shortly before the Vandals arrived, rather than immediately afterwards as depicted here.
Panel 5. The Vandal sack of Rome led to "vandal" entering the English language to describe someone who engages in senseless destruction. Among the Vandals’ loot was the gilded dome of the Capitol (which they apparently mistook for real gold).
Panel 8. The enforced marriage of Eudoxia’s daughter (named Eudocia) to Genseric’s son (named Hunneric) is also a historical fact. They had actually been engaged for some years, perhaps from the year 442. Petronius Maximus, after usurping the imperial throne, decided to have Eudocia marry his own son instead - which may have been another reason why Genseric decided to sack Rome.
478. Panel 2. Foster again (see the entry for #278, Panel 4) improbably bestows the Anglo-Saxon title of "thane" upon a French nobleman.
484. Panel 3. Guinevere’s jealousy of Aleta would not be followed up on during this stay at Camelot; however, it would become a full story later on, in #1134-36.
Panel 7. In fact, Essex’s name originated from its being home to the East Saxons ("East" in relative terms to those Saxons who had settled further to the west in Britain, such as Sussex - home to the South Saxons - and Wessex - home to the West Saxons). For that matter, the name "East Saxony" would make little sense from the perspective of geography, since Britain lies to the west of the Saxons’ original homeland on mainland Europe.
Panel 8. Arthur’s comment that Val spent his childhood in Essex is another of Foster's inconsistencies; Val spent his childhood in the Fens, which are adjacent to Norfolk and at some distance from Essex.
Note that the Round Table is here portrayed as solid all the way through to the center, rather than ring-shaped as in its original appearance in Prince Valiant.
485. Panel 3. Sir Barin is Foster’s invention, but Sir Fergus of Cornwall is a minor character in Malory. He first appears as a young, newly-made earl whose lands are troubled by a marauding giant named Taulurd, until Sir Marhaus slays the giant and frees the earldom from his terror. Later on in Malory’s work, Sir Fergus enters Tristram’s service and eventually becomes a knight of the Round Table.
Panel 4. This custom of knights is a mainstay of Arthurian romance; in Malory, Arthur’s knights on their quests would frequently be faced with such obstacles. While most of them (unlike Val on this occasion) welcomed such encounters, there were occasional exceptions to this rule. For example, Sir Tor, dispatched by Arthur to recover a dog belonging to Nimue that had been carried off by one Sir Abellius, was waylaid on his mission by a pair of knights by the names of Sir Felot of Languedoc and Sir Petipace of Winchelsea, who demanded a joust of him and refused to take "no" for an answer, even when Tor stressed the urgency of his errand. (Tor defeated them both and sent them to Camelot to yield themselves up to Arthur.)
492. Panel 2. Hugh the Fox is clearly intended as a Prince Valiant version of Robin Hood, adapted to an Arthurian setting. (One all but expects him to greet Aleta with the words "Welcome to Sherwood, my lady.")
While Robin Hood is generally not made a contemporary of King Arthur in "legendary fiction", usually being placed during the time of Richard the Lion-hearted (although the earliest Robin Hood stories were set during the 14th century; the notion of Robin Hood being a contemporary of Richard I and John Lackland entered the development of his legend relatively late), T. H. White did place the two most famous legendary heroes of medieval England in the same time period in his The Sword in the Stone; here, Robin Hood (who turns out to actually bear the name "Robin Wood", "Hood" being treated as the result of garbled accounts of his adventures) and his outlaws join forces with the young Arthur and Kay in rescuing Arthur’s favorite dog Cavall and a few human prisoners (one of whom, in the American edition, but not the British, is Friar Tuck) from a set of formidable adversaries. (In the British edition of The Sword in the Stone, these opponents are the Anthropophagi, White’s adaptation of the monstrous peoples of the East in ancient and medieval legend, while in the American version, Arthur and Robin Hood are pitted against Morgan le Fay and the wyverns and griffons that guard her castle.)
Panel 7. The quarterstaff bout with Little Cyril again shows the influence of the legends of Robin Hood (even down to Little Cyril’s name, a clear evocation of "Little John").
Panel 9. Val’s boyhood quarterstaff battle was in #12.
497. Panel 4. Note King Arthur’s armor, for once more evocative of the later Roman Empire (or of Britain in the aftermath of the Roman occupation) than of the medieval period. A campaign against the Saxons makes an appropriate occasion for its appearance.
Panel 8. Horsa does battle with Arthur for the third time in the strip. Foster returns to his original portrayal of him as a Saxon chieftain (as depicted in the Battle of the Fens) rather than as a Viking leader (as depicted in the Hadrian’s Wall campaign). However, he makes him active in Essex, whereas the Horsa of legend (and possibly history) was traditionally associated with Kent instead.
500. Panel 3. It is fitting that Mordred, traditionally the most villainous of Arthur’s major knights, should be the one to spot Hugh and have him arrested, becoming almost an Arthurian equivalent to the Sheriff of Nottingham.
501. Panel 4. Val’s explanation as to why Hugh and his men became outlaws - to escape the tyranny of their local lords -evokes the legend of Robin Hood again.
Panel 5. The indication that Arthur was unaware of these nobles’ corrupt ways, and will clearly put a stop to them now that he is aware of them, allows Hugh to function better as a recognizable "Robin Hood" analogue in Arthurian Britain (which, unlike the England of Robin Hood, has to be a place with justice being administered properly from the throne). (T. H. White solved the problem in a different way; he placed Robin Hood and his followers during the reign of Uther Pendragon, whom White depicted as a brutal tyrant.)
504. Panel 3. Lancelot’s "French" or Breton origins are noted again.
Panel 4. Here, astonishingly, Foster portrays Mordred as Arthur’s half-brother rather than as his nephew (or son). The reason for this startling change to the traditional story is unknown; the change itself is all the more surprising when, on almost all of Mordred’s other appearances, he would be portrayed, as per Malory, as Gawain’s half-brother. (Foster’s successors, such as the Murphys, would revert to this interpretation of Mordred’s relationship to Arthur after Foster retired from writing the strip, presumably inspired by this panel.) Most likely it was a slip of the pen on Foster’s part rather than a deliberate deviation from the legend.
Panel 5. This is the first mention in Prince Valiant of the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere, one of the best-known elements of the Arthurian cycle.
The Love Triangle appears to have originated with Chretien de Troyes in his Lancelot, or the Knight of the Cart; while Guinevere was depicted in earlier works (such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and his pseudo-chronicler successors) as unfaithful to Arthur, this marked the point where her lover was first identified as Lancelot. In Chretien’s poem, Lancelot comes to the rescue of Guinevere after the latter is kidnapped by the villainous knight Meleagant; it transpires afterwards that they are lovers. (Chretien’s Lancelot appears to be almost a parody of the ideal lover, his devotion to the Queen becoming comically exaggerated; for example, at one point, while attempting to see the abducted Guinevere from a castle window, he leans out of the window so far that he almost loses his balance and has to be hauled back in before he can fall out.)
The Prose Lancelot expanded upon Chretien’s story by providing an account of how Lancelot and the Queen first came to be lovers. When Lancelot came to Arthur’s court to be knighted, the king forgot to gird on his sword, so Guinevere undertook that act, a deed which bound her and Lancelot together. Lancelot’s close friend, Duke Galehaut of the Long Isles, after learning of their feelings for one another, arranged for their first clandestine meeting together (Dante made a famous allusion to this act of Galehaut’s in his account of the encounter with Francesca da Rimini in Canto Five of the Inferno). The Prose Lancelot also told how Lancelot’s love for Guinevere brought much tragedy into his life in the end; first, it prevented him from achieving the Holy Grail, and then it became the catalyst whereby Arthur’s kingdom and the Round Table were destroyed.
Sir Thomas Malory left out the beginning of Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair in his Le Morte d’Arthur, but gave a full description of the latter portions of it, all the way to the tragic end. It is doubtless thanks mainly to Malory that the adultery of Arthur’s queen and his greatest knight came to occupy so central a position in the legend as it does today, although Tennyson’s Idylls of the King helped as well (not to mention T. H. White’s The Once and Future King and its musical adaptation Camelot)
.The Love Triangle’s prominence in the legend is partly due to its laying low Arthur’s court (and this is brought to the fore on the two occasions that Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair is touched on in Prince Valiant). It would be more accurate to state that it was not the Triangle that destroyed the kingdom so much as the exposure of the Triangle, for that is how the matter is portrayed in the medieval accounts (including Malory’s); so long as everyone looked the other way (with the exception of a few perfunctory attempts by Morgan le Fay to open Arthur’s eyes to his betrayal by his queen and his chief knight, all of which were easily foiled), no harm came to the kingdom, but after the adultery was finally forced into the open, a civil war between Arthur and Lancelot ensued, splitting the Round Table in half. Tennyson’s Idylls provided a case for the actual love affair being a poison to Camelot even before it was made public, on the other hand, through the spectrum of Victorian morality; here it sets a bad example for the knights and ladies of Arthur’s court, who upon seeing Lancelot and Guinevere committing adultery, imitate them out of their admiration for the greatness of the pair, producing enough moral rot to shake Camelot’s foundations and give Mordred the following that he needs to carry out his treachery.
Mordred’s public accusation of the lovers is no doubt inspired by the opening act of the "Morte d’Arthur" in Malory, where Mordred and his half-brother Agravain inform Arthur that Lancelot and Guinevere are unfaithful to him, and persuade him to let them set a trap for the guilty couple. In Malory’s work, however, it is Agravain, rather than Mordred, who is the ringleader, and his motivation is not to start a civil war between Arthur and Lancelot, but merely to dispose of Lancelot (whom he hates out of envy over the latter’s superior prowess in arms and knightly exploits). The conflict that develops between Arthur and Lancelot thereafter stems from a series of accidents (particularly Lancelot’s inadvertently slaying Gaheris and Gareth while rescuing Guinevere from the stake) rather than from a deliberate scheme of Mordred’s. The notion of Mordred as the initiator of the accusation of adultery against Lancelot and the queen, fueled by the hopes of exploiting the subsequent rift in the Round Table to achieve his own ambitions, appears to have originated with Tennyson.
505. Panel 4. It is appropriate that Mordred be banished to the north, since in the medieval texts, he was the son or stepson of King Lot of Lothian and Orkney. (Presumably the "fighting in the north" is against the Picts.)
VOLUME TWELVE: THE NEW WORLD.
507. Panel 2. From Katwin’s words here, one would have to assume that, Aleta would never be able to return to Camelot at all, yet she and her husband would eventually do so (obviously Foster could not afford to write King Arthur and his court permanently out of the strip!). Presumably by the time of Val and Aleta’s next visit, the memory of Mordred’s accusation had receded enough to remove the danger that Katwin had mentioned.
509. Panel 3. Ulfrun’s name can be found in the "Short Seeress’s Prophecy" in the Elder Edda, though the original Ulfrun (one of the nine mothers of Heimdall, the watchman of the Norse gods) was female. (This is not the last time that Foster would ascribe a female name to a male Viking character - see the annotations for #1443, Panel 5, and #1951, Panel 4.)
527. Panel 5. In real history, the Vikings first came to Iceland in the 9th century, four hundred years after the time period in which Prince Valiant is set. (They were not the first people to set foot there; there is strong evidence that Irish monks had gotten there first and dwelt there for a while as hermits. Also, a few Roman coins dating from the late 3rd century A.D. have been found in the south of Iceland, suggesting that during this time, the Romans might have briefly come upon it. It is also possible that Iceland could have been the original "Thule" mentioned by Pytheas in the 4th century B.C. - cf. the annotation for #1, Panel 1.) According to tradition, the first Viking to come upon it was Floki Vilgerdarson, also known as Ravens-Floki, who arrived there around 860. Floki found the climate too harsh for him (even in the summer), and returned to Norway in disappointment, but two of his companions, Herjolfur and Thorolf, spoke more highly of it back home. At this time, Norway was becoming united under the rule of Harald Fairhair; many Norsemen who chafed at this eagerly emigrated to Iceland, where they would be beyond his reach. The official first colonist among them was Ingolfur Arnarson, who came to Iceland shortly after 870.
In fact, Foster would, in his account of Val’s pursuit of Ulfrun, compress the Viking voyages of discovery (which, in actual history, took place over two centuries) into a single adventure, bringing Prince Valiant all the way from Thule via Iceland and Greenland to North America, in a culmination that would be almost the Prince Valiant equivalent of Leif Ericson’s arrival in Vinland.
528. Panel 2. Greenland was, in real history, discovered by Eric the Red, Leif Ericson’s father, in the late 10th century. (It is popularly believed that he deliberately named it "Greenland" in order to lure his neighbors in Iceland into settling there, as the Viking Age equivalent of the unprincipled and duplicitous real estate agent - and the Icelandic sagas do admit that Eric thought that people would be more eager to go to Greenland if it had an attractive name - but the historical evidence indicates that Greenland actually was green and pleasant at that stage in history, and that its harsher climate of today only came about after his lifetime.)
529. Panel 9. The title for next week’s page, "Ulfrun Sows the Dragon Teeth", is a reference to Greek mythology. Cadmus, a Phoenician prince who had come to Greece in a fruitless search for his sister Europa (who had been abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull), slew a dragon and was instructed by the gods to sow its teeth. When he did so, they turned into armed warriors, which fought each other until only five remained alive; Cadmus persuaded the five survivors to assist him in the founding of the city of Thebes. (Jason had a similar adventure during his Quest of the Golden Fleece, when he was instructed by King Aeetes of Colchis, the keeper of the Fleece, to plow a field with two fire-breathing bulls and sow it afterwards with dragons’ teeth; Aeetes’ daughter Medea helped Jason achieve this task.) Since then, "sowing the dragon teeth" (or "sowing the dragon’s teeth") has become a metaphor for "creating discord".
537. Panel 9. The Beothucks (or Beothuks) were an actual Newfoundland tribe, who indeed painted not only their skin, but even their garments red (though more as an insect repellent than as a means of disguise). Indeed, it is thought that this custom was what led to European explorers and colonists referring to the Indians as "red men". There is no evidence that they might have been of part-Viking descent (although it is possible that they had encountered the Viking explorers of North America in the time of Leif Ericson, and were the native "Skraelings" whom the Vikings spoke of); it is of interest, however, that their language differed noticeably from the Algonquin language so prominent in that part of North America (though this is more likely to have been due to their isolation in Newfoundland). Nor does their name seem to have been derived from the hypothetical Viking Beothald of Foster’s tale; it is more likely the Beothuk word for "human body". Sadly, Foster is correct about the Beothuks now being extinct; this came about as a result of conflict with French fishermen in colonial times, who not only made war on the Beothuks themselves, but encouraged their neighbors, the Micmac, to do the same. The last known Beothuk is recorded as having died in 1829.
541. Panel 2. The Manitou was the chief god of the Algonquin people (the tribe that Val and Aleta lived with during their winter in North America was not explicitly identified with them until Arn’s visit many years later), a pantheistic deity.
Panel 7. We do not know precisely when this partition of Niagara Falls took place, unfortunately. Pierre Berton, in his Niagara: A History of the Falls, suggests that it happened five hundred years ago - which would mean that Val and Aleta would have come a thousand years too early to witness the event. (Of course, Foster might not have known this when he drew this scene.)
552. Panels 7-8. The spectacle of Val celebrating his son’s birth with so many horns of mead upset several of Foster’s readers, who disliked this display of drunkenness from the strip's hero.
BOOK THIRTEEN: THE SUN GODDESS.
555. Panel 1. For the first time (but not the last) Foster draws a page of Prince Valiant as told from Arn’s perspective, with Arn as the narrator. Arn’s comment that "no author is going to make a puppet of me, to dance on a string whenever the creative inspiration fails him" is amusingly ironic, since it is clear enough that this is precisely what Foster is doing to Arn in this page.
563. Panel 8. The Hurons were one of the major Indian peoples of the Great Lakes region. (They called themselves the "Wyandot", meaning "islanders"; "Hurons" was a name given to them by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, meaning "rough" and describing their wild hair-styles, which makes its use here anachronistic - though one could always speculate that Foster is employing a translation convention.) During colonial times, they entered into trading relations with the French, making a great profit out of the fur trade (particularly since they served as the middleman between the French and other Indian peoples); unfortunately, this came to an end in 1648-49 when the Iroquois launched a powerful attack upon them in order to wrest control of the fur trade from them. The Hurons were scattered; some settled in Canada and others (after much migrating and forced relocating by the United States government) in Oklahoma.
Apart from the Beothuks, the Hurons were the first Indian tribe in Prince Valiant to be mentioned by name, and the only Indian tribe mentioned by name during Val and Aleta’s stay in the New World. During Arn’s visit, many years later, more American Indian people would be introduced: the Algonquin (identified as the Indians that Val and Aleta had lived among), the Iroquois, the Ottawa, the Mohawks, and the Mohegans. However, their presence is another anachronism, in that Foster was transplanting the Indian peoples and nations of the Great Lakes area from the 17th and 18th centuries to to 5th century. During the time when Foster places Prince Valiant’s adventures, many of these peoples had not even settled in that region of North America as yet.
568. Panel 1. Foster would repeat this concept many times in the strip thereafter, applying it not only to Arn but later to his younger siblings, the twins and Galan, as well. Indeed, Val’s periodic quests and adventures taking him away from his family must have been a godsent to Foster, allowing him to "redesign" Val and Aleta’s offspring each time their father came home, thereby aging them gradually from infants to toddlers to children to adolescents.
Panel 4. Foster revises the story of Ilene’s abduction here, altering the picture of the Vikings for example so as to show Ilene (rather than one of her servants as in the original - compare this panel to #68, Panel 8) as their prisoner. Also, in the original story, Val and Arn’s ship was not wrecked in the storm which sank Thagnar’s ship and resulted in Thagnar and Ilene’s watery deaths.
576. Panels 5-6. Foster here ties in Val and Aleta’s adventures in North America (particularly Aleta’s promise to the Indians) to the "Fair God" legend, which actually appears in the mythologies of Central and South America. These legends involved a god or culture-hero (called Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl in Mesoamerica, Viracocha in South America) who taught his people the arts of civilization and then departed.
When the Spanish conquistadors came to the Americas in the 16th century, their leaders (such as Hernan Cortez) exploited these legends by claiming to be the "Fair God" returned. Missionaries and friars accompanying them eagerly seized upon any details in the "Fair God" legend that could be interpreted as suggesting that the "Fair God" might have been a European visitor, preferably one of the Apostles (Quetzalcoatl, for example, was equated with St. Thomas). Many people since then have speculated that the "Fair God" might indeed have been a pre-Columbian visitor from the Old World. However, the historical evidence indicates that the "Fair God" or "White God" was so called, not because of his complexion (he was usually depicted as dark-skinned) but because he dressed in white; furthermore, the mistaken assumption on the part of the Aztecs, Incas, and other native peoples of Central and South America that the conquistadors were Quetzalcoatl or Viracocha returned appears to have only taken place because of the claims of the conquistadors. In all fairness, however, Foster probably did not know this when he drew this page.
(The actual circumstances in the strip raise a couple of additional questions about Foster’s identifying Arn as the "Fair God" here. For one thing, Aleta addresses her prophecy to the Indians of the Great Lakes, even though the "Fair God" legend is associated with regions much further south, and no trace of it can be found in this part of North America; apparently the legend of Arn’s return must have transplanted itself so thoroughly in Mesoamerica as to leave no trace behind in the land of his birth. Furthermore, Arn did indeed return to America later on in the strip - though Foster might not have seriously planned for him to do just that at the time that he drew this page - which would raise the question of why he would still be expected by the time of Cortez’s landing in Mexico in 1519.)
584. Panel 1. Foster’s remark that it would be a thousand years before the next transatlantic crossing is not entirely accurate. For one thing, some years later, he would send Arn on his own journey to North America (though he might not have foreseen this when he drew the page, despite Aleta’s words). The events in Prince Valiant aside, there is some argument that there may have been other visits between Europe and North America in the period between Val and Aleta’s visit to the New World and Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
For example, Irish legend claims that St. Brendan the Navigator once journeyed to a distant land in the west with his monks; some have argued that this distant land might have been North America (the Irish monks were good seafarers, and even appear to have made it to Iceland before the Vikings), though others hold this to be the Otherworld and not a true geographical land. (During the Murphy years, Prince Valiant would have a brief encounter with St. Brendan at sea.)
More significant than this, of course, and far more famous, was the visit by Leif Ericson and his fellow Vikings to a part of North America which they named Vinland (supposedly Norse for "Wine-land", after the great quantities of grapes that they discovered there), around the year 1000. Exactly where Vinland was has been debated by scholars to this day, beyond the fact that it was somewhere along the eastern coast of North America. Viking remains have been discovered in Newfoundland, however, at l’Anse aux Meadows. The Vinland saga is very likely to have been at least a partial inspiration for Val and Aleta’s visit to North America - if no more than its core concept.
For that matter, it has even been suggested by some historians that fishermen were secretly catching fish off of Nova Scotia or Newfoundland in the 15th century even before Columbus, although this has not been confirmed. Not that this deprives Columbus of his importance in being the one who ensured that America and Europe would enter into permanent contact with each other.
Panel 4. The appearance of the Irish elk fulfills another of Horrit’s prophecies, in that it appears in the background behind the "dragon" and "unicorn" in Panel 7 of #10, although she made no mention of it in her speech. In fact, the Irish elk was extinct by the 5th century, so its presence is yet another anachronism in the strip (though, at least, not as much so as dinosaurs lurking in the Fens).
Panel 6. The "little folk" presumably are an adaptation on Foster’s part of the smaller breed of Irish fairy-folk (such as leprechauns), influenced, perhaps, by a popular theory (though one without scholarly support) that fairy-legends arose from an aboriginal "dwarf-race" that once inhabited the British Isles but was driven into hiding by the taller Britons and their descendants. They would play no further role in Val’s visit to Ireland, but Foster later on reintroduced them in #2233, where Arn encounters them on the Isle of Man.
592. Panel 4. Since Foster had consistently identified Camelot with Winchester throughout Prince Valiant, the answer to Aleta’s question would have to be "No"; the Usk is in southern Wales, nowhere near Winchester. However, the Usk does flow past Caerleon, another of Arthur’s traditional strongholds; perhaps Foster had momentarily confused Camelot with Caerleon and failed to catch his error in time. At least, the Usk’s vicinity to Caerleon makes the slip an appropriate one.
(It might be added that Lord Dunsany, one of Foster’s favorite writers, had linked Camelot to the Usk in one of his short stories, "The Madness of Andelsprutz". After the soul of the once-great city of Andelsprutz has fallen into madness, the souls of the departed great cities of legend and ancient history come to comfort it; among these is "the soul of Camelot that had so long ago forsaken Usk" (A Dreamer’s Tales, p. 37.).)
VOLUME FOURTEEN: SWORD AND SORCERY.
599. Panel 7. King Tourien’s impregnable castle, while fictional, is most likely modeled on Tintagel. Both castles are in Cornwall, and both lie on a rocky peninsula on the coast, accessible from land only by a narrow causeway.
616. Panel 1. Again Foster turns the narration (for one page) over to Arn.
619. Panel 2. The vow that Prince Arn of Ord mentions is one that never took place during the original account of Ilene’s abduction and its tragic resolution; apparently, Foster has engaged in retroconning again.
Panel 4. Foster alters the story of Ilene’s abduction in the seventh scene of this panel, as well; in the original story, Prince Arn continued his ride to pursue the main party of the Vikings (the ones that actually had Ilene as a prisoner) rather than to collect reinforcements.
621. Panel 1. Linet’s name is most likely borrowed from that of the sharp-tongued damsel who accompanied Sir Gareth on his first quest (see the annotation on #760, Panel 4), another example of Foster borrowing names from the medieval Arthurian romances for his invented characters.
623. Panel 2. The Archbishop’s full title is not given in Prince Valiant. Presumably he would be the Archbishop of Canterbury (an anachronistic title, since that see was not established until after St. Augustine’s mission to England in 597, but one which would be suitable to the world of Arthurian romance; indeed, the title appears in Malory).
In the pseudo-chronicle tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the most prominent Archbishop in Britain during King Arthur’s reign was Dubricius, who was appointed to the position of Archbishop of Caerleon by Aurelius Ambrosius, Uther Pendragon’s older brother and Arthur’s uncle. Dubricius was a very devout prelate, so holy that he could heal the sick through his prayers; he sponsored the young Arthur after Uther’s death and raised him to the throne, and gave a stirring battle oration to the Britons just before their engagement with the Saxons at Bath (Geoffrey’s adaptation of the Battle of Badon). He finally retired from his archbishopric on the eve of Arthur’s war with the Romans to spend his remaining days as a hermit, and was succeeded by St. David, who would become the patron saint of Wales. Malory makes no mention of Dubricius in his Le Morte d’Arthur, but instead depicts an anonymous Archbishop of Canterbury who works with Merlin in gathering the British nobles to London for the Sword in the Stone. Another anonymous Archbishop of Canterbury (or maybe the same one - Malory does not say) opposes Mordred at the end of Arthur’s reign, calling him to task for usurping the throne and seeking to marry Queen Guinevere; when Mordred persists in both actions, the Archbishop excommunicates him and then, fearing that Mordred will send assassins after him, flees to Glastonbury where he becomes a hermit in secret, to be later on joined in his retreat by Sir Bedivere, Sir Lancelot, and Lancelot’s kinsmen. After Lancelot’s death, Constantine of Cornwall, Arthur’s successor, restores the Archbishop to his see.
624. Panel 7. Although the upcoming story involving Oom Fooyat takes a rationalist approach towards magic, here the plump little wizard is apparently able to magically conjure up a genuine apparition or demon.
626. Panel 3. Again, Oom Fooyat works a genuine feat of magic that does not fit in well with the more rationalized tone of the Illwynde story that he will soon play a major role in.
628. Panels 3-5. Foster here finally has Merlin explain to Val about magic being merely a trick, although Val was portrayed on earlier pages (such as #238, Panel 5), remembering this conversation long before it happened. This marks even more strongly Foster’s increasing shift away from the fantastic in the strip.
629. Panel 8. Afreets were evil spirits in Arabian folklore, similar to djinn. (The mention of an afreet in Wales, far from the Middle East, is jarring, although the well-traveled Prince Valiant could be imagined as having learned of them in his previous visit to that part of the world.)
630. Panel 4. Val refers to djinn, again incongruously introducing elements of Arabian legend into a Welsh setting.
631. Panel 1. The banshee was a death-omen in Irish folklore. Each banshee was attached to an Irish family and would let out a mournful wail, known as a keening, when a member of that family was about to die. While banshees were Irish rather than Welsh, the mention of one here is at least more appropriate than that of a djinni or afreet, and it is not difficult to imagine that the Welsh would have had something similar to banshees in their own folklore.
Panel 4. The frightened knight receives his name, Sir Cador, for the first time. He is clearly named after Duke Cador of Cornwall, who first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain as one of Arthur’s leading noblemen. Cador fights diligently for Arthur in the Saxon wars that begin his reign in Geoffrey’s account, defeating an army under the command of the Saxon chieftain Baldulf that was coming to relieve Arthur’s siege of York (which had been taken by Baldulf’s brother Colgrin), and taking care of those Saxons who survived the crushing defeat that Arthur inflicted upon them at Bath. He is also depicted by Geoffrey as the guardian of Queen Guinevere before she married Arthur (later versions, such as Malory’s, would make her the daughter of King Leodegrance of Cameliard and remove her links to Cador). When Arthur holds court in great splendor at Caerleon on the eve of the embassy from Lucius Hiberius that initiates the Roman war, Cador is one of four kings or chieftains who personally waits on Arthur (the other three being the kings of Scotland, northern Wales, and southern Wales); after Lucius’s emissaries demand tribute from Arthur, Cador eagerly welcomes the prospect of war, stating that he had feared that the Britons would lose their edge and become weak and soft during a period of prolonged peace. Needless to say, Cador plays a prominent part in the Roman war that follows; among his exploits are commanding (with Sir Bedivere) a troop sent by Arthur to take the captured Romans from the first skirmish in the war to Paris where they can be safely imprisoned (and foiling an attempt by the Romans to rescue the prisoners), and commanding the left wing of the first division of Arthur’s army in the climactic battle with Lucius at Soissons. He disappears from Geoffrey’s story afterwards (a man named "Cador Limenich" is mentioned as among the casualties of Arthur’s forces in the final battle with Mordred, but it is uncertain as to whether Geoffrey meant this to be the same Cador or not), but his son Constantine succeeds Arthur to the throne after the latter is taken away to Avalon.
Later writers, such as Malory, would reduce Cador’s importance; in Malory, Cador only appears on stage during the Roman war, though he is still mentioned as being Constantine’s father.
The Sir Cador who plays such a prominent role in the Illwynde story is clearly not the Cador of Arthurian pseudo-chronicle; he is found in Wales rather than Cornwall, and appears to be merely an ordinary knight-errant rather than a duke. Most likely Foster is simply name-borrowing again, as he had done with King Lamorack, King Aguar, Sir Astomore, and Lady Linet.
636. Panel 4. Sir Cador’s duel with the black knight and his subsequent discovery of his opponent’s true nature evokes the denouement of Tennyson’s treatment of the story of Sir Gareth in "Gareth and Lynette", one of his Idylls of the King (though we do not know if Foster had that in mind). Here, Gareth, after defeating three brothers who guard the approach to Lady Lyonors’s castle, must face their brother, a menacing figure in black armor with a skeleton’s design upon it. The Black Knight is so terrifying in appearance that even Sir Lancelot (who is accompanying Gareth on the final part of his quest) "thro’ his warm blood felt/ Ice strike" (lines 1363-64); nevertheless, Gareth jousts against and overthrows him. When he strikes off his fallen opponent’s helm, the Black Knight turns out to be a young boy pretending to be a monstrous champion under the orders of his brothers (who had never dreamed that anyone would actually dare challenge him). The similarities may be coincidental, but certainly the core concept is the same in both cases: a fearsome knight in black armor turns out to be far less fearsome when unhelmed.
638. Panels 2-3. This part of the strip is, in some ways, unfortunate; while Oom Fooyat and the herbwoman are well-characterized here, Foster breaks the atmosphere of his story by naming the herbwoman "Winnie the Witch" and giving Oom Fooyat the line of "Take a card, any card!" Such elements would have worked better in a far more comedic series than the (generally) serious Prince Valiant.
VOLUME FIFTEEN: YOUNG GEOFFREY.
645. Panel 2. Sir Baldwin, who would become a recurring figure at Arthur’s court as the trainer of pages and squires, is introduced here. His name is similar to that of Sir Baudwin of Britain, one of the "old knights" of Uther Pendragon’s generation in Malory, whom Arthur appointed as his constable; Foster might have intended his Sir Baldwin as an adaptation of that character. However, Sir Baldwin is never called Arthur’s constable or otherwise linked to his near-namesake in Malory, so the name could be a coincidence.
Foster first calls Geoffrey "Jeff", an unfortunate nickname that seems much too modern for an Arthurian setting; one could almost call it another jarring anachronism like "Winnie the Witch" (see the annotation for #638, Panels 2-3, above).
671. Panels 1 and 2. Again, Arn temporarily becomes narrator.
673. Panel 1. Foster here engages in a slight retrocon; Arthur had merely banished Geoffrey from the kingdom. There was no mention in his decree of setting foot on British soil, which weakens the loophole that Boltar provides the boy with.
Panel 8. This sudden name-change from Geoffrey to Arf was the result of events in Foster’s own life. His son, Arthur James Foster, had been stationed overseas in Germany as part of the U.S. Army when he had received a "Dear John" letter from his wife Doris. Arthur was so upset by the break-up that he went to California without a word to his family or anyone else; desperate to find his son, Foster changed Geoffrey’s name in Prince Valiant to "Arf" - his son’s nickname - in the hopes that this would alert Arthur to his search for him. Fortunately, it did and he came home to his parents.
Thereafter, Geoffrey was known as "Arf" throughout the strip until #817, Panel 1, after which he disappeared from Prince Valiant for a long time, not to re-appear until #1579, Panel 1. When he re-entered the strip, he would return to being known as "Geoffrey" (fortunately; the problem with his being called "Arf" was that the new name sounded - as Boltar comments in #674, Panel 3 - too much like a dog’s barking).
684. Panel 1. Arn once more serves as narrator.
VOLUME SIXTEEN: LOVE AND WAR.
693. Panel 2. Foster makes a continuity error in this panel, by portraying Val as wearing his familiar armor, including the red stallion of Thule, in his adventures with Gawain and Tristram. In fact, during this time, as a perusal of the strips from that period shows, he was wearing plain armor as part of the disguise that he had adopted in relieving a Hunnish officer of his gear, and would not recover his heraldic device until long afterwards, in the aftermath of the siege of Sir Hubert’s castle.
Panel 3. Rufus Regan is, jarringly, introduced out of thin air, an unfortunate habit that Foster sometimes indulged himself in. (Another example can be found with the introduction of Ailianora in #1436, Panel 3.)
Panel 8. In light of all the trouble that Geoffrey/Arf’s crush on Aleta has caused for both himself and others (including, most recently, the duel between Val and Egil), Aleta’s advice here certainly seems sound.
695. Panel 5. Foster’s description of Hap-Atla and his father here clashes with the previous use of the Inner Lands in the stories of Valgrind’s attempted coup and Einar the Red’s attempted revenge. There certainly does not appear to have been enough time since then for a successor of Valgrind’s (as Hap-Atla’s father would have to be) to carry out "many... ambitious schemes of conquest". Presumably Foster simply reused the name "Inner Lands" for a neighbor of Thule without remembering the details of its past appearances in the strip.
699. Panel 8. In this case, Aleta is evidently making use of the tactic that Val used during the siege of Sir Hubert’s castle (trapping the incoming army into a small fenced-off portion of the courtyard) in #273.
707. Panel 7. The foundation of Normandy is another anachronism. It actually took place in 911, when a Viking chieftain named Rollo or Hrolf the Ganger (an old-fashioned term for "walker"; according to legend, he gained this nickname because he was so large that no horse could bear him) invaded northern France. The then-French king, Charles the Simple, too weak to face Hrolf in battle, offered him a portion of northern France in return for his oath of loyalty; Hrolf agreed to this and thus became the first Duke of Normandy. Normandy, of course, was named after the Northmen or "Normans", as the French called them.
Over the next century, the Normans became increasingly "Frenchified". Their most famous achievement came in 1066 when Hrolf’s descendant, Duke William the Bastard, defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings and became King of England as William the Conqueror.
712. Panel 2. While Foster’s comment on how King Dumdribile’s "knowledge of the alphabet ended" after the letter D works, the mention of his daughter Ollie being named "after a dragon he once met" is jarring; it is an obvious reference to Ollie the dragon in the television series "Kukla, Fran and Ollie", which was airing at the time that Foster drew this page, but it (like Winnie the Witch’s name in the Castle Illwynde story) destroys the willing suspension of disbelief.
715. Panel 7. "Sieur" was a medieval French title meaning "lord".
726. Panel 8. The story of Black Robert and Ruy Foulke’s feud, including the Romeo-and-Juliet-style relationship of Adrian and Ruy’s daughter, is an obvious re-use of the story of Sir Hubert and Lord d’Arcy’s feud. (Foster tended to repeat himself frequently, one of his weaknesses.)
VOLUME SEVENTEEN: RETURN FROM ROME.
740. Panel 1. Petit St. Bernard is an actual mountain pass in the Alps, one of two (the other being Grand St. Bernard) named after St. Bernard of Aosta, the vicar-general of Aosta in the 11th century. (His dates would make the actual mention of Petit St. Bernard by that name another anachronism in Prince Valiant, although Foster might be simply using the present-day name for the purposes of clarity.) St. Bernard was noted for building lodgings for travellers in these two passes; one wonders whether the monastery that Val and his companions have just left could have been intended by Foster as a 5th century precursor to one of them. The famous St. Bernard dogs so strongly associated with the Alps are also named after him.
745. Panel 2. Foster’s mention of Gregory the Great as current Pope is another one of his slips. Pope Gregory’s reign was from 590 to 604, almost a hundred and fifty years after the events in Prince Valiant. The error is appropriate, in a way, since Gregory was responsible for the mission of St. Augustine of Canterbury to Kent in 597 which began England’s conversion to Christianity; perhaps Foster had it in mind when he wrote about Val’s own hopes of papal missionaries reaching Thule on a similar mission.
Gregory the Great was one of the leading Popes of the early Middle Ages, noted both for his administrative skill (he faced effectively many crises in Italy during his reign, including an invasion of the Lombards, and resolved them) and his theological writings (such as a treatise entitled "Pastoral Care", which Alfred the Great translated into English three hundred years later). Gregorian chants were named after him, although they originated in the 9th century.
Panel 4. Foster is correct when he says that it would take a long time for Val’s goal to be fulfilled - longer than the text suggests, in fact. An early attempt was made to convert Denmark to Christianity in 826, when a Danish chieftain named Haraldur Klaka and four hundred of his men were baptized at the court of King Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son. He took a missionary named Anskar back with him to Denmark, but Anskar appears to have made little progress (apart from founding a church at Hedeby in 849). Denmark was not fully converted until around 960, when King Harald Bluetooth was baptized and made his subjects follow his example. Norway was converted to Christianity by King Olaf Tryggvason after his own baptism in England in 994 (England's then-king, Ethelred the Unready, stood as sponsor for him), but did not take full hold until his successor, St. Olaf, in 1014. Sweden held out the longest, but even it had a bishop at Upsala by 1164.
747. Panel 2. The lame boy from #323-24 has evidently realized his dream.
748. Panel 4. This is another reference to the (anachronistic) Norman settlements in Sicily alluded to earlier in #202, Panel 1.
Panel 7. Foster’s mention of "the power of Athens [being] broken" at Syracuse is most likely a reference to the defeat of the Athenian forces there during the Peloponnesian Wars. The Athenians, then at war with Sparta, decided in 415 B.C. to strike a blow against the city of Syracuse, which was allied with the Spartans, hoping that by conquering it, they could both gain control of its resources and deny them to the Spartans. They placed one of their best generals, Alcibiades, in charge of the expedition. Unfortunately, on the eve of the army’s departure, several statues of Hermes throughout Athens were mutilated; Alcibiades, who had been an open agnostic, was suspected of this crime, and quickly fled (deserting to the Spartans, as a matter of fact) rather than stand trial for it. His replacement, Nicias, was far less competent than Alcibiades, and under his leadership, the Athenians were defeated; a great many of them were even captured by the Syracusans and made into slaves. After this debacle, the war increasingly turned against Athens until it was defeated by Sparta in 404 B.C.
Foster’s account makes it sound as if Rome immediately took over from Athens as the "mistress of the world" at Syracuse, but this was not the case; in the 5th century B.C., it was still just one of several city-states in Italy, with no military involvement in Sicily. Its triumph took place about a century and a half later, during the First Punic War with its rival Carthage. By the end of the war, the Romans had captured both Syracuse and the rest of Sicily. This was the first occasion where the Romans would claim territory outside of Italy, but far from the last.
749. Panel 7. Foster’s description of the founding of San Marino is another anachronism; Marius (his name was actually Marinus, which fits the name of San Marino much better), while indeed a stonemason, lived during the 4th century as opposed to the 5th. As the name of San (Saint) Marino suggests, he was canonized (his feast-day in the republic named after him is September 3), having become a hermit on the future site of San Marino (and made a deacon by Bishop Gaudentius of Rimini in 359).
752. Panels 3-4. It is a pity that we shall probably never learn whether Foster had known all along that Geoffrey was meant to become a historian rather than a knight or if he had only discovered this in the course of writing. (Incidentally, this revelation of Val’s also indicates that Geoffrey’s disgracing himself at Camelot by deserting his post and twice stealing King Arthur’s horse, thus depriving himself of any hope of sitting at the Round Table, was not such a loss after all, now that it becomes clear that he would never have become one of Arthur’s champions even if he had acted more cautiously.)
754. Panel 5. Foster now reveals that Geoffrey’s biography of Prince Valiant is, in fact, the "source" of the strip, following the time-honored tradition of inventing manuscripts as the source of a work of fiction (much like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s "ancient book in the British tongue" which he claimed to be the origin of his History of the Kings of Britain).
755. Panel 7. Greek fire was one of the naval weapons of the Byzantine Empire. It was developed by an architect named Callinicus in 673 or 674 (which, incidentally, makes its use in Prince Valiant yet another anachronism), to rout a Muslim army then besieging Constantinople. Its exact composition is unknown (the Byzantines, who used Greek fire to defend Constantinople from would-be invaders, both Muslims and Vikings, took care to keep the formula secret), but it is believed to have included sulphur, saltpetre, and naphtha.
760. Panel 4. This panel introduces Sir Gareth, a younger brother of Gawain, into Prince Valiant. Gareth was the youngest of Gawain’s full brothers (the others being Gaheris and Agravain), and so came to Arthur’s court later than they did. As Malory tells the story, Gareth arrived at court during the feast of Pentecost incognito, asking of Arthur three boons. The first boon was that he be allowed to remain at court for a full year, and supplied while there with food and drink; he would ask the other two boons of Arthur the following Pentecost. Arthur, while surprised at the nature of this request, placed Gareth in the keeping of Sir Kay. Kay, convinced from Gareth’s request that he must be of humble birth (had he been nobly born, Kay argued, Gareth would have surely asked for a horse and armor rather than a year’s supply of food and drink), made him eat with the servants and sleep in the kitchen, and since Gareth had not revealed his name to Arthur or his court, nicknamed him "Beaumains" (French for "Fair-hands") on account of his fine white hands.
Gareth spent a full year in Arthur’s kitchens, conducting himself meekly and making no complaint concerning Kay’s lodging him there. The following Pentecost, a damsel named Linet came to court to beseech Arthur for a knightly champion to rescue her sister Liones from her besieger, Sir Ironside the Red Knight of the Red Lands. Gareth now requested his remaining two boons from Arthur: that he be made Linet’s champion, and that Sir Lancelot knight him. Arthur granted both, but Linet was disgusted that a mere kitchen boy (she thought) take up her cause, and treated him with considerable verbal abuse during the journey to Liones’s castle. Instead of answering in kind, Gareth treated her with constant gentleness and courtesy until she finally came to repent of her scornful words towards him. Along the way, he defeated many robber-knights and either slew them or sent them to Arthur’s court; at last he defeated Sir Ironside in single combat, but spared him on the condition that Ironside yield himself up to King Arthur’s judgment likewise. His true identity was afterwards revealed, and Gareth married Liones and became a knight of the Round Table, while Linet married his older brother Gaheris.
Gareth was (in Malory) the noblest of Gawain’s brothers, and the only one who consistently refused to take part in his family's more ignoble acts (such as the murders of King Pellinore and Sir Lamorak) - indeed, he openly deplored them. He remained a close friend to Sir Lancelot, until the latter inadvertently slew him while rescuing Queen Guinevere from being burnt at the stake - a tragic act that led to Gawain’s bitter feud with the great French knight that was a crucial element in the wars that destroyed Arthur’s realm.
Sir Gareth’s description as "tall" is not an invention of Foster’s, incidentally, but an actual physical trait of Gareth’s in Malory, where he is described as being "higher than the other twain [his two attendants] by a foot and a half".
762. Panel 8. Foster errs in saying that Val and Gawain would have to go through "the land of the warlike Picts" before reaching Scotland; in the 5th century, the part of Britain that we now know as Scotland was the home of the Picts. (It became "Scotland" as a result of Irish settlers, also known as Scots, colonizing the Pictish regions between the 6th century and the 9th, to the point where they finally, by 843, secured control over all Scotland under Kenneth mac Alpin, officially the first King of Scotland.)
763. Panel 4. Castle Lothian is Foster’s invention, although its name appropriately echoes the fact that King Lot, Gawain’s father, was the ruler over Lothian as well as Orkney. In T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Lot and Morgause’s castle in Orkney, where much of the second part of White’s work, The Queen of Air and Darkness is set, was named Dunlothian; since "dun" is a Gaelic word for "fortress" or "castle", "Castle Lothian" would be a literal translation of this name into English. Since Foster’s portrayal of Morgause (see the annotation for Panel 6 below) was clearly influenced by White, it is possible that the name of Castle Lothian might have been derived from White’s work - but since Lot was King of Lothian in the medieval romances, this might also be a coincidence.
King Lot is mentioned in Prince Valiant for the first time here. In the medieval accounts of King Arthur’s story, Lot was king of both Lothian and Orkney. He married Arthur’s half-sister Morgause at the same time that Uther married Morgause’s mother Igraine, and was the father by her of Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris, and Gareth. Evidently one of the most important under-kings in Britain at that time (in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lot is even entrusted with the command of Uther Pendragon’s forces against the Saxons during Uther’s illness, although Malory did not include this detail in his Le Morte d’Arthur), Lot refused to acknowledge the young Arthur as his king, and led a rebellion of like-minded kings against him. Arthur defeated King Lot in two successive battles, at Caerleon and Bedegraine (on the latter occasion entering into an alliance with King Ban of Benwick, Lancelot’s father); during the latter battle, the lands of King Lot and his allies were invaded by the Saracens (in the Prose Merlin, Malory’s source for this event, the invaders are Saxons, historically far more plausible), forcing the rebellious kings to withdraw to their own realms to meet this threat. Lot apparently entered into an uneasy peace with Arthur until the latter unwittingly committed incest with Morgause; angered by this, King Lot went to war again, this time to avenge Arthur’s act of adultery. He formed an alliance with King Rions of North Wales and Ireland, but Merlin delayed Lot’s arrival on the field long enough for Arthur to face the two kings separately, defeating them both one at a time, rather than having to fight them together. In the final battle, Lot was slain by King Pellinore, and given a generous burial afterwards by Arthur at Camelot.
Geoffrey of Monmouth gives a dramatically different account of Lot’s activities during Arthur’s reign, with no trace of any hostile relations between the two kings. Here, Lot is a northern nobleman whose lands in Lothian were overrun by the Saxons, but recovered by Arthur and returned to him. Lot is also the nephew of King Sichelm of Norway, who upon his death, bequeaths his kingdom to Lot. However, the people of Norway reject Lot’s claim to the throne and choose a certain Riculf instead. Arthur promptly invades Norway on Lot’s behalf, defeats and slays Riculf, and places Lot upon the throne. Lot’s connection to Norway in Geoffrey is of particular interest from the perspective of Prince Valiant, in light of his son Gawain’s close friendship with Prince Valiant, who hails from Norway (though I doubt that this had any influence on Foster’s decision to make Val and Gawain best friends).
King Lot is evidently still alive in Prince Valiant at this point, judging from Val’s remarks about him later on during the Oswick adventure (see the commentary on #1145, Panel 8), but makes no on-stage appearance at Castle Lothian (or anywhere else in the strip). Nor does Foster make any explanation for his absence on this occasion.
Panel 6. Gawain’s other two full brothers, Agravain and Gaheris, appear in Prince Valiant for the first time, as does his mother Morgause.
In Malory and his predecessors, Agravain was a brave and effective knight, but also of a villainous disposition. He eagerly took part in the more disgraceful acts of Gawain’s family, such as murdering Sir Lamorak, and furthermore bore a strong hatred towards Lancelot that led to his deciding to expose the latter’s love affair with Queen Guinevere. In partnership with his half-brother Mordred, Agravain persuaded Arthur to let him set an ambush for the lovers while the king was away hunting, and recruited twelve knights to assist him in laying the trap. When Lancelot and Guinevere met in the Queen’s chambers during Arthur’s absence, Agravain and his confederates surprised them, intending to either slay Lancelot or take him alive to be delivered up to Arthur for trial; Lancelot, however, slew both Agravain and all of his followers, except for Mordred - though in so doing, he helped continue the chain of events that led to the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom.
Gaheris is perhaps the least distinctly characterized of Gawain’s brothers, in Malory veering between honor and dishonor. On the one hand, he participated eagerly in his family’s feud with King Pellinore and his lineage, and in particular murdered his mother Morgause for engaging in an affair with Sir Lamorak, Pellinore’s son. He even (in partnership with Agravain) killed a knight at Joyous Garde for merely saying that Lancelot was a greater knight than Gawain, for which both brothers were sharply rebuked by Sir Tristram, who would have slain them both had they not been of such close kin to King Arthur. On the other hand, Gaheris refused to assist Agravain and Mordred in their plot against Lancelot - though he, like Gareth, afterwards was accidentally slain by Lancelot during the Battle at the Stake, an act that led to the bitter feud between Gawain and Lancelot that laid low the Round Table. Foster’s portrayal of Gaheris as having slightly more nobility than the other plotters at Orkney - enough so that Gawain can entrust him with the mission of going to Thule to work out the details of the trade agreement with King Aguar - doubtless stems from this.
Morgause was one of the daughters of Igraine, King Arthur’s mother, by her first marriage to Duke Gorlois of Cornwall (the other two being Morgan le Fay and Elaine). After Uther married Igraine, he had Morgause married off to King Lot of Lothian and Orkney, by whom she was the mother of Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris, and Gareth. Shortly after Arthur was crowned King of Britain, Morgause visited him at Caerleon (Malory hints that King Lot sent her there to spy on Arthur, whom he was at war with at the time); the two were unaware that they were half-siblings and engaged in a brief amour, which produced Mordred. Morgause was shortly afterwards widowed when King Lot was slain in battle against Arthur, and remained for a long time (apparently) in her husband’s lands, until she came south during Gareth’s first quest to learn how he was faring. Not long afterwards, Morgause fell in love with Sir Lamorak, much to the disgust of her sons (partly because Lamorak was the son of King Pellinore, who had slain Lot in battle, partly because Morgause and Lamorak chose to consummate their relationship out of wedlock, without marrying). Gaheris burst in upon Morgause and Lamorak during one of their trysts and slew her on the spot, though sparing Lamorak on the grounds that he was unarmed at the time.
While the Morgause of Malory and his predecessors seems to have been imagined as reasonably decent (her faults apparently stemmed more from human weakness than from malignity), many modern-day works of Arthurian literature, especially T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, have portrayed her as a villainess, bent on Arthur’s destruction; she deliberately seduces him for the purpose of undoing him (aware all the while that she is committing incest), and trains Mordred to hate his father and plot his doom. White, in fact, bears most of the credit for this interpretation’s popularity, depicting her as thoroughly self-centered and callous (in her first on-stage appearance, she boils a cat alive so that she can use one of its bones in an invisibility spell, but loses interest in the project halfway through and throws the cat’s remains); his biographers have generally agreed that White modelled her upon his own equally selfish and uncaring mother, Constance. White’s Morgause ostensibly hates Arthur because of the wrongs that Uther committed against her parents, though whenever we get a close look at her, she shows no sign of that; she seduces him, not because of the Pendragon-Cornwall feud, but because Arthur is young and exciting, and she drums the details of Uther’s mistreatment of her family into her sons’ heads more to bind them to her and possess them than to encourage them to vengeance. Almost all interpretations of Morgause in Arthurian fiction since then, including Foster’s here, stem from White’s take upon her.
The description of Morgause as "believed to be a witch" is also most likely due to White's portrayal. While Malory and his predecessors make no mention of Morgause being a sorceress, T. H. White introduced the notion that she had studied magic, though on a much smaller level than Morgan le Fay, using it only for her amusement. (It is through her use of the black arts that she seduces Arthur.)
Mordred returns to the strip, and Foster again alludes to the incest that produced him in naming him "the half-brother", while not mentioning it directly.
764. Panel 3. Indeed, the Vikings, in actual history, developed a strong presence in Orkney (though not during the 5th century, of course). During the Viking Age, it was ruled by a series of powerful earls (whose line is said, according to legend, to have been founded by a certain Sigurd during the reign of King Harald Fairhair of Norway, in the 9th century). One of the most prominent of these earls was Thorfinn the Mighty, who reigned in the first half of the 11th century and is said to have been an ally of Macbeth (1040-1057).
765. Panel 3. Foster’s mention of Scandia here can be considered another continuity error in Prince Valiant. When the name "Scandia" first appeared in the strip, in #325, Panel 6, it was defined as being another name for Sweden. However, a ship travelling from Orkney to Norway (where Thule is located) would hardly be likely to pass along the Swedish coastline unless it was going far out of its way, and there is no indication of that here. Most likely, Foster was here using "Scandia" to refer to the Scandinavian peninsula as a whole, rather than merely that portion of it which we know today as Sweden.
768 - 769. Foster yet again makes Arn the narrator, even so far as this time (in a cheeky manner) temporarily changing the name of the strip on these two pages.
771. Panel 5. Unfortunately, Foster becomes so interested in the Boltar-Tillicum story that Boltar’s attack on the Sieur du Luc’s ship leads to that he does not say whether it indeed permanently destroyed the hopes of the trade agreement between Thule and Orkney, as Gaheris feared it would. Even more seriously, Adele is quickly forgotten, not re-entering the strip until # 1709. Foster’s readers had to wait eighteen years to find out if she recovered from her wound!
VOLUME EIGHTEEN: THE STOLEN RIVER.
775. Panel 7. The "Next Week" caption is a Biblical quote, coming from Isaiah 11:6.
791. Panel 4. During the medieval period, as hawking or falconry evolved into a complex sport, the notion developed that each variety of hawk was meant for a specific class of society (though long after the 5th century, of course). The Boke of St. Albans (published in 1486) contained such a list, stating that gyrfalcons were for kings, falcons for princes, peregrines for earls, merlins for ladies, goshawks for yeomen, sparrow-hawks for priests, and so on.
Val and his family do not quite follow this procedure in the story (though, to be fair to them, the Boke of St. Albans was not due to be written for over a thousand years after their lifetimes). Aleta correctly flies a merlin, but Val flies a gyrfalcon, even though he is only a prince and not a king yet and should use a falcon instead. Aguar, for his part, flies a golden eagle rather than a gyrfalcon.
794. Panel 4. Foster never depicted Aguar’s eagle bringing down a heron during his account of the hunt; we only learn about it now.
795. Panel 2. It was really more than three hundred years (see the annotation for #745, Panel 4).
796. Panel 3. Valeta’s name is an obvious blend of Val and Aleta’s names. The names "Karen" and "Valeta" for the twins came about through a contest held by King Features after their births; these winning names were submitted by a girl named Cindy Lou Hermann.
807. Panel 3. This parable of Jesus’s can be found in Matthew 7: 24-27 and Luke 6: 46-48.
811 - 816. This section is a retelling of Val’s stand at Andelkrag as a "space-filler" while Foster had gone off on a vacation, visiting Cornwall (and making good use of his visit for his story a year later about Val’s adventures in Cornwall helping King Arthur with a Saxon invasion). As is often the case in Prince Valiant, Val’s account of these past events does not always match the original account in the strip perfectly.
811. Panel 3. Val oversimplifies his account when he said that Aguar "grew restless in exile"; in the original story, Aguar was spurred on by Val’s inspiring speech to recover Thule from Sligon.
812. Panel 4. In the original story, the traveller who told Val about Andelkrag did not give him directions on how to get there (indeed, he dropped dead from the plague before he had the opportunity to do so), another of Foster's alterations.
813. Panel 4. Strangely,Val here makes no mention of his foiling the Huns’ scheme to burn down Andelkrag’s drawbridge.
VOLUME NINETEEN: DUEL IN IRELAND.
827. Panel 2. The Druids were Celtic, in fact, rather than Norse, another error on Foster’s part. They were a sort of priesthood found in Gaul, Britain, and Ireland before those lands were converted to Christianity, who served as teachers and judges as well. The Druids possessed great learning, but would hand it down only orally rather than via the written word; according to Julius Caesar (who wrote about them in his book on the conquest of Gaul), the Druids refused to write their knowledge down partly because they were afraid of the consequences of just anyone being able to learn their lore, partly because they believed that writing things down eroded one’s ability to memorize them. They also conducted human sacrifices, which did not endear them to either the Romans (who ruthlessly wiped out the British Druids in an attack upon their headquarters at Anglesey in A.D. 60) or the early Christians in that part of the world.
Panel 4. While an important figure in Norse mythology, Loki does not appear to have been an actual god in the sense of being worshipped (as Odin and Thor were). He was a trickster-figure, either one of the jotnar or giants that opposed the Aesir (the gods of Asgard), or at the least descended from them, and bearing much of their nature in him. Accepted into Asgard by Odin, Loki, a shrewd, amoral personage, was notorious for getting the gods into trouble by his actions, and frequently getting them out of trouble again (particularly when Odin and Thor threatened him with bodily harm if he did not act). He once cut off all the golden hair of Thor’s wife Sif, and then, to appease Thor, had the dwarves not only make fresh golden hair for her, but even a fine spear for Odin and a flying ship for Freyr. On another occasion, he helped the storm giant Thiassi kidnap Idun, the goddess who kept the apples of youth needed to preserve the Aesir’s vitality, but then (again, under pressure from the angry gods) rescued her. He accompanied both Odin and Thor on several of their adventures, sometimes helping them, sometimes hindering them.
As time went on, Loki’s bad qualities became more apparent. He mated with a frost giantess named Angurboda, upon whom he fathered three monstrous children: the Fenris-wolf, Jormungand the Midgard Serpent, and Hel, goddess of the dead. Even worse, he helped bring about the death of the god Balder through a set of particularly subtle machinations. In anger at this, the other gods captured Loki and chained him over three rocks with a serpent hanging over his head, dripping venom upon him. There he would remain until Ragnarok, the end of the world, when he would finally break free from his chains and take part in the great battle between the gods and their enemies that would make up a major part of that dreaded event. In that battle, Loki would face Heimdall, the guardian of the rainbow bridge Bifrost, and the two of them would slay each other.
Panel 7. The word "nectar" stems from Greek mythology rather than Norse; originally, nectar was the drink of the Olympian gods (and, along with their food ambrosia, closely linked to their immortality and divinity). However, the Norse gods had no unique beverage of their own, so Foster presumably had to settle for a borrowing from classical mythology.
828. Panel 1. Foster inaccurately uses the word "rune" here to mean a spoken spell rather than a carved letter. To be fair to him, he is in good company here; others have made similar mistakes. (And it was believed by the Norsemen that runes could be used to cast spells, which makes the confusion all the more understandable.)
Panel 3. Bifrost was the rainbow bridge connecting Midgard (the human world) to Asgard (the realm of the gods - or, more specifically, that tribe of gods known as the Aesir, which included Odin and Thor). It would be finally destroyed at Ragnarok, when it would break beneath the fire demons of Muspellheim under Surtur, as they invaded Asgard. It was said that the red hues of the rainbow were actual fire, to discourage the frost giants from setting foot upon it.
The Valkyries were minor goddesses, handmaidens of Odin who would visit battlefields and take the souls of slain heroes to Valhalla, to become the einherjar, warriors who would fight for Odin at Ragnarok.
Sol and Mani were the names of the drivers of the sun’s chariot and the moon’s chariot. They were constantly pursued by monstrous wolves, who at Ragnarok would finally catch up with them and devour them. (In his illustration, Foster apparently portrays Sol as male and Mani as female; in the actual Norse myths, it was the other way around.)
Foster’s illustration of Thor shows him going into battle against the frost giants in his famous goat-drawn chariot. Thor’s goats were named Tooth-gnasher and Gap-tooth, and seem to have had a touch of magic about them, appropriate for the animals of a god. In Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, it is recounted how once Thor and Loki stopped at the farm of a human farmer to spend the night; Thor provided supper by killing and cooking his goats, afterwards instructing his hosts to throw all the bones of the goats, whole and undamaged, upon their skins. In the morning, Thor waved his hammer over the goats, restoring them to life. Unfortunately, one of the goats arose lame in a hind leg; it turned out that the farmer’s son Thialfi had secretly broken open the goat’s thigh-bone to get at the marrow inside. Thor promptly took Thialfi and his sister Roskva into his service for the rest of their lives, as compensation for Thialfi’s act.
(Foster’s depiction of Thor fighting the giants, incidentally, is modelled on a painting by M. E. Winge, Thor and the Giants, painted around 1890.)
The use of the name "Woden" for Odin is inaccurate in this context; Woden was the Saxon name for Odin, not the Norse name. (It stands out all the more here because on the previous page - #827, Panel 4 - Foster had used the name "Odin" rather than "Woden".) The Druid’s vision depicts him here in his "aged wanderer" form rather than as the majestic ruler of the Aesir. If one looks closely, one can see Odin’s pet ravens, Hugin and Munin, perched on his shoulder; these two birds would each day travel throughout the world and report to Odin upon their return of all that they had seen.
829. Panel 3. Foster again engages in retrocon in having Merlin rationalize Morgan le Fay’s illusions (something that he never did in the actual story).
830. Panel 4. The statue of Woden (again, it ought to be "Odin") bears many of the familiar features of the ruler of the Aesir in Norse myth. Not only are Hugin and Munin perched on his shoulders (see the annotation for #828, Panel 3), but one can also see the figures of two wolves crouched beside him. These clearly must be Geri and Freki, Odin’s pet wolves, who sat by him during his feasts in Valhalla and to whom Odin gave all his food (contenting himself with mead alone). The statue also depicts Odin as having only one eye; he gave up one of his eyes for a drink from Mimir’s well, to gain the wisdom that it conferred, and could be always recognized thereafter by his missing eye.
Foster again inaccurately bestows the term "druid" upon a pagan priest of the Norse gods.
Panel 5. Val and Helgi’s discovery of the real reason why the food offered up to Odin disappears in the night may owe something to a story about the Biblical prophet Daniel in the Apocryphal book Bel and the Dragon. In it, the sacrifices of food offered up to the god Bel in his temple disappear during the night, and are seen by the pagans as proof of Bel’s divinity. Daniel, unconvinced, secretly scatters flour over the floor of the temple, and discovers footprints in it the following morning, made by the priests of Bel and their families who would secretly enter the temple after dark and eat the food.
There are obvious differences between the two stories (in Prince Valiant, the pagan priest of Odin is not directly responsible for the devouring of the offerings, and might not even have been aware of the rats and insects who were the real culprits), but the parallel is a clear one.
Panel 7. In Norse mythology, Asgard was the home of the Aesir, the leading clan of Norse gods, from which Odin and Thor came. (I write "the leading clan" because there was a second tribe of gods in Norse mythology, the Vanir, who came from Vanaheim. While the Aesir gods were primarily gods of warfare and storms, the Vanir were a gentler race who presided over fertility and peace. Their most famous members were Frey and Freya, who came to live in Asgard with their father Njord as part of a peace agreement between the Aesir and the Vanir.)
835. Panel 4. Again, Foster gives Odin’s name a variant more evocative of Germany than of Norway. (It is ironic that Torr, who accompanies Val on a mission to assist the spread of Christianity throughout Thule, is still a worshipper of the Norse gods.)
841. Panel 3. This is the first on-stage contact that Aleta has had with the Misty Isles since Val abducted her. Foster never presented a story revealing how she got back in touch with her subjects, which is a pity; a depiction of Aleta, in her usual "womanly common sense" fashion, calming down her people and assuaging their anger towards Val for carrying her off, would have been a delight to read.
842. Panel 7. Tintagel, first introduced into Prince Valiant as King Mark’s castle, is now one of Arthur’s strongholds, with no explanation as to how it passed from Mark’s hands to Arthur’s. (Apart from his conception being located there, Arthur is seldom portrayed as present at Tintagel in the medieval legends. One exception is a folktale about how Arthur, after being mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlann, was taken there where he died - and it does not appear in either Geoffrey of Monmouth or Malory, the leading primary sources for the Arthurian cycle. Arthur also visits Tintagel in the 13th century French romance Perlesvaus where he learns the details of his conception - see the annotation of #849, Panel 1 for those details - but does not remain there for long. The portrayal of Tintagel as a Cornish residence of Arthur’s is a mainly Victorian or modern one.)
844. Panel 3. Restormel Castle (to give it its proper spelling) is a real Cornish castle. The Restormel of history was built by a Norman lord named Baldwin Fitzturstin, and thereafter passed from hand to hand until, in 1299, it became the property of the Duchy of Cornwall.
846. Panel 2. Launceston Castle is also a real Cornish castle. The Launceston of history was built by Robert de Mortain in Norman times. During the English Civil War, it changed hands five times; it was also the site of imprisonment for George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends or Quakers, in 1656.
847. Panel 5. It is tempting to wonder whether Foster’s account of Arthur and the Cornish kings fighting the Saxons could have been loosely inspired by a Cornish folk-tale, which tells how King Arthur and seven Cornish kings defeated the Danes at the Battle of Vellandruchar and afterwards held a victory banquet at a rock named Table Men. Foster reduces the number of Cornish kings to five (properly four, since the king at Restormel was presumably slain by the Saxons), and there is no mention of either Vellandruchar or Table Men, but the core concept of Arthur and a group of Cornish kings together battling the Germanic or Scandinavian invaders (and Foster had periodically confused Saxons with Vikings) is strong enough to suggest that the folk-tale could have provided the germ for this adventure.
849. Panel 1. While Tintagel is best known for being King Arthur’s alleged birthplace, this is a relatively late concept, maybe going back to Victorian times. Most likely it resulted from confusion with its being the site of Arthur’s conception.
In the Arthurian legends, going back all the way to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Uther Pendragon fell in love with Igraine, the wife of Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, which led to a war between Uther and Gorlois. Gorlois shut Igraine up in Tintagel, while taking up a position in another castle (called Dimilioc in Geoffrey, the Castle Terrabil in Malory). Uther besieged Gorlois in his stronghold, but, making no progress, sent for Merlin. Merlin magically altered Uther’s appearance to make him appear to be Gorlois, thus allowing him free access to Tintagel and to Igraine, upon whom, in this disguise, he begat Arthur. The same night, Gorlois discovered Uther’s absence and decided to take advantage of it to attack Uther’s leaderless army outside his castle walls, only to be slain in the fighting, allowing Uther to marry Igraine afterwards.
Perhaps the notion of Arthur being born in Tintagel arose from confusion with the story of his conception there (there is no mention in either Geoffrey of Monmouth or Malory of Arthur actually being born in Tintagel), or out of a desire to keep Arthur’s connections with Tintagel without having to involve Uther’s adulterous desire and trickery, which the Victorians must have found embarrassing. (Tennyson went so far as to suggest that Arthur was not actually Uther and Igraine’s son, but a baby washed ashore at the foot of Tintagel on the night of Uther’s death, whom Merlin found there.) Foster never alluded to this story in Prince Valiant beyond mentioning Arthur’s birth at Tintagel; presumably the sordid affair would have been difficult to present in a family strip (which may also be why he made several veiled references to the incest of Arthur’s that produced Mordred, but never openly described it).
854. Panel 3. In the legendary history of Ireland, the Firbolgs were one of a series of invading races that competed with each other over the rule of this island. They were said to have been the descendants of a people that had been enslaved by the ancient Greeks, but who managed to escape and migrate to Ireland; one particular legend claims that the Greeks set them to work carrying clay in bags, hence their name "Firbolg", meaning "People of the Bag". They ruled over Ireland for a time, until they were conquered (and, in some versions of the legends, expelled) by the Tuatha de Danann (see the annotation for #856, Panel 2). Foster here interprets the Firbolgs as a slave-caste.
Panel 7. Rory McColm is Foster’s invention, but Cashel is a real place in Ireland. Its most prominent feature is the Rock of Cashel where the kings of Munster (one of the sub-kingdoms of Ireland) held sway from the 4th century to the 11th, and where Foster locates Rory McColm’s castle (indicating that he would be King of Munster as well as High King of Ireland). Around A.D. 450, St. Patrick came here to baptize the then-King of Munster, one Aengus; a great cathedral (built long after Patrick’s day, of course) stands atop the Rock to commemmorate his link with Cashel. (Patrick’s visit to Cashel in history or legend finds an echo in the subsequent events of the strip, as we shall shortly see.)
Despite Foster, Ireland had no true High King at this point; theoretically, the king who ruled at Tara had precedence over all the other Irish kings, but in practice, they all went their own way.
855. Panel 7. St. Patrick, the famous apostle to Ireland, is introduced here.
St. Patrick (whose name is indeed short for the Roman "Patricius", though, judging from his family background, this must have been a "birth-name" of his rather than a name bestowed upon him by the Pope) was of British birth and came from a well-to-do family in Roman Britain during the late 4th or early 5th century. His father, Calpornius, was an important land-owner near the village of Bannaventa Berniae (whose location is unknown, beyond the fact that it must have been somewhere in the west of Britain), and also a deacon; his (Patrick’s) grandfather, Potitus, was a priest (in that period of history, priests were not required to be celibate). When Patrick was almost sixteen, he was captured by Irish raiders, who took him back to Ireland as a slave and set him to work tending sheep. He spent the next six years of his life there until he escaped and boarded a ship going to Britain. Although he was thus reunited with his family, he did not remain with them for long; soon afterwards he began experiencing visions in which he was being called back to Ireland to preach the Gospel there. He became a priest and went to Ireland to teach the Irish (then mostly pagans) about Christianity.
The details of St. Patrick’s career are blurred by legends developed about him from centuries afterwards, such as driving all the snakes out of Ireland (in fact, there never were any snakes in Ireland, a fact that was recorded long before Patrick’s birth); fortunately, we have two writings of his, his Confessions (a sort of spiritual autobiography, written in his defense when the bishops of Britain tried to have him recalled) and a letter of rebuke that he wrote to a British chieftain named Coroticus, whose soldiers had carried off many converted Irish as slaves.
According to traditional chronology (though there is no first-hand evidence for it) St. Patrick returned to Ireland to begin his evangelism in 432 and died on March 17, 461 (hence the observation of St. Patrick’s Day on March 17). If these dates were indeed correct, then Val would be meeting Patrick towards the end of his life, since his encounter would have to be taking place a few years after the Vandal sack of Rome in 455 (though Foster never seems to have concerned himself with a chronology fully consistent with real history for Prince Valiant).
856. Panel 2. The De Danann (also known as the Tuatha de Danann) were another of the "ancient peoples" of Ireland in its legendary history. The Tuatha de Danann were a semi-divine race (apparently the gods of pre-Christian Ireland) famed for their beauty and might, who came to Ireland from four great cities, known as Finias, Falias, Gorias, and Murias. Under Nuada, their king, they overthrew the Firbolgs (see the annotation for #854, Panel 3 above) who were then dwelling in Ireland, only to be threatened in turn by the Fomorians, a race of monstrous demons. With the aid of the sun-god Lugh, the Tuatha finally defeated the Fomorians in an epic battle; not long afterwards, however, they were themselves defeated by the Milesians (the ancestors of the human inhabitants of Ireland), and retired to live in underground palaces within the Irish hills, dwindling into a race of faerie-folk. (Their dwindling may well be an echo of the demotion of the Tuatha de Danann from gods to faeries after the Irish became Christian.)
Panel 3. Patrick alludes to his youthful period of slavery in Ireland (see the annotation for #855, Panel 7, above), although he was enslaved for six years rather than seven.
858. Panel 3. It is tempting to see a hindsight prophecy in Patrick’s words here, for this indeed later on did happen in Irish history. During the reign of Henry II of England (1154-89), King Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster appealed to the English for help in defeating his enemies; several English barons, led by Richard de Clare (nicknamed "Strongbow"), responded to his plea, capturing Dublin in 1170. The following year, Henry II followed them there to secure control of Ireland for himself (assisted by a papal bull from Adrian IV, the only English-born Pope, which declared him Ireland's rightful overlord), beginning the long struggle between the English and Irish over Ireland.
Panel 7. Cashel is anachronistically depicted as a conventional medieval stone castle; at this stage in Irish history, chieftains’ fortresses - even those belonging to particularly powerful kings like Rory McColm - would have been built from wood.
859. Panel 1. Tara was the traditional "sacred center" of Ireland. It was here that the Ard Ri or "High King" customarily resided, and the home of the Lia Fail, a sacred stone which was said to reveal the rightful High King by screaming aloud when he set foot upon it. (Some legends claim that it was eventually transported to Scotland, where it became the Stone of Scone.)
Panel 2. Cormac mac Art was one of the leading kings of Irish legend. He was said to have ruled over Ireland in the 3rd century A.D. (two hundred years before the time of St. Patrick and Prince Valiant), and was famed for his wisdom and justice. (He displayed both traits even as a boy. According to legend, the then High King of Ireland, Lugaid mac Conn, confiscated a woman’s sheep for grazing in a field belonging to his wife. The young Cormac commented that a far more fitting decree would have been that the woman shear the sheep and give King Lugaid the wool, since both the wool and the grass in the field would grow back; the Irish recognized the rightness of this sentence, which led to Cormac eventually becoming High King in Lugaid’s place.) He was possessed of a magical goblet, given to him by the sea-god Manannan mac Lir, which would break asunder whenever three lies were told in its presence, and repair itself when three words of truth were spoken. It is even said that Cormac was posthumously baptized by St. Patrick so that he might enter Heaven.
There is no known direct link between Cormac and Cashel, but one of the actual landmarks atop the Rock of Cashel is Cormac’s Chapel (which was built between 1127 and 1134, long after the time of Prince Valiant and St. Patrick). Perhaps the name inspired Foster to link Cashel to the legendary Irish king.
861. Panel 2. "Scoti" (more accurately, "Scotti") was the term given to the Irish raiders on the western coasts of Britain in the 4th and 5th centuries, meaning "pirates". Eventually, it acquired a new meaning when, in the early 6th century, many of the Irish settled in Caledonia, setting in motion the events that would lead to its, by the middle of the 9th century, becoming Scotland.
865. Panel 4. St. Patrick is correct here. According to ancient Irish law, a king had to be free from blemish.
Two examples of this occur in the Irish myths. The first of these tells how Nuada, the ruler of the Tuatha de Danann, lost one hand in battle, and had to have an artificial hand made for him out of silver. However, the silver hand was considered a blemish, and so Nuada had to abdicate. He was replaced by one Bres, who proved to be a greedy and stingy monarch; so miserly was he that he gave inadequate hospitality to his guests, one of the most serious offenses in Irish society. One such guest, the bard Cairpre, was so angered at his reception that he magically cursed King Bres, whose face broke out in unsightly blotches; this, in turn, forced him to abdicate as well.
VOLUME TWENTY: THE PILGRIMAGE.
870. Panel 1. Foster here switched the "opening caption" of each week’s instalment from "Synopsis" to "Our Story", a permanent change that has lasted in Prince Valiant to this day.
Panel 4. Dozmary Pool is a real place on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, noted for its atmospheric quality. For more about its role in Arthurian folklore (a role which will be evoked in Val’s visit to it) see the entry on Panel 7, below.
Panel 7. This is one of only two mentions of the Lady of the Lake (who would remain an off-stage character on both occasions) in Prince Valiant. The Lady is well-known, of course, as the figure who gave Excalibur to King Arthur at the beginning of his reign (and who would, apparently, receive it back at the end).
It may surprise those who only know the Arthurian cycle from Malory and his successors that the Lady of the Lake's earliest recorded appearance gives her closer ties to Sir Lancelot than to either Arthur or Excalibur; she was introduced in the Prose Lancelot, where she was depicted as an enchantress who ruled over a beautiful city; to hide it from covetous eyes, she magically disguised it as a lake, hence her title. She adopted the infant Lancelot, and when he came of age, sent him to Arthur’s court; she also served as a sort of fairy godmother to him, watching over him many times. She even gave him a magic ring which rendered him immune to all hostile spells. The Prose Lancelot named her Vivienne, and also claimed that she was a former pupil of Merlin’s who afterwards used the magic that she had learned from him to forever imprison him.
The Suite de Merlin introduced the notion of the Lady of the Lake giving Arthur Excalibur, as did Malory, who followed it. Here, however, the Lady of the Lake in question appears to be a different figure from the one who raised Lancelot. When Arthur asked her for Excalibur, she agreed to give it to him if he would in turn do her a favor at some point in the future. Later on, she arrived at Arthur’s court to name the favor: Arthur was to put to death Sir Balin, one of his knights, whom she hated. Arthur, horrified by the bloodthirstiness of her request, refused, but Balin, overhearing the Lady’s request and already an enemy of hers, at once beheaded her. He explained afterwards to Arthur that the Lady of the Lake was an evil sorceress, who had brought about the death of his own mother, but Arthur, apparently remembering how the Lady had given him Excalibur, still had Balin banished from his court for a time, and gave her a decent burial. The Lady of the Lake’s role was afterwards taken up by Nimue (Malory’s version of Vivienne).
Modern-day adaptations of the Arthurian legend (from Tennyson onwards) have generally ignored both the Prose Lancelot’s interpretation of her domain as merely veiled by an illusion and Malory’s account of her death (under circumstances that would lead one to suspect that Balin spoke the truth in calling her evil), portraying her as a more ethereal, inherently magical being. Her lake becomes a literal one that she dwells in, as if she was a water-goddess. (At least, this is the case in the more fantastic versions. The "rationalized" versions have frequently followed the concept of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon in making the Lady of the Lake the head of a pagan Goddess religion still surviving, if just barely, in a Christian Britain.) Apparently this is the interpretation that Prince Valiant follows here, although it is hard to tell, particularly since the Lady of the Lake’s existence is never confirmed.
Merlin’s location of the Lady of the Lake in Dozmary Pool stems from a piece of Cornish folklore, which claims that Dozmary Pool was the body of water which Sir Bedivere threw Excalibur into following King Arthur’s final battle. (In fact, this "tradition" post-dates Tennyson; prior to his Idylls, Dozmary Pool was associated with the ghost of Jan Tregeagle, a corrupt 17th century Cornish lawyer, rather than with King Arthur.) Foster presumably decided that if Dozmary Pool was the place where Bedivere returned Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake, then it must have been where Arthur received his famous sword from her to begin with.
871. Panel 2. Once more, it appears that there is real magic in Prince Valiant’s world (a rarity this late in the strip); no rationalization is offered of the mysteries of Dozmary Pool.
Panel 5. The Lady of the Lake’s domain being the site of Nimue’s arrival is all the more appropriate since Nimue was often identified with the Lady of the Lake (see the entry for 870, Panel 7, above).
Panel 6. The story of Merlin and Nimue’s first meeting, while following the overall concept of the legend ("an old man hopelessly smitten with love for a young girl"), differs in its details from those of Malory’s account. In Malory, Nimue came to Arthur’s court during his wedding feast pursuing a white stag; her dog was stolen by a guest, and Nimue demanded of Arthur that he recover her dog, only to be abducted suddenly by a knight named Sir Hontzlake of Wentland. At Merlin’s advice, Arthur sent King Pellinore to rescue Nimue and Sir Tor (Pellinore’s illegitimate son) to rescue the dog; both quests were fulfilled. Merlin fell in love with Nimue in the aftermath, a love which would have fatal results for him.
872. Panel 5. Foster allows for the possible existence of further magic in Merlin departing without a trace.
881. Panel 4. Pierre, Gawain’s not-too-competent squire, is introduced here. Foster modelled his physical appearance after that of a European waiter whom he had met once.
882. Panels 4-5. No explanation is ever given for why Pierre chooses to accompany Gawain. Admiration for the famous knight? A desperate wish to get as far away from his former employers as possible (judging from their behavior in this episode, it would be hard to blame him), and seeing service with Gawain as a means of accomplishing this?
887. Panel 4. Samos is a real island in the Aegean Sea. Among its most noteworthy features were serving as the birthplace of Hera, queen of the gods, in Greek mythology, and as the homeland of the famous ancient mathematician and philosopher, Pythagoras.
888. Pane 6. Candia (now Iraklion) was one of the major cities and leading ports of Crete (and still is today). Its name here is another anachronism of Foster’s, for it stems from "Khandaq", the name given to it by the Arabs when they ruled over Crete in the 9th century. ("Khandaq" was corrupted to "Candia" by the Venetians, who purchased Crete in 1204 from the Crusaders following the Fourth Crusade.)
898. Panel 1. This is the last time in Prince Valiant that Foster turned the narrative voice over to Arn.
Panel 6. Avalon was the legendary isle to which King Arthur was taken for healing after his fatal wound at the Battle of Camlann. Geoffrey of Monmouth first mentions it in his History of the Kings of Britain, twice; the first time is when he mentions that Arthur’s sword Caliburn (better-known to us as Excalibur) was forged there, and the second time is when he reports that Arthur was taken away to Avalon after being seriously wounded in the final battle with Mordred. He says nothing more about it in that book, but in his Vita Merlini, he has Merlin recall taking Arthur to Avalon (a concept obviously not used in later versions of the legend, such as Malory’s, where Merlin has long since been imprisoned by Nimue by the end of Arthur’s reign), described here as a faerie island of great beauty, ruled over by Morgan (Morgan le Fay, here portrayed in a more benevolent role than that assigned to her in the more familiar account of Malory), who promises to heal Arthur if he remains with her for a long time. Wace says no more about Avalon in his Roman de Brut than Geoffrey did in his History of the Kings of Britain, but Layamon in his Brut briefly speaks of it as ruled over by the beautiful elf-queen Argante (a variant of Morgan le Fay?).
These descriptions of Avalon suggest it to be a magical fairyland, an earthly paradise that cannot be located on the map (and which would be pointless to look for). However, in 1190, an alternate interpretation of Avalon developed when the monks of Glastonbury reported discovering King Arthur’s grave on the grounds of their monastery, complete with an inscribed cross describing Arthur as buried in "the Isle of Avalon". This introduced a new theory about Avalon, that it was no enchanted isle but merely an old name for Glastonbury. (Glastonbury was originally an island, of a sort, having been surrounded by marshes in the early medieval period and before, and enjoyed enough of an otherworldly reputation that it could easily be identified with the legendary Avalon.) This also led to a new interpretation of Arthur’s fate, that he was not still alive, convalescing on Avalon, to someday return to Britain, but had died like anyone else, with Avalon being merely the place of his burial. It was this interpretation that both the unknown author of Mort Artu and Sir Thomas Malory would use in their descriptions of the great king’s end (although the author of Mort Artu leaves the site of Arthur’s burial geographically vague, unlike Malory, who specifically locates it at Glastonbury).
Nevertheless, the original notion of Avalon was preserved in Arthurian literature, and Tennyson in his "The Passing of Arthur" returns to this conception, when he has the wounded Arthur describe this enchanted isle to Bedivere as a place:
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea
("The Passing of Arthur", lines 428-31).
Other writers in more recent times have followed suit, though the more realistic school (that is, those who deal with the "original Arthur" of 5th and 6th century British history rather than the Arthur of medieval romance) do interpret it as either Glastonbury or some other earthly place where Arthur will die like any other man. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon portrayed Avalon as a sort of "alternate Glastonbury", dedicated to the pagan Goddess-worship at the center of her book; once it was the same as the Glastonbury of the mundane world but as that Glastonbury became dedicated to Christianity, Avalon increasingly receded from it, withdrawing entirely at last into another dimension. J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium of Middle-earth, while not dealing directly with the Arthurian cycle, also followed the interpretation of Avalon as a magical land not part of earthly geography, when Tolkien gave the name of "Avallone" to a port-city on the Elvish isle of Eressea in the Undying Lands.
It might be added that there are some theorists who, while identifying Avalon as a real place on the map, do not see it as being at Glastonbury. Geoffrey Ashe, for example, in his The Discovery of King Arthur, hypothesized that Avalon might originally have been the town of Avallon in Burgundy, a place not far from where Riothamus (his candidate for the original Arthur - see the annotation for #936, Panel 2) fought his final battle against the Visigoths, and that Riothamus could have retreated here after his defeat.
Arn is most likely simply using "Avalon" here in terms of its general reputation as a magical, romantic, far-off land. It is worth noting, however, that the other two distant places that he mentions, Carcassone and Cathay, are both real ones, solidly on the map, though still with a legendary aura about them. (Since Foster never reached the point in his strip where Arthur would fight his final battle and depart, he never had to deal with the question of how to interpret the great king’s fate, although he did identify Avalon with Glastonbury, or the region in which Glastonbury lies, a few years later, in #1193.)
For Carcassone, see the annotation for #267, Panel 5.
Cathay is a medieval name for China, with a particularly exotic flavor to it. However, its use is an anachronism here, since its name is derived from "Khitai", a Tatar kingdom founded in the 10th century, five hundred years after the time period of the strip. The name appears to have been introduced into Europe (or at least popularized) by Marco Polo in his famous account of his travels.
900. Panel 7. The imprisoned knight calling out to Val and Gawain in English is anachronistic; English as we know it did not yet exist then. (And if this knight was from Arthur’s kingdom, he would be speaking an early form of Welsh or a precursor to it rather than English, the language of the Saxons.)
902. Panel 1. Jerusalem was indeed part of the Eastern Roman Empire at this time. However, the "universal language" in this part of the world would have been Greek.
Panel 7. This anachronistically suggests Muslim custom, two hundred years before Islam existed.
909. Panel 4. Foster is alluding here to Gawain’s being the son of King Lot of Lothian and Orkney.
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