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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 TWENTY-ONE: PRISONER OF THE KHAN.

917. Panel 3. Foster’s description of a "Roman cohort" leading Jerusalem "to aid in a last feeble effort to save the Empire" is most likely a mere case of "grand sweep of history"-style drama without anything specific in mind. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that during the reign of Leo I (see the annotation for #936, Panel 2), who would be mentioned a few pages later as Emperor at Constantinople, there were some efforts (if unsuccessful) to protect the remains of the Western Roman Empire, in part thanks to the threat posed by the Vandals under Genseric. The most dramatic of these took place in 468, when Leo dispatched a fleet of considerable size and expense against Genseric. While the Roman fleet won a few early battles, Genseric finally defeated it through the use of fire ships. In the aftermath, the general in charge of the expedition, one Marcellinus, was murdered, and Leo’s enterprise came to an ignominious end. I doubt that Foster was referring to this particular event when he drew this panel (and the timing does not fit, coming at a point when Arn, who was born less than two years after the Vandal sack of Rome in 455, is somewhere between six and eight years old), but at least there is some historical basis for the cohort’s mission.

Mohammed would come "soon" only from the grand historical perspective; he was born around 570 (a little over a hundred years after the time of Val and Gawain’s pilgrimage), and would found Islam in the early 7th century A.D. (He and his fellow Arabs were not "conquered people" rising up against the rule of Rome, either; the Roman Empire had never conquered Arabia.) Under his successors, the Muslims would indeed "conquer as far as Spain", which they took over in 711 and would hold for several centuries. (The Christian Spaniards would eventually win Spain back from the Muslims, completing the process in 1492 when Grenada fell to Ferdinand and Isabella.)

The Seljuk Turks would arrive a few hundred years later, emerging from central Asia in the 11th century, and conquering Persia and Mesopotamia. In 1071, they would even defeat the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert, adding Asia Minor to their rule. (Their victories over the Byzantines would encourage the latter to send for help from the knights and nobles of western Europe, serving as one of the causes - or at least, catalysts - for the Crusades.)

925. Panel 1. Naxos is an island in the Aegean Sea, best known for being the place where Theseus abandoned Ariadne on his way home from Crete to Athens, after his victory over the Minotaur. (There she was found by Dionysus, the god of wine, and became his consort; some versions of the Theseus myth even claim or suggest that Theseus left Ariadne there due to pressure from Dionysus, who had already chosen her to be his bride.)

Mrs. Grundy originated as an off-stage character in a play by Tom Morton, Speed the Plough (which was published in 1798). She was referred to by the on-stage characters through the words "What will Mrs. Grundy say?", and from there developed into a symbol of the disapproval of the morally upright (or self-righteous).

932. Panel 4. Aleta’s changing the title of the elders to "senators" is another inconsistency; the Misty Isles were already portrayed as having a senate earlier, in #885, Panel 6.

933. Panel 2. The people of the Misty Isles (like the people of Tambelaine) are portrayed as worshipping many gods even though the Aegean should have been converted to Christianity by this time.

936. Panel 2. Emperor Leo I, or Leo the Great, was Emperor of Constantinople from 457 to 474. He assumed the throne through the agency of one Aspar, the commander of the Eastern Roman Empire’s forces, after the death of the previous Emperor, Marcian (450-57). While Aspar clearly hoped to serve as the power behind the throne in thus appointing Leo, the Emperor had other ideas, and in 471, had Aspar and his sons put to death - an act that earned him the nickname of "Butcher" in the historical writings of the period.

One particular piece of Leo’s statecraft, while not touched upon in Prince Valiant, is worth mentioning. After the office of Western Roman Emperor fell vacant, Leo I appointed one of his noblemen, a certain Anthemius, to the position. Anthemius, who ruled over the Western Roman Empire from 467 to 472, decided to embark upon a policy of dealing with the Visigoths in Gaul, and made an alliance with a British king named Riothamus to defeat them. Unfortunately, Riothamus was betrayed to the Visigoths by a traitorous Roman prefect named Arvandus and subsequently defeated. What marks this of interest is that the Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe has advanced the theory that Riothamus could have been a historical original for King Arthur, and especially served as an inspiration for Arthur’s overseas campaigning in Geoffrey of Monmouth (Ashe has stressed the fact that Arthur’s adversary in the Roman war, Lucius Hiberius, is portrayed as an official serving one Emperor Leo, who might have been the same as Leo I of Constantinople). Ashe’s theory is still only a speculation, and has not convinced many historians, but it is still worth mentioning as a potential connection between Leo I and King Arthur.

Panel 3. Foster anachronistically portrays the Greek soldiers in the not-yet-Byzantine army as hoplites more likely to have taken the field during the Persian or Peloponnesian Wars, rather than Roman soldiers of the 5th century A.D.

Panel 4. Foster’s portrayal of Vikings in the service of the Eastern Roman Empire is clearly based (anachronistically) on the Varangian Guard of actual history. This was an elite imperial bodyguard made up of Viking adventurers, that originated in the 10th century (five hundred years after the reign of Emperor Leo I). Its name was apparently derived from the Old Norse word var, meaning "pledge", referring to the vows that the Vikings took when they joined this Guard to fight together as a team. Being a member of the Varangian Guard was a great status symbol for the Vikings; one of its most famous members was Harald Hardraada, who would later on become King of Norway and invade England in 1066, only to be slain at the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

937. Panel 3. Foster makes no mention of the Vikings who had accompanied Aleta to the Misty Isles earlier and whom one would expect to be accompanying Val and Aleta back to Thule now, making Katwin’s recruitment activities in Constantinople unnecessary. Perhaps those Vikings had already left (either thanks to Dionseus’s law against foreign mercenaries, which had made it illegal for them to remain in Aleta’s service, or out of a simple desire to return home now that Aleta had safely arrived at the Misty Isles) - or, more likely, Foster had simply forgotten about them.

938. Panel 3. Note the question mark next to Foster’s label of "Misty Isles". Could this be a sign of the general uncertainty over their location upon their original introduction in the strip? (Though if foreign ambassadors and merchants are able to reach the Misty Isles, its location on the map cannot be that mysterious.)

941. The Patzinaks (also known as Patchenegs) were an actual nomadic people of Turkish descent found on the steppes of eastern Europe, although they are first recorded during the 9th century A.D., three hundred years after Val’s journey through this region. They invaded southern Russia in 969, and attacked Constantinople itself in 1090-91, though they failed to capture it. They were finally defeated by the Byzantine Emperor John II Comnenus in 1122, after which they disappear from history.

947. Panel 5. The Kazars (or Khazars) were an eastern European people, noted for their great trading skills, and for having converted to Judaism around 740 (a little under three hundred years after the time of the story).

956. Panel 1. Kiev was indeed one of the major cities of early Russia, although it was not founded until the 8th century; thus, its presence in Prince Valiant is yet another anachronism. Kiev was a center of Russian culture between the 9th and 13th centuries (it was sacked by the Golden Horde in 1240), and the early rulers of Russia (or Rus, as it was then known) resided here. Chief among these was Vladimir of Kiev in the late 10th century, who, among other things, was responsible for converting the Russians to Christianity - Eastern Orthodox Christianity, to be precise, due to his admiration of the Byzantine Empire and the splendors of Constantinople. (According to legend, Vladimir received missionaries from not only the Eastern Orthodox Church, but also Judaism, Islam, and the Catholic Church in the West. He rejected Judaism when he found that its dietary laws forbade the eating of pork, Islam when he learned that its tenets forbade the drinking of wine and other alcoholic beverages, and the Catholic Church because he had no desire to be subject to the Pope’s authority. Since the Eastern Orthodox Church did not require any of these, he chose to embrace it.)

VOLUME TWENTY-TWO: HOMEWARD BOUND.

960. Panel 3. Aurochs were a species of wild cattle (from which modern cattle may be descended), once inhabiting Europe, but now extinct; the last aurochs died in Poland in 1627, over a thousand years after Val’s adventures.

973. Panel 1. Foster, on holiday again, fills in during his absence with reprints of Val’s boyhood adventures (with some mild alterations to the original story, the more important of which will be mentioned below).

The anachronistic use of "England", absent from the strip for a long time, reappears.

976. Panel 3. Foster "revises history", having Ilene arrive at Camelot directly after Val’s being made Gawain’s squire rather than following the Northman war that Val was forbidden to attend and the "fake quest".

985. Panel 6. Gawain is alluding to Val’s ransoming him from Guy Haakon with his share of Boltar’s gold in #265-66.

990. Panel 4. Foster may have borrowed Garm’s name from that of Garm, the hound of Hel in Norse mythology. A Norse equivalent to Cerberus, Garm guarded the gates of the fortress of Hel, the goddess of the dead. He was only released at Ragnarok, where he slew and was slain by Tyr, the one-handed god of war.

Obviously Foster did not have the original Garm’s infernal nature in mind if this was indeed the source of the huntsman’s name, but he may very well have chosen it on account of the traditional postive qualities of dogs, such as loyalty and steadfastness, qualities displayed by Garm during his adventures with Arn.

996. Panel 6. Foster alludes to Val and Aleta’s previous visit to Earl Jon’s manor in #517 (which had inspired him to embark upon the very improvements that Aleta notices here).

998. Panel 4. Wotan is the Germanic form of Odin’s name, popularized by Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung opera cycle. Actual Vikings would have been more likely to use the Norse form of "Odin", however; Wotan would have been used in pre-Christian Germany, instead.

VOLUME TWENTY-THREE: THE KINGS OF CORNWALL.

1023. Panel 1. Pentecost (also known as Whitsunday) was one of the three great church festivals in medieval Christendom (the other two being Christmas and Easter), commemmorating the fiery tongues (a manifestation of the Holy Ghost) that came down upon the Apostles, which inspired them to speak to Jews visiting Jerusalem from all around the known world in their own languages and dialects (Acts 2); it falls seven weeks after Easter (thus taking place in May or June). It might seem odd that Pentecost should be portrayed as drawing near when Thule is still wintry and snow-laden, but one could always credit that to the Norwegian climate. (On the other hand, Foster appears to have been uncertain as to just when in the year Pentecost was supposed to take place - see the annotation for #1394, Panel 7 below.)

Pentecost was as important a day in the Arthurian calendar as it was in the medieval church calendar. According to Malory, each Pentecost, the knights of the Round Table were to assemble at Arthur’s court, to renew their vows and tell the king of the quests and adventures that they had undertaken in the past year. The Quest of the Holy Grail itself began at one of these Pentecost gatherings, when the Grail appeared before the assembled knights of the Round Table. This would certainly make Pentecost an appropriate time for King Arthur to hold a "great tournament".

1024. Panel 3. The quarrel between Gawain and Lancelot and the threat that it poses to the Round Table (see #318, Panel 7) returns to Prince Valiant, but this time comes more to the fore, with Val needing to take an active role in quenching it.

1025. Panel 1. Merlin is still present at Camelot, seated beside Arthur, though he will not be there much longer.

Panel 3. It is tempting to see the identity of the rival captains in the melee as a link to the quarrel between Gawain and Lancelot that Val must help defuse in this story, since Mordred isGawain’s half-brother (and Gawain is shown here as one of the knights gathered close to Mordred).

1027. Panel 2. The name "William Vernon" sounds more appropriate for a knight during the High Middle Ages rather than the 5th century. For one thing, the name "William" is French in origin, spreading to England as a result of the Norman Conquest which introduced French names into the English population (and which was carried out by one such William, in fact). Also, he bears a surname, a concept more likely to be found in England during the High Middle Ages and thereafter than in post-Roman Britain (although those Britons that had adopted Roman ways would have most likely borne both personal and family names). In fact, surnames barely appear in the Arthurian romances, except in the most early of forms, such as "Pendragon" for Uther and Arthur (more a nickname or title on its way to becoming a surname) or "de Galis" for the sons of King Pellinore. But the anachronism, again, is no worse than jousting knights in post-Roman Britain.

Lydney, William’s home town, is a small town in southeastern Wales, at one point held sacred to the Celtic god Nodens (a British version of Nuada of the Silver Hand). It fits in well with the location of events to come in his story, being not far from Berkeley (though Lydney would not be mentioned again in the strip after this panel).

Panel 3. This is the only time in Prince Valiant that King Pellinore is mentioned. In Malory, Pellinore was one of the most prominent knights in Britain during Arthur’s youth. He spent much of his time in pursuit of the mysterious Questing Beast, a bizarre animal with the head of a serpent, the body of a leopard, the hindquarters and tail of a lion, and the feet of a hart, which made a noise like sixty hounds all barking from its stomach wherever it went (except when it stopped to drink from a stream). Pellinore first met Arthur while the latter was still young and newly-come to the throne; Arthur had gone hunting in the forest, become separated from his companions, and seen the Questing Beast briefly. Pellinore came by shortly afterwards, asked Arthur if he had seen the Beast, and upon learning that he had, continued off in pursuit of it; Arthur wished to take part in the hunt himself, but Pellinore refused, saying that the Beast was his quarry alone.

Not long afterwards, Pellinore apparently decided to call off his pursuit of the Questing Beast and settled down by a fountain, challenging any knight who passed by to single combat. After one such knight, Sir Miles, was slain by Pellinore in the encounter, Miles’s squire went to Arthur to petition him for redress. Arthur went to battle against Pellinore, only to break the sword that he had drawn from the stone and anvil fighting against him, and only Merlin’s quick intervention saved his life. Later, Pellinore made peace with Arthur (Malory does not report how it happened, unfortunately), and fought on his side when the latter was at war with King Lot of Lothian and Orkney. Pellinore slew Lot himself in battle; however, Gawain vowed to avenge his father’s death, and did so by slaying Pellinore ten years later.

During his time in Arthur’s service, Pellinore was one of the leading knights of the Round Table (in Malory, Merlin even advised Arthur to seat him close by the Siege Perilous - which angered Gawain all the more); he was also the father of Lamorak, Percival, Aglovale, Dornar, and Tor, all of whom became knights of the Round Table. Of these five sons, only Percival was ever mentioned in Prince Valiant, though Lamorak’s name was presumably the inspiration for that of King Lamorack.

Pellinore has become all the more familiar to Arthurian devotees thanks to his prominent role in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, primarily its first two books, The Sword in the Stone and The Queen of Air and Darkness. White portrayed Pellinore in an affectionately comedic manner, focusing on his eternal hunt for the Questing Beast, a task which Pellinore dislikes because of the physical discomforts involved, but must undertake because it is a family tradition. (At one point in The Sword in the Stone, Pellinore temporarily abandons his quest to stay in the castle of Sir Grummore Grummorson after his inept duel with the latter - see the annotation to # 276; however, the Questing Beast, upset about the fact that he is no longer hunting it, loses the will to live and begins pining away. Fortunately, Pellinore comes upon it while out on a boar hunt, takes it to Sir Ector’s castle where he can nurse it back to full health, and resumes the chase once it is restored.) In The Queen of Air and Darkness, Pellinore falls in love with a Flemish princess; she is middle-aged and plain, but she was the first person whom he had ever met who truly understood him, which is what matters to him. After they marry, Pellinore retires from hunting the Questing Beast, passing the duty on to Sir Palomides the Saracen. (Needless to say, there is no mention of the Questing Beast anywhere in Prince Valiant.)

1030. Panel 6. In light of its geographical location, Berkeley Hall is most likely intended as a 5th century precursor of Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire. Berkeley Castle is particularly infamous for being the site of the murder of King Edward II (1307-27) on September 21, 1327.

1031. Panel 2. Like William, Gwendolyn and her father bear an (anachronistic) surname, derived from the name of their home (an actual source of many surnames). Gwendolyn’s father, awkwardly enough, is known only as "Sir Berkeley" throughout his appearance in Prince Valiant, with no indication of a Christian name.

1039. Panel 3. There is no evidence that the headland of Tintagel was ever used as a stronghold by either the pre-Roman Britons, the Romans or the Saxons. Archeological studies have discovered that Tintagel was inhabited in the 5th and 6th centuries; at first, it was thought that the settlement there was a monastery, but later investigations have suggested that it was a princely stronghold instead. It was re-occupied in the 12th century, when Earl Reginald of Cornwall built a castle there, although the present remains date from the 13th century, when Tintagel was owned by Prince Richard, the younger brother of Henry III (1216-72).

Panel 4. Cornwall, ruled over by five kings at the time of Val’s previous visit there, now has been whittled down to only three, without a word of explanation. (It would still have three kings during Val’s later visit on the eve of the Battle of Badon, though a different royal trio this time.) Most likely this is another case of Foster’s tendency towards minor inconsistencies in his work.

1040. Panel 5. Although Val chafes at Alfred’s choice of disguise, the notion of a knightly hero going undercover as a pilgrim or palmer is a respectable one. One familiar example is that of Wilfred of Ivanhoe in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, who returns from the Holy Land in palmer’s guise. Another can be found in some of the tales of Robin Hood, where King Richard the Lion-hearted, having returned from the Third Crusade, visits the famous outlaw disguised as a pilgrim.

Panel 7. A side-note: the cross on Val’s shield is a Celtic cross. Given the fact that Val’s adventure in his palmer disguise is set in Cornwall, one of the chief "Celtic" regions of Britain, this blazon is appropriate.

1043. Panel 7. Restormel has evidently returned to Cornish hands after the Cornish campaign (though the king there would have to have been a new one, since the original one had been killed by the Saxons in #845).

1044. Panel 3. The mention of a "canting friar" is, once again, anachronistic for the 5th century.

Panel 4. The proud-faced warrior is forgotten immediately after this panel, and "the bullfrog" thereafter appears to be the sole leader of the war band.

1050. Panel 4. "Quintus" is the Latin word for "five", but there is no explanation for why Val (or Foster) should have chosen this particular alias, or whether its meaning is at all significant.

VOLUME TWENTY-FOUR: THE RED STALLION.

1052. Panel 3. Foster reuses the art from #1048, Panel 3.

1061. Panel 4. Foster clearly repeated himself in the Och Synwyn story, reusing elements from the story of King Tourien: a cruel, power-hungry, and mad but crafty Cornish king plots to overthrow Arthur, Prince Valiant learns of his scheme and infiltrates his court, becoming the king’s right-hand man, and then proceeds to use this position to bring about the king’s downfall before he can attack Camelot, but feels guilt-ridden afterwards about the methods that he used. Here, however, Val’s guilt plays a larger role than it did in the Tourien affair, to the point where it needs a full resolution at Camelot.

1062. Panel 3. Sir Beaumains’ name is borrowed from the story of Sir Gareth (see the annotation for #760, Panel 4, above). Since the Beaumains depicted here bears no similarity to Gareth as portrayed elsewhere in Prince Valiant, Foster must have been simply engaged in reusing names from the Arthurian legend for his invented characters again.

Panel 7. Prince Valiant comes to Stonehenge, one of the most famous landmarks in Britain. Nobody knows for certain whether Stonehenge was a temple, as Foster describes it here, or formed for some other purpose (such as calculating eclipses, as Dr. Gerald Hawkins has proposed).

Foster makes no mention of the role that Stonehenge plays in Arthurian legend through Geoffrey of Monmouth. In Geoffrey’s History of the Kings of Britain, Vortigern and a group of British nobles met with Hengist and his Saxon followers in a parley either at, or close to, the spot where Stonehenge now stands. However, Hengist had plotted treachery, and at his signal, the Saxons drew concealed daggers from their persons and stabbed the Britons to death. The only survivors among the Britons were Vortigern (whom Hengist took alive, to be used for bargaining purposes) and Count Eldol of Gloucester (who fought his way out with a large wooden cudgel).

After Aurelius Ambrosius became King of Britain, he wished to raise a memorial to the murdered Britons, but none of his engineers could think of anything grand enough for the purpose. At last Ambrosius sent for Merlin, who advsed him to fetch a ring of stones known as the Giants’ Dance from Ireland. These stones, which were raised by a tribe of giants from Africa, had miraculous abilities, such as being able to heal the sick. While Ambrosius was initially sceptical, he at last agreed to Merlin’s advice and sent his brother Uther to Ireland with an army to capture the stones and bring them back to Britain. While Uther succeeded in defeating the Irish when they sought to prevent the Britons from taking the Giants’ Dance, he and his engineers were unable to dislodge any of the stones from their positions. At last Merlin, who had accompanied Uther’s expedition, stepped in, by constructing his own machines which removed the Giants’ Dance from their old place and were able to set them up anew at the site of the massacre on Salisbury Plain, where they became Stonehenge. (While Geoffrey makes this feat of Merlin simply a product of good mechanical skills, later legends amplify this into an act of outright magic.) Not only did they serve as a suitably awe-inspiring monument to the murdered British nobles, but after their deaths, both Ambrosius and Uther were buried here.

It is now certain, of course, that Stonehenge was raised long before the 5th century (when Ambrosius, Uther, and Merlin supposedly lived), though the fact that some of the stones comprising this site came from the Prescelly Mountains in southwestern Wales has led some scholars to believe that the notion of Stonehenge coming from Ireland could be a distorted memory of the removal of the stones in question from the Prescelly Mountains. Not surprisingly, Foster makes no mention of Merlin’s feat in bringing Stonehenge from Ireland to Britain, an act too much at odds with real history to be included. (He makes no mention of Ambrosius or Uther being buried here, either, though the Murphys alluded to Stonehenge being Uther’s final resting place in a strip published in 1981, outside the range of this work.)

1063. Panel 2. As Foster would later on admit in #1192, Panel 3, Stonehenge actually predated the Druids.

1064. Panel 8. Arthur’s description of a meeting of the knights of the Round Table as a "siege" may be inspired by the individual seats at the famous table as "sieges", such as the Siege Perilous. I have never encountered the word "siege" in this sense outside of Prince Valiant; presumably its use here was Foster’s invention.

1065. Panel 4. Note that the Round Table, as depicted here and in the scenes on both this page and the next, is not only solid all the way through, but also appears too small to seat a hundred knights; this is another example of Foster’s inconsistency in the size and appearance of the famous table.

1070. Panel 7. Foster’s tale of how Val tamed Arvak and won him for a loyal companion for the rest of their lives is his adaptation of a recurring theme in hero-tales of the ancient and medieval world: how the hero wins his great horse. The best-known of these is the story of Alexander the Great and Bucephalus (see the commentary on #1973, Panel 3, for further information).

1074. Panel 7. Val is almost correct here (and being Norse himself, he ought to know this); in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, Arvak was one of the two horses who drew the sun’s chariot. The other horse was named Alsvith; much later on in the strip, Val would bestow this name upon Arn’s horse, to provide a match. These horses were also mentioned in Stanza 38 of the Grimnismal in the Poetic Edda.

1075. Panel 7. Halgar’s title as "chieftain of the East Saxons" is the first sign in Prince Valiant that the Saxons making permanent settlements in Britain instead of being merely overseas raiders that are always driven back across the sea by Arthur and his knights shortly after landing. This is brought home all the more by the statement in #1076, Panel 4, that he "rules a large district", as well as by the fact that his interaction with King Arthur takes the form, not of outright war, but rather of a state visit to Camelot, for the purpose of undergoing negotiations with the king.

1076. Panel 8. Foster again inaccurately calls Essex "East Saxony" (see the annotation for #484, Panel 7).

1081. Panel 7. Foster’s drawing here of Aleta and Katwin is reused from #936, Panel 7.

1083. Panel 4. Karen and Valeta now display their distinct character traits for the first time.

1087. Panel 3. This scene involving Arn and Frytha evokes the scene in The Medieval Castle where Arn gives Melisande his favorite knife (though Frytha is a different kind of pest than Melisande was). Foster repeated himself several times in Prince Valiant, but this is one of the few occasions that he recycled a story idea from the 1940’s companion strip.

1091. Panel 5. Bergen is in the southwest of Norway. It was not actually founded until 1070, making its mention another of the strip’s anachronisms.

VOLUME TWENTY-FIVE: THE CURSE.

1098. Panel 4. Fabious Felix’s cry of "Thank Jupiter" indicates that he is a worshipper of the Roman gods rather than a Christian. This would be just possible for the leader of an isolated Roman outpost cut off from the Empire since the 4th century A.D. (while Christianity was gaining the upper hand at that point, thanks to Constantine the Great legalizing it via the Edict of Milan in 313, it had not completely wiped out paganism; there was even a brief attempt by Julian the Apostate (361-363) to revive the worship of the old gods, though a failed one). Of course, such a remark might be reading too much into Fabious’s words; Val is described in Prince Valiant as a Christian knight, yet has on occasion sworn by Zeus and other pagan gods.

Panel 5. Foster’s depiction of Fabious’s household illustrates effectively how this outpost’s isolation has doomed it. Not only are most of its members elderly, but the one child depicted in the group is apparently deformed from inbreeding. This remote Roman settlement’s days are irrevocably numbered.

1099. Panel 1. Scandinavia was never part of the Roman Empire, of course, but there is some small evidence that the Romans traded with the people in those parts. The outpost is clearly Foster’s invention, though.

Panel 2. Since we know from the historical events that Prince Valiant is set against (the death of Attila the Hun, the Vandal sack of Rome, etc.) that Val’s adventures take place in the mid-5th century A.D., this means in turn that the Roman outpost must have been cut off in the middle of the 4th century A.D.

1106. Panel 5. It is worth pointing out here that Aleta had been absent from King Arthur’s court for a very long while at this point; the last time that she had been in Camelot was in #661, almost nine years before in real time! Val’s three most recent visits to Camelot had been without his family. During the first of these (the brief visit on his way back from his mission to Rome), Aleta was still in Thule. During the second (where Val participated in the Saxon war in Cornwall and underwent his diplomatic mission to Ireland), Aleta was on her way to the Misty Isles. During the third (the occasion of Val’s foiling Och-Synwyn’s plans of conquest and gaining Arvak), Aleta was again residing in Thule. Her journey from Thule to the Misty Isles and back had bypassed Britain entirely both ways. She had had a very long absence from Camelot indeed.

1109. Panel 7. Gundar Harl and Sigrid must have tied the knot, albeit offstage.

1111. Panel 1. Foster here repeats his drawing of Arn and Frytha from #1110, Panel 3.

1114. Panel 6. When Foster writes here that Camelot is "so soon to vanish utterly", he must have meant "so soon" in the sense of the grand sweep of history, for Arthur’s kingdom was not due to come to an end any time soon in the strip. In fact, at this time of writing, Camelot (though having suffered many vicissitudes) is still thriving in Prince Valiant.

1116. Panel 2. This marks Alfred’s last appearance in Prince Valiant until his cameo before the gates of Atheldag in #1844.

Panel 3. Edwin’s name is Anglo-Saxon in origin, which fits the anachronistic tone of King Arthur’s court well enough, but seems out of place for a Briton taking part in a war against the Saxons. The most famous bearer of that name was King Edwin of Northumbria in the early 7th century, who was converted to Christianity by St. Paulinus (assisted by the famous story, as narrated by Bede, of the sparrow flying through the hall).

1117. Panel 1. King Arthur’s mention of "the Danes and Saxons" suggests a blending by Foster between the Saxon invasion of Britain in the 5th century, and the Viking raids on England (mainly carried out by the Danes) in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Arthur’s mention that many of the Saxons in Kent and Sussex have settled down in a reasonably peaceful manner is another admission (like Halgar’s presence some pages earlier) that a permanent Saxon presence in Britain, to eventually become "Anglo-Saxon England", has begun; the Saxons are no longer merely overseas raiders, as they had been in the early days of the strip.

1118. Panel 5. The "shield-wall" was one of the best-known military formations of the Saxons and Vikings. Perhaps the most famous occasion on which this tactic was used was at the Battle of Hastings, where Harold Godwinson’s army adopted it against William the Conqueror’s Norman knights; it proved successful until the Saxons made the mistake of abandoning their position to pursue the retreating Normans, and were thus easily cut down.

1123. Panels 3-4. Val’s horror over the bloodshed that he has wrought with the Singing Sword and guilt-ridden address to it may be more influence from Lord Dunsany. In Dunsany’s "The Sword of Welleran", a young man named Rold takes up the sword of the long-dead hero Welleran to defend his city from its enemies, and defeats them. Afterwards, however, horrified at the carnage on the battlefield, Rold cries, "O sword, sword! How horrible thou art! Thou art a terrible thing to have come among men. How many eyes shall look upon gardens no more because of thee? How many fields must go empty that might have been fair with cottages, white cottages with children about them? How many valleys must go desolate that might have nursed warm hamlets, because thou hast slain long since the men that might have built them?... O sword! sword! why did the gods send thee among men?" (The Sword of Welleran, p. 27-28).

Panel 5. There is a parallel here with Malory and Tennyson’s accounts of Sir Bedivere’s return of Excalibur to the lake. Val’s swinging the sword three times before throwing it echoes the arm clad in samite’s brandishing Excalibur three times before sinking into the watery depths; added onto this is the poetic, almost magical imagery contained in Foster’s description, such as how the Singing Sword "arch[es] over the sea in a glittery rainbow" and disappears "into the green depths". (And Horrit had already stated earlier that the Singing Sword was a twin to Excalibur.)

Foster still makes this scene (assuming that he did have the passing of Excalibur in mind, consciously or unconsciously, when he composed it) different from the departure of King Arthur’s famous sword. Val throws the Singing Sword away out of horror over the carnage that he has wrought with it, rather than as a means of returning it to the place where it came (the reason for Bedivere’s throwing Excalibur into the lake as Arthur commanded him) when its work is done. Furthermore, he recovers it only a couple of pages later, rather than parting with it forever.

1127. Panel 3. The arrival of the Danes outside London echoes a few historical attacks by the Danes in Anglo-Saxon times upon that city. London Bridge (which here serves as a barrier to them) even featured in an assault carried out in 1010 by Olaf Haraldsson (who later on became King of Norway, converted to Christianity, and is remembered as St. Olaf); recognizing the formidable barrier that the bridge posed to his fleet, Olaf had his men pull it down with grappling hooks. This stratagem is thought to have given rise to the famous nursery rhyme "London Bridge is Falling Down".

1131. Panel 6. The White Tower is the central keep of the Tower of London, built by William the Conqueror as a place from which to securely hold London following the Norman Conquest.

1134. Panel 7. Guinevere’s childlessness was another of her canonical traits, found in the medieval pseudo-chronicles and romances. Wace in his Roman de Brut stated it best of all, perhaps, when he said of Arthur and Guinevere’s marriage: "never had they a child together, nor betwixt them might get an heir" (Arthurian Chronicles, p. 54). Arthur had a few sons in the medieval accounts, but generally illegitimate ones (and, with the exception of Mordred, all but ignored by the storytellers); Guinevere remains barren, and while, in light of her notorious amour with Lancelot, this might have been a blessing in disguise, it apparently helps ensure the permanent ending of Camelot and the Round Table with Arthur’s passing, since he has no legitimate son to succeed him. (In both the pseudo-chronicle tradition and Malory, his heir is Constantine of Cornwall, who is only very remotely related to Arthur, if at all.)

(There is one exception to this rule, in the eccentric French romance Perlesvaus or The High History of the Holy Grail. In it, Arthur and Guinevere have a son named Loholt; this same Loholt is mentioned in other medieval works, but is portrayed in them as an illegitimate son of Arthur’s, begotten before he first met Guinevere. Loholt is a promising young knight, but unfortunately attracts the jealousy of Sir Kay, who promptly murders him. Guinevere is so grief-stricken over her son’s death to pine away and die herself, forming a particularly noteworthy deviation from the traditional story. However, the notion apparently never appealed to other romancers, and thus Guinevere remains without issue in all other versions of the Arthurian cycle.)

The caption for "Next Week" is a humorous allusion to the Order of the Bath, an English order of knighthood founded by King George I of England (1714-27) in 1725. (George thought that he was reviving a medieval order of knighthood, reputedly established by Henry IV (1399-1413), due to a misinterpretation on his part of the custom of would-be knights taking formal baths before the knighting ceremony.)

1137. Panel 4. Presumably this mission of Gawain’s was one of the "other duties" that the various leading knights of the Round Table (apart from Prince Valiant) were busy with on the eve of the Saxon war in #1116, Panel 1.

Panel 7. Caerwent was the regional capital of southeastern Wales under Roman rule, then known as Venta Silurum (named after the Silures, a British tribe in that part of Wales).

It would have to be, in fact, more than "two decades" since the Roman departure of Britain. Traditionally, Roman rule in Britain ended in A.D. 410 (although many historians now believe that it may have lingered on longer than that); Foster had earlier chosen the year 412 to mark the point when the Romans departed from Britain for good. Val’s adventures have earlier involved such events unmistakably dated to the early 450’s such as the death of Attila the Hun, the assassinations of Aetius and Valentinian III, and the Vandal sack of Rome, meaning that it would have to be at least four decades rather than two since the Romans went away. (Since Arn was born over a year after the Vandal sack of Rome and is apparently around ten years old by this time in Prince Valiant, it would most likely be five decades.)

1138. Panel 3. In contrast to its depiction in #87-89 as a splendid court of Arthur’s, Caerleon is now portrayed as a decaying Roman fortress, contradicting the earlier events in the strip but fitting Foster’s gradual shift to the portrayal of an Arthurian Britain that owes as much to the real history of the 5th century as to medieval romance.

Val’s surprise at the impressive nature of the Roman fortifications of Caerleon clashes with his earlier visit to it during King Arthur’s tournament there; apparently Foster had forgotten about Val’s first visit to Caerleon by this time.

Panel 5. The Roman amphitheatre at Caerleon is an actual landmark, one of the most noteworthy features there. It is thought to have been built for the soldiers stationed at Caerleon (members of the Second Augustan Legion) around A.D. 90. After the Romans left, the amphitheatre was overgrown with grass, and came to be at some point nicknamed "King Arthur’s Round Table", presumably influenced by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s location of Arthur’s chief court at Caerleon. Its true nature was rediscovered when Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated it in 1926-27, a little over thirty years before Foster wrote and drew the scenes of Val’s visit to it.

1141. Panel 1. Foster here gives an account of Merlin’s parentage and birth based on that of Robert de Boron in his verse romance Merlin. In the pseudo-chronicles, Merlin was merely the son of an incubus or spirit of the air that had seduced the daughter of the King of Demetia (southwestern Wales), with little further detail. De Boron, however, altered this story to provide a more dramatic account of Merlin’s origins, one which also cemented him more firmly in a Christian framework.

According to de Boron, the Devil and his fellow demons were angered when Jesus Christ descended into Hell following the Crucifixion to free the various patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament from captivity there and take them with him to Heaven (an event not mentioned in the Bible, but found in later legends as the Harrowing of Hell). Wishing to counter their losses, they decided to send a demon to father a child upon a virtuous and devout maiden, thereby producing a false prophet who could win even more humans over to Satan’s rule. The demon partly succeeded in his task, in that he did beget a son upon this same virgin at a moment when, while distracted, she forgot to say her prayers before going to bed; however, she realized afterwards what had happened to her, and had her confessor, a priest named Blaise, baptize her son as soon as he was born. Because of his baptism, Merlin inherited only the powers of his demonic father, but not his evil nature; in addition, God bestowed upon him the gift of prophecy. (Blaise afterwards retired to the forests of Northumberland, where he wrote an account of Merlin’s life and prophecies; Merlin periodically visited him there to keep him updated as to his latest activities so that Blaise could continue to record them.)

Malory was presumably aware of this story; he did not describe it in Le Morte d’Arthur, but briefly alluded to it in his account of how Sir Uwaine prevented Morgan le Fay from murdering King Uriens (cf. the annotation to #58, Panel 3). Malory’s Uwaine cries out in horror at his mother, "men said that Merlin was begotten of a fiend [demon], but I may say an earthly fiend bore me".

Panel 3. The "Second Sight" is a term, primarily found in Scotland, used to describe the gift of foreseeing the future - one of Merlin’s most prominent abilities in legend.

Merlin actually did reveal the future to humans many times in the Arthurian legends, contrary to his statement here (for that matter, the very advice that Merlin gives Val here contradicts his claim that he was not permitted to impart such knowledge). However, on one occasion in Geoffrey of Monmouth, he did refuse to speak a prophesy, when he was first brought before Aurelius Ambrosius, Uther Pendragon’s older brother and King Arthur’s uncle. Ambrosius, in a light-hearted mood, bade Merlin utter some predictions of the future for him; Merlin would not do so, however, saying that if he were to use his gift so frivolously, merely to entertain the king and his court, he would have it taken away from him. Chastened, Ambrosius withdrew his request.

Merlin’s ability to so accurately predict what Val must do to rescue Gawain gives him once more, in his last on-stage appearance in Prince Valiant during Foster’s run, genuine magical powers rather than scientific knowledge disguised as magic (as was the case during most of his appearances in the comic strip).

Panel 5. Merlin now departs both King Arthur’s side and the strip Prince Valiant forever, to appear thereafter only via flashbacks and memories (at least, under Foster, though the Murphys once had Val meet him in his cave in the early 1980’s). Following tradition, Nimue goes with him, the cause of his permanent retirement.

Merlin’s final fate is not recorded here, but the medieval legends offer varying accounts of his end. The earliest version is a brief mention, near the beginning of the Prose Lancelot, of how Merlin fell in love with, or lusted after, Nimue (here called Vivienne), who, when she had learned all of his magic, imprisoned him in the forest of Darnantes forever. The Prose Merlin expanded upon this story by describing how Merlin first met Vivienne in the forest of Broceliande in Brittany, fell in love with her, and visited her many times, teaching her his magic. Vivienne, however, unhappy about the fact that Merlin would periodically leave her side to advise Arthur, decided to keep him with her permanently, and so used the arts that he had taught her to first place him in an enchanted slumber and then, while he slept, imprison him within an invisible tower that only she could enter or leave. When Merlin awoke and realized his plight, Vivienne promised to visit him regularly, as a consolation to the old wizard.

Malory’s account (based on that of the Suite de Merlin) differs from that of the Prose Merlin. After Nimue was brought to Arthur’s court by King Pellinore, Merlin was love-struck with her and followed her about constantly, to her increasing annoyance. Merlin knew what the outcome of his infatuation with her would be, but also knew that he could not avert his fate; he told Arthur that he would soon be lost to him forever, gave him a few last warnings about troubles to come (including the theft of Excalibur by Morgan le Fay), and then left him, following Nimue on her travels. When they came to Cornwall, Nimue, wishing to be rid of Merlin’s presence forever, tricked him into entering an enchanted cave (purportedly so that he could tell her of the wonders to be found within), but then used the magic that she had learned from him to trap him inside so that he could never leave.

Later writers, in the 19th and 20th centuries, have also made much use of the legend of Merlin and Nimue. Perhaps the most influential treatment was that of Tennyson in his poem "Merlin and Vivien", part of the Idylls of the King; here Vivien is an evil enchantress, hostile to Arthur and his court, who seduces Merlin through her wiles and then uses his own magic to trap him forever. This interpretation of Nimue/Vivien as a villainous figure who imprisons Merlin to keep him from further protecting Arthur’s kingdom has become since then popular in many modern-day Arthurian works; others, however, such as T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, have Merlin voluntarily submit to it, not only out of a sense of fatalism, but also in order to force Arthur to rule on his own rather than constantly lean on him for advice.

It might be added that there is one treatment of Merlin’s end, written apparently before the Prose Lancelot, which had the great wizard withdraw from the world only after Arthur’s passing. This is the Didot-Perceval, an account of Percival’s quest for the Holy Grail; in it, Merlin serves periodically as an advisor to both Arthur and Percival, guiding the latter on his adventures several times. After Arthur’s passing, Merlin tells Percival that the time has come for him to go into retirement and then shuts himself up in a mysterious place known only as his esplumoir (a medieval French word whose very meaning is in doubt among Arthurian scholars), where he will remain until the end of the world. Welsh folklore also has Merlin retire on his own, depicting him as asleep in a house of glass hidden on Bardsey Isle (an actual island off the coast of northern Wales) until the time comes for himself and Arthur to return to Britain.

As a side-note, it might also be added that while Nimue presumably leaves the world with Merlin in Foster’s version, in Malory, she became almost a successor to the famous wizard as Arthur’s magical guardian. She twice saved Arthur from assassination plots by Morgan le Fay (the attack upon him by Sir Accolon and the enchanted cloak which would burn up whoever wore it), rescued him from a sorceress named Annowre who, out of frustration at an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him, attempted to have him killed (Nimue secured the aid of Sir Tristram in carrying out this rescue), cleared Guinevere’s name when the latter was falsely accused of poisoning a visiting knight by revealing the true culprit (if a trifle tardily, since Sir Lancelot had already forced Guinevere’s accuser, Sir Mador de la Porte, to retract his accusation after defeating him in single combat), and helped to take him away to Avalon (in the company of Morgan le Fay, oddly enough) after the final battle with Mordred. But none of this appears in Foster’s work; if anything, it appears that Nimue goes into seclusion forever alongside Merlin.

Panel 6. Foster once again misuses the word "rune" here, treating it as a magical rhyme rather than as a carved letter.

Panel 8. It is tempting to see in Val’s alias of "Cid" a reference by Foster to El Cid, a half-historical half-legendary Spanish knight famous for his battles against the Moors in the 11th century. El Cid became to Spain, in fact, what King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were to Britain or Roland and his fellow paladins in Charlemagne’s service were to France; as a leading hero of chivalric romance, it would obviously be not inappropriate for him to be alluded to in a comic strip based on that genre. This possibility becomes all the stronger when we note that the minstrel whom Val changes clothes with to assist in his disguise is named Ruy; El Cid’s real name was Ruy Diaz de Bivar ("El Cid" being a nickname in the Arabic language, meaning "champion"). I doubt that this is a coincidence.

1142. Panel 4. Foster most likely borrowed Val’s intended strategy from the story of Blondel, a troubador in the service of King Richard the Lion-hearted. According to legend, when King Richard was captured by Duke Leopold of Austria on his way home from the Third Crusade, and turned over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Blondel searched for him, visiting each castle in the Emperor’s domains and singing a song that he and King Richard had often sung together. When he reached the castle where King Richard was imprisoned and sang his song there, Richard, hearing him, joined in; Blondel thus discovered the king’s whereabouts.

VOLUME TWENTY-SIX: LITHWAY’S LAW.

1145. Panels 2 - 4. Val’s account of Gawain and the tailor’s dummy does not quite match the original account of it in #388; for one thing, Val and Gawain were on their way to Marseilles, to take a ship for the Misty Isles, rather than to Rome. However, Foster could have imagined Val deliberately altering the details (Val obviously invented the notion that Gawain was on the adventure to avoid Arthur’s wrath at his mischief as part of his plan to convince Oswick that Arthur did not value his nephew highly enough to pay the ransom for him; it strongly echoes Gawain’s reason for assisting Val in his campaign against the Huns in #139, Panel 8).

Foster reused the original panels from this story in #388 for Panel 4 of this page, of course.

Panel 7. Gawain’s brothers and father King Lot are mentioned once again. Mordred is also again recognized as Gawain’s half-brother, another allusion to the incest that produced him.

1146. Panel 5. It is here implied that King Lot is still alive. If this is the case, then Foster is diverging from Malory, who had Lot slain by King Pellinore early in Arthur’s reign. (See the annotation for #763, Panel 4, for further information.)

Despite Val’s words (which would have to be taken with a grain of salt, in any case, given his motivation for uttering them to Oswick’s daughters), Gawain never succeeds his father to the throne of Lothian and Orkney in Malory. At least, such an event is never mentioned anywhere in Le Morte d’Arthur, or the French romances on which it was based. (Malory and his predecessors presumably did not wish to have Gawain or his brothers burdened with the responsibilities of kingship, which would interfere with their careers as adventurous knights of the Round Table.)

1152. Panel 4. The three "Cornwall Sisters" (the term is T. H. White’s invention) were the daughters of Duke Gorlois and Duchess Igraine of Cornwall (and thus Arthur’s half-sisters): Morgause, Morgan le Fay, and Elaine. (Elaine is never mentioned in Prince Valiant, and indeed, was the least important of the sisters in Malory; she marries King Nentres of Garlot and then disappears from the story. Even T. H. White did not make her anything more than a name.)

Foster again uses White’s notion of Morgause as a sorceress (cf the annotation to #763, Panel 6).

1159. Panel 3. In light of Coth’s later action of persuading his friend to challenge Kerwin, one wonders whether he actually overheard Val’s warning; his riding by at that exact moment that Val is advising Kerwin makes this certainly a strong possibility.

1163. Panel 5. Val is not exaggerating, but alluding to his boyhood as a hunter and provider in the Fens (though, since Gawain was already an adult and experienced knight while Val was still in his early teens, we must dismiss the "while you were sucking your thumb" remark as merely a joke of Val’s, not to be taken literally).

Panel 8. The presence of rabbits in Britain is another anachronism; they were actually imported into the island after the Norman Conquest. Originally, they were bred in captivity for their fur, but many escaped into the wild, where they soon multiplied. None had yet reached Britain in the 5th century, however.

1166. Panel 2. The noble title of "count" was generally found only on the Continent and not in Britain, but is appropriate for Arthurian times. Its English or British equivalent of "earl", originated among the Saxons and so would be hardly appropriate for a member of the British peerage under a king who fought against the Saxons (see the annotation for #1175, Panel 2, below).

1171. Panel 1. In reference to Gawain’s remark, "And that is why I never married!", it is worth pointing out that one tale about him (not found in Malory, but familiar enough in modern-day collections of Arthurian stories, particularly those aimed at younger readers) does have him entering matrimony: The Wedding of Sir Gawain. According to it, King Arthur was once captured by a formidable robber-knight, Sir Gromer Somer Joure, who agreed to spare him if Arthur were to return to him a year and a day later and answer this question: "What do women most desire?" Arthur spent the next year asking everyone whom he met this question, but none of the answers seemed right to him. At last, he met an old crone of phenomenal ugliness who announced that she knew the right answer to Sir Gromer’s question, but would only give it to Arthur if one of his knights would wed her. Arthur reluctantly agreed to her condition, and learned the answer from her: what women most desire is to have their own way. Arthur gave this answer to Sir Gromer, who ruefully admitted it to be correct, and thus had to let the king go.

Gawain volunteered to wed the hag according to Arthur’s agreement with her. Once the marriage ceremony took place and they retired to Gawain’s quarters, the hag transformed into a beautiful young woman, who explained that she had been turned into a hideous crone by a curse, half of which had been lifted by Gawain’s marrying her. She would now be either beautiful by day and ugly by night, or beautiful by night and ugly by day, and asked Gawain which condition he would rather have. Gawain, finding both possibilities having severe drawbacks, finally decided to give the choice to her, which turned out to break the other half of the spell, so that she would be beautiful all the time.

(Geoffrey Chaucer wrote an adaptation of this story as "The Wife of Bath’s Tale" in The Canterbury Tales, although here the knight who marries the "Loathly Lady" is anonymous and the details are somewhat different.)

Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that this incident ever happened in the world of Prince Valiant. I still cannot resist mentioning it here, however.

1174. Panel 6. This is an amazing comment from Aleta, given that her own track record of "meddl[ing] in men’s affairs" in the strip by that point had generally resulted in success; it was Aleta who had defused the threat of rebellion from Earl Jon, rescued Val and his knights from the Picts at Hadrian’s Wall, saved Thule from King Hap-Atla, and foiled Dionseus’s attempted coup, all through her womanly common sense.

1175. Panel 2. The title of "earl" is an anachronistic one for an Arthurian nobleman to have, in the time before the Saxon conquest of Britain, since the word originated as a title among the Saxons. (It seems to have been a shortened version of the title ealdorman, which independently developed into the modern-day "alderman".) Of course, it does fit the general medieval setting of Foster’s Arthurian Britain (particularly since the Earl of Lithway’s story is more evocative of the tales of Robin Hood than those of King Arthur’s knights).

"Tithes" was not the most appropriate word for Foster to use for the Earl’s tax monies; the word applies strictly to money due the Church, as opposed to that due to a king or other secular authority.

1177. Panel 4. Foster ingeniously leaves the question of whether there is an actual curse of the Singing Sword at work or not unresolved; while the events in Panels 2 and 3 could indeed be the result of the curse, it is equally possible that they are the results of the outlaw’s carelessness and lack of experience in handling a sword.

1187. Panel 1. Claudius, last seen in #1132, Panel 1, makes a brief reappearance in the strip.

1188. Panel 5. This is the first mention of the Holy Grail, one of the best-known elements of the Arthurian legend, in Prince Valiant.

The Grail first appeared in Arthurian literature in Chretien de Troyes’ unfinished romance Perceval. Percival, on his wanderings, comes upon a castle whose lord is a man with a wounded leg known as the Fisher King, who welcomes him graciously. At dinner, a procession of youths and maidens enters the hall, bearing various remarkable objects. One of these is an object which Chretien calls a graal, described as being wrought of gold and set with many precious stones; it fills the entire hall with its radiance. The maiden bearing the graal takes it into an adjoining chamber; Percival wonders why this is, but does not ask about it. The maiden and the graal return with each course of the meal, and each time enter the same neighboring room, but Percival still does not ask about it. Only after leaving the castle on the following morning does he learn that he should have asked about the graal and whom it was being taken to; had he done so, the Fisher King (who, it turned out, was Percival’s uncle) would have been healed of his leg wound and restored to full health. Percival finally, after fully comprehending the consequences of his failure, sets off on a quest to find the Fisher King’s castle and this time ask the question; however, Chretien’s poem ended before Percival could complete this goal.

There is no mention in Perceval of the graal being at all connected to Jesus Christ or Christianity; for that matter, the graal was apparently conceived of by Chretien as being, not a cup or chalice (as we customarily view it as being today), but a serving dish (which is what the word graal meant in medieval French). However, as later writers, desiring to complete the unfinished Perceval, took up the story, the graal, or Grail, gradually took on a more familiar form. It was Robert de Boron who first (so far as we know) developed the notion of the Grail being a vessel from the Last Supper, either the cup that Jesus Christ had drunk from or the serving-dish from which he had eaten; additionally, according to de Boron, it was used to catch some of Jesus’s blood when he hung from the Cross. Joseph of Arimathea, who took the Grail into his keeping after the Crucifixion, brought it to Britain, where it provided him and his companions with spiritual nourishment. He then placed it in the keeping of his brother-in-law, Bron, who became the first of a hereditary line of custodians of the Grail, all the way down to the Fisher King of Perceval.

While in both Chretien and de Boron, the Quest of the Holy Grail was strictly reserved for Percival, the Prose Lancelot introduced the concept of all of Arthur’s knights taking up the quest, which Malory used in his Le Morte d’Arthur, thus familiarizing it to an English-speaking audience. In this new version, while the knights of the Round Table were gathered at Camelot for the feast of Pentecost, the Holy Grail appeared before them, covered with a veil of samite, and bestowed upon each of the knights his favorite food and drink. After it vanished, Gawain announced that although they had seen the Grail and been fed by it, yet they had not seen it unveiled, and vowed to set out on a quest to behold it whole (by which he meant, learning its true significance). All the other knights vowed to take up this quest, and set out from Camelot the following morning.

Unfortunately, almost all of the knights, including Gawain, fared poorly upon the quest. They failed to understand that the Quest of the Holy Grail was not just another adventure of the sort that they were used to, but a spiritual enterprise, and did not prepare themselves properly for it. They learned nothing more about the Grail (except that they were too worldly in outlook to learn anything more about it), and accomplished nothing except to engage in a number of pointless battles with each other. (Gawain himself inadvertently slew at least two fellow knights of the Round Table, Sir Uwaine les Avoutres and King Bagdemagus.) Sir Lancelot came closer than they did, in a sense, only to learn that his adulterous love for Queen Guinevere barred him from achieving the Grail; he was subjected to one humiliation after another as a means of chastisement, and when he finally reached Carbonek, the castle where the Holy Grail was kept, was sent into a coma that lasted for twenty-four days after he attempted to force his way into the chapel where the Grail Mass was being celebrated.

The only knights of the Round Table who did achieve the Grail were Sir Galahad (Lancelot’s illegitimate son, now introduced into the Arthurian legend), Sir Percival, and Sir Bors (a cousin of Lancelot’s). After undergoing a number of adventures to test them, all of which they passed, they arrived at Carbonek where together they learned of the Grail’s true nature, and celebrated Mass with it. Afterwards, they bore it to the city of Sarras in the Middle East; there, Galahad achieved the final vision of the Holy Grail and died, after which the Grail was taken up to Heaven forever. Percival remained at Sarras to become a hermit, while Bors returned to Camelot to tell the full story to King Arthur and his court.

As Foster commented in this panel, the Quest of the Holy Grail played a leading role in helping to bring the Round Table to an end. Many of the knights were slain on the quest or otherwise failed to return; furthermore, after the quest was over, the surviving knights spent more time quarreling with one another than with undertaking adventures to aid Arthur’s people, leading to the civil wars that destroyed Camelot. Indeed, the internecine strife that followed the Quest of the Holy Grail was treated by the medieval romancers as a divinely ordained punishment, visited upon King Arthur’s knights for having proven themselves unworthy of the Grail. Foster only makes use of the former aspect, in his mention that the quest for the Grail is costing many of Arthur’s knights their lives.

Foster took two major liberties with the familiar Malory version of the Grail Quest in Prince Valiant. The first was making the Grail itself the object of the quest, rather than (as in the Prose Lancelot and Malory) the discovery of its true nature. The second was in portraying it as not a single quest taken up by all of Arthur’s knights at once, but as a series of expeditions undertaken by various individual knights of the Round Table at different times. (Foster was not the first person to treat the Quest of the Holy Grail in this fashion; Mark Twain, in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, also portrayed it as a periodic event, jokingly describing these quests as the 6th century equivalent of attempts to find the Northwest Passage and telling how "[e]very year expeditions went out holy grailing, and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for them" (Twain, p. 63).) Foster never depicted the miraculous appearance of the Holy Grail at Pentecost in the strip; this is not surprising, since such an event would have clashed with the rationalist tone of Prince Valiant. He also made no mention of Carbonek or of the Fisher King, choosing to focus on the Grail’s links (found more often in 19th and 20th century Arthurian literature than medieval) to Glastonbury via Joseph of Arimathea instead.

Panel 6. Arthur’s concern over the cost of the Quest of the Holy Grail to the Round Table is true to Malory. When the knights first volunteer to take up the quest, the king is distressed, and sadly chides Gawain for first making the vow and thereby encouraging the others to embark on this expedition, knowing that many of them will not return from it. He cannot even sleep that night, and is so grieved after their departure as to be unable to speak.

The Arthur of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is also troubled over his knights’ desire to go in search of the Holy Grail, though for a different reason. Here, not only is he aware that the quest will cost many of them their lives, but he is additionally disturbed over the fact that the enterprise is taking them away from their duties to help those of his people in need (particularly since, in Tennyson’s treatment of the Grail Quest - as in Foster’s - it is uncertain as to whether the Grail even exists).

VOLUME TWENTY-SEVEN: THE ETERNAL QUEST.

1190. Panel 7. Winchester (where Foster placed Camelot) and Old Sarum were directly linked by a Roman road, which raises the question as to why Val would need to find it when he could have just taken it out of Camelot. (Presumably this is another of Foster’s slips.) Note that the Roman road in Foster’s picture is drawn as decaying, with weeds springing up and a number of loose stones; this effectively displays the fading of the old infrastructure of Roman Britain.

Old Sarum was a fairly prominent town during early British history (all the way down to Norman times). However, the site was plagued by a shortage of water, which (among other reasons) led to the local bishop, in 1220, deciding to relocate the town cathedral to what is now Salisbury (or New Sarum), leading to the decline and abandonment of Old Sarum. This would be still in the distant future at the time of Val’s investigation of the Holy Grail, of course.

1191. Panel 2. Foster’s choice of Old Sarum as Val’s first stop on his search for the truth behind the Grail legend, and as a place where he seeks to consult the local archives for information about the Grail, may have been derived from medieval romance. In Malory (and the Prose Lancelot before him), after Sir Bors returned to Camelot to report the conclusion of the Quest of the Holy Grail, King Arthur had the adventures of his knights during the Quest written down and the chronicles kept in a library or almery at Salisbury, the "descendant" of Old Sarum. Might this have given Foster the idea of having Val research the Holy Grail at Old Sarum?

Panel 3. For the first time in Prince Valiant, the Holy Grail is described as a chalice, the popular modern-day interpretation of it. Foster would generally adhere to this description, except for #1193, Panel 2 (see below).

1192. Panel 3. Foster now correctly points out that Stonehenge was not built by the Druids at all, but by a pre-Druidic British people. (Just one day after this strip was printed on December 13, 1959, the British Ministry of Works announced that its own findings had also led it to the same conclusion.)

The Beaker Folk or Beaker People were one of a series of British peoples believed in history books of the time (the 1950’s) to have invaded Britain in waves; historians nowadays are far more dubious about such migrations. There is no record, however, of Druidic persecution of the Beaker Folk.

The Romans did indeed exterminate the Druids, in A.D. 60. The Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus led an expedition in that year against the Druids’ headquarters in Anglesey, put them to the sword, and burned their sacred groves. The Romans carried this action out, not for religious reasons, but political; the Druids had been fomenting resistance against the Romans among the conquered Britons (in the very same year as Suetonius Paulinus’s expedition, one of the most famous British rebellions, that of Boudica - more popularly known as Boadicea - broke out in Norfolk). It probably did not help that the Druids also committed human sacrifice.

1193. Panel 1. Joseph of Arimathea appears in the Gospels as a wealthy man, member of the Sanhedrin (the ruling council of the Jews in New Testament times), and secret disciple of Jesus Christ. After the Crucifixion, he approached Pontius Pilate and obtained permission from him to take Jesus’s body down from the Cross and give it a decent burial. (Matthew 26: 57-60; Mark 15: 43-46; Luke 23: 50-53; John 19: 38-42.) That is all that the Bible says about him, but later legends, dating from the medieval period, expanded upon his role dramatically. He was portrayed as journeying from Judea to Britain with a small band of followers in A.D. 63, where they settled at Glastonbury; the local king, Arviragus, welcomed them and, while uninterested in converting to Christianity, granted them twelve hides of land. Joseph and his followers built a church at Glastonbury, and spent the rest of their lives there. After they died, Glastonbury (according to the same legends) was abandoned until it was rediscovered in the year 170 by two missionaries from Rome named Faganus and Deruvianus, who set up a fresh community of hermits there, that would last into the 5th century before undergoing re-organization by St. Patrick (see below).

It was also claimed that Joseph of Arimathea became the first custodian of the Holy Grail after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and brought it to Britain, though not explicitly to Glastonbury (the two branches of his legend did not become one until Tennyson’s Idylls of the King).

Panel 2. Avalon is mentioned for the second time in Prince Valiant (for the first occasion in which it was mentioned, see the commentary on #898, Panel 6), this time in one of its most familiar roles as an alias of Glastonbury. Foster would continue to call the region around Glastonbury "Avalon" for the rest of Val’s adventure there.

The old man is correct when he says that some believed the Holy Grail to be a serving-dish rather than a chalice (its more familiar form), even to the point of rightly defining a "grail" as a serving-dish. Even Malory allowed for an interpretation of the Grail as a serving-dish, when he had Jesus Christ tell Sir Galahad, during the latter’s divine communion while achieving the Grail, "This is... the holy dish wherein I ate the lamb on Easter Day".

1194. Panel 5. Foster does not make it clear whether the "he" who wore the mask during the encounter with the Ogre of Sinstar Wood was the Ogre (referring to his disguise as an ogre) or Val (referring to his demon-mask that he used to frighten the Ogre to death); either subject for the pronoun would fit the context.

1195. Panel 2. During the 5th century and before, the region around Glastonbury was marshy; Glastonbury itself was almost an island (which may have helped its equation with the isle of Avalon). Foster accurately depicts its topography during the "Arthurian" Age here.

Panel 4. This page, in which Foster describes Och’s backstory, appeared in the newspapers at the beginning of 1960. The year before, an Arthurian novel named The Pagan King, by Edison Marshall (1894-1967), was published; among its characters was a figure named Pillicock, whom Arthur meets in a lonely tower in a remote part of Britain. Pillicock initially seems to be gnome guarding treasure at the tower, but is later revealed to be a former slave of Vortigern’s named Rufus, who had been kept as a curiosity at court because of his misshapen legs, until he escaped and went into hiding in the tower. Arthur befriends Pillicock, who becomes one of his closest and most loyal friends thereafter.

The parallel between Pillicock and Och is noteworthy: both are men with misshapen legs who, because of this physical deformity, are made cruel sport of by a tyrant, and both escape, go into hiding, and masquerade as mythical beings (making use of their deformities to assist them in this disguise), until they encounter and are befriended by the protagonist. And The Pagan King was published just one year before this strip. Could Foster have gotten the idea for Och from Marshall’s book? We have no evidence that Foster had read it, unfortunately, so all that we can say is that it falls into the realm of possibility - and that it would be an amazing coincidence if Foster had been unaware of Marshall’s Pillicock when he wrote and drew this page.

Panel 5. Glastonbury Tor, one of the leading landmarks of Glastonbury, is mentioned here for the first time. The Tor is a great hill close by the town of Glastonbury, the focus of many of the legends surrounding this part of Britain. Some tales make it the home of Gwyn ap Nudd, the semi-demonic ruler over the faerie-folk, until the hermit St. Collen drove him away. Gwyn’s sinister nature may have led to the building of a chapel dedicated to St. Michael, the traditional battler of Satan and his infernal hosts, at the top of the Tor; the church tower still stands there today as one of Glastonbury’s most prominent features.

Panel 8. Foster’s "Next Week" caption is inaccurate; it is a prior rather than a bishop who heads the religious establishment at Glastonbury in the following instalment. Presumably Foster changed his mind between finishing this page and beginning the next one.

1196. Panel 1. Wearyall Hill is another real landmark at Glastonbury. According to legend, it received its name when Joseph of Arimathea and his followers arrived here, being "weary-all". Joseph thrust his staff into the ground at this spot, and it took root and blossomed into a tree, the celebrated Glastonbury Thorn, whose flowers unfold at Christmas - or did before England switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian in 1752. (This particular tale concerning Joseph of Arimathea is relatively late, going back in its full-fledged form only to 1716, though there are references to the Thorn in Tudor times. The Glastonbury Thorn is a real tree, however, a hawthorn, which, interestingly enough, bears a much closer resemblance to hawthorn trees found in Palestine than in Britain. The original tree was cut down by a Puritan in 1643, but fortunately, its descendants were preserved, one of which still grows in Glastonbury today. Foster makes no mention of the Glastonbury Thorn, though.)

Unfortunately for legend, the evidence that we have indicates that "Wearyall Hill" is actually a corruption of "Wirral Hill".

Panel 5. The wattle church purportedly built by Joseph of Arimathea (known more formally as the Vetusta Ecclesia) was an actual landmark at Glastonbury, until it was destroyed in a great fire that ravaged the monastery in 1184. (The exact identity of its builder was in doubt even in the legends, however; there were some who claimed that Jesus himself was the one who raised it.)

Foster again anachronistically places a friar in 5th century Britain.

1197. Panel 5. Foster errs in describing Joseph of Arimathea as an Apostle; he was never reckoned among their number.

The mention of "pilgrims" among the religious folk dwelling at Glastonbury is astonishing; pilgrims, by definition, are those who visit a holy place, as opposed to those who actually live there.

Panel 6. Foster refers to Val’s past visits to the Holy Land.

Panel 7. Glastonbury Tor has been crowned on more than one occasion with a chapel, usually dedicated to St. Michael (see the annotation for #1195, Panel 5). The ruins where Val here sits would thus be appropriate. (Although, it should be added, archaeological evidence has indicated that, in the actual 5th century, the Tor was crowned not by a chapel, but the hall of a local lord or chieftain instead.)

1200. Panel 6. Foster has to allow the wattle church to survive the fire, since it is not due to be destroyed in actual history for another seven centuries (see the annotation for #1196, Panel 5).

1202. Panel 7. Cheddar Gorge is a famous landmark in the Mendip Hills. It is perhaps best-known as the place where the remains of a prehistoric Briton who lived in the 8th millennium B.C. were found, the oldest signs of human occupation in Britain; the man was named "Cheddar Man" after the gorge.

1206. Panel 4. Val’s remark about Timmera being "where he should be" is a particularly delightful case of double meaning on his part.

1208. Panel 4. St. Patrick’s visit to Glastonbury is not an invention of Foster’s. The same Glastonbury legends that claimed Joseph of Arimathea as the original founder of the religious community at Glastonbury also claimed that Patrick came to Glastonbury late in his career, to take charge of the hermits dwelling there and organize them into a proper monastery - just as he does here in Prince Valiant. The tales even claim that Patrick became the first abbot of Glastonbury and spent the last nine years of his life there. There is no historical evidence for this (although a forged charter purporting to have been written by St. Patrick appeared in the Middle Ages); it appears to be merely a case of the monks of Glastonbury wishing to have their monastery linked to as famous a saint as Patrick, for the sake of the prestige.

St. Patrick’s becoming a bishop was no legend, however; he himself describes himself as a bishop at the beginning of his letter to Coroticus.

1212. Panel 3. Judging from Hugo’s name, he must have come from Wales; "ap" is a Welsh word meaning "son of", which was regularly used as a patronymic among the Welsh in lieu of a surname.

1215. Panel 5. Centaurs were one of the best-known of the many half-human half-animal creatures in classical mythology, being human from the waist up, horses from the waist down. According to legend, they were the result of a union between the ambitious human king Ixion and Nephele, a sort of living cloud disguised as Hera, the queen of the gods; Ixion had decided to take on Hera as his mistress (actually believing that she would welcome him as a lover as a means of paying Zeus back for his numerous infidelities to her), but was duped into sleeping with Nephele instead. (Afterwards, a distinctly unamused Zeus sent Ixion straight to Tartarus, to be bound to a fiery wheel for eternity.)

The centaurs lived in the plains of Thessaly in northern Greece. As befitting their ancestry, they were notoriously wild and violent (especially when drunk), and frequently raided their human neighbors. The most famous example of this came when they were invited to the wedding of King Pirithous of the Lapiths, and after drinking too much wine, decided to carry off both Pirithous’s bride and many of the other women present. Pirithous, needless to say, took exception to this and fought back; fortunately for him, his guests included many of the leading heroes of Greece at that time, resulting in an epic battle with the centaurs that was frequently celebrated in poetry and art thereafter (including on the Acropolis in Athens during its Golden Age). Heracles also fought and slew many centaurs (though he was finally posthumously slain by one of them, named Nessus).

There was one centaur who was of a more civilized and peaceful nature, however, named Chiron. He was a wise and gentle figure who lived on Mount Pelion, and was famous throughout Greece for his learning. As a result, he was given the occupation of tutoring many of the leading heroes of Greek mythology (such as Jason and Achilles) when they were boys, preparing them for their great deeds when they came of age. Chiron himself, unfortunately, came to a sad end, when he was inadvertently fatally wounded by one of the poisoned arrows of Heracles; Zeus honored him after his death by placing a constellation depicting him in the heavens (either Sagittarius the Archer or Centaurus the Centaur, depending on which version of the Greek myths you read).

1219. Panels 3 - 4. The Saxon "invasions" are treated once again as Viking-style raids from overseas, with the Saxons’ goal being to plunder all that they can and then sail back home, rather than to establish permanent homes in the east of Britain and expand from there (which they were doing in the real 5th century).

1220. Panel 2. Pevensey was originally a Roman fortress in the southeast of Britain.

1221. Panel 2. Hastings is, of course, best known for the battle between Harold Godwinson and William of Normandy (which was not actually fought at Hastings itself, but nearby, at what is now the town of Battle) in 1066 that resulted in William becoming King of England as William the Conqueror - an event that was still six hundred years in the future from the perspective of Prince Valiant.

1222. Panel 4. This marks the only time in Prince Valiant that Morgan Todd is given the title of knighthood. (I suspect it to have been another of Foster's slips.)

1233. Panel 1. Foster contradicts the last panel of #1232 here, in changing the "two pirate captains" to one pirate captain and one "desert chieftain".

VOLUME TWENTY-EIGHT: THE SAVAGE GIRL.

1237. Panel 1. Rhodes would indeed be distant from the perspective of the Misty Isles, being one of the easternmost (if not the easternmost) of the Greek islands, lying just to the south of the coast of Asia Minor (now Turkey). Rhodes owes its fame to two achievements. The first of these was the Colossus of Rhodes, a famous statue of Helios, the Greek god of the sun, built in the 3rd century B.C., which became one of the Seven Wonders of the World - until it was toppled by an earthquake. (Contrary to popular belief - encouraged by Shakespeare, when in Act I, Scene II of Julius Caesar, he had the envious Cassius, in a famous passage, describe Caesar as "bestrid[ing] the world like a Colossus" - the Colossus did not straddle the town’s harbor.) The second was serving as the headquarters for the Knights Hospitaller during the late Middle Ages.

Panel 6. For the story of the Trojan Horse, see the annotation to #156, Panel 5.

1240. Panel 3. Here we have the first hint that Aleta is with child for the third time in Prince Valiant.

1243. Panel 5. Note another continuity error in this picture; Thrasos, who was portrayed in long sleeves only one page before (in #1242, Panel 3) is now wearing a sleeveless breastplate - with no opportunity to have changed his attire between the two pages.

1248. Panel 3. We see the newly-born Galan (though he is not due to receive that name for another fourteen pages) for the first time.

1262. Panel 2. Galan was named after Claudius Galen, a famous 2nd century Roman physician. (Foster’s successors have had Galan learn about his namesake and become inspired to take up the study of medicine.) The name was suggested by one John Hall in a competition that King Features held over what to name Val and Aleta’s newest child (like the one held over what to name the twins a few years earlier).

Panel 3. This should be Val’s third christening, in fact, not his fourth, because Karen and Valeta, as twins, had a joint christening.

This is the last time that Paul and Diane appear in Prince Valiant (unless Paul is the boy shown training in the armory alongside Val and Arn in #1263, Panel 3).

1263. Panel 4. Aleta uttered those words in #769, Panel 8 (if with some minor changes in wording from the version given here), although the "flashback picture" in this panel is new.

1266. Panel 3. Technically, this is Val’s fifth visit, for on both of his previous visits to the Holy Land, he had gone to Jerusalem twice. However, it is his third visit to the Middle East.

Panel 5. Despite the wisdom in Val’s urgings of tolerance, it is questionable whether their observation by the Christians actually could have averted the Crusades. The Crusades were prompted by the capture of the Holy Land and its shrines by the Seljuk Turks, who were: a) much more fanatical than the Arabs, and b) nowhere near the Holy Land in the 5th century (so that Christian bitterness towards the non-Christian residents of Jerusalem and its environs at that time would have had small influence, if any, upon the Seljuks’ attitudes). Also, another crucial catalyst for the Crusades was the Byzantine Emperors’ uneasy awareness of the increasing might of the Turks and the threat that they posed to the Byzantine Empire, which led them to urge the Pope to persuade the knights and nobles of western Europe to come to Constantinople as reinforcements; more humane behavior on the part of Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem would probably not have been enough to prevent that.

1271. Panel 3. Bagdad or Baghdad, the final goal of Val’s trading mission in the Middle East, is again anachronistically brought into Prince Valiant.

1272. Panel 5. Samarkand and Bokhara were both major cities in central Asia (they are now in Uzbekistan), famous in the ancient and medieval world for being great trading centers. Both were sacked by Genghis Khan in 1220, though they were later on rebuilt; the 14th century Mongol leader Timur or Tamerlane even made Samarkand into his capital.

1276. Panel 4. Foster errs in calling the black stone venerated by Muslims (or, more accurately in this case, Arabs in a pre-Muslim period) the Kaaba. The Kaaba was actually a structure built to house the black stone. Its presence as an object of religious devotion is not an anachronism, however, for the black stone was revered by the Arabs long before Mohammed’s time, to such an extent that he had to incorporate it into the teachings of Islam.

Panel 5. Once again, Foster mistakenly treats "magi" as if it was singular rather than plural; the proper singular form of the word is "magus". He also erroneously portrays Zoroaster as a sun-god; he was actually a human prophet of the 6th century B.C., who founded a dualistic religion that portrayed the universe as a battleground between Ahura Mazda (or Ormazd), who represented good, and Angra Mainyu (or Ahriman), who represented evil. This religion was adopted by the Persians until the 7th century A.D., when they were conquered by the Muslims and Zoroastrianism was replaced by Islam. This is not the last time that Foster would inaccurately portray Zoroaster as a divinity in Prince Valiant.

1277. Panel 1. Foster’s remark that Taloon first feels happy since her banishment is contradicted by #1275, Panel 3.

Panel 3. Teheran (or Tehran) is also an anachronistic presence in Prince Valiant. In the 5th century, it was not a major city, but only a suburb of the city of Rayy; it assumed its present-day importance after the Mongols captured and razed Rayy in 1220.

VOLUME TWENTY-NINE: MONASTERY OF THE DEMONS.

1281. Panel 6. A reference to the three Fates of Greek mythology, who spun the threads of human lives. Clotho spun the threads, Lachesis measured them, and Atropos cut them with her shears when the time came for the humans linked to those threads to die.

1284. Panel 1. Foster repeats his mistake from #1276, Panel 5, of using "magi" rather than "magus", and of assuming that Zoroaster was a god with temples dedicated to him, rather than a human prophet.

1287. Panel 2. Foster repeats the original art from #232, Panel 3.

Panel 3. Foster here repeats the original art from #235, Panel 5.

1297. Panels 3-4. Foster here follows the popular romantic notion of blaming the ruined buildings of classical Rome on marauding barbarians; this, however, is a myth. The real culprits were a combination of time, neglect, and finally the deplorable habit by the Romans during medieval times of pulling down the now-unused buildings as a relatively cheap and easy way of obtaining stone for houses and other projects. (During the Renaissance, as people became more aware of the grandeur of the classical world, many of them began to protest these practices.)

1298. Panel 4. Arn must have spent little time with his white horse, however, since at this point in the strip, he had only once visited Camelot since infancy, and that only briefly (on the eve of his departure to the Misty Isles in #1229-30). Also, though he was shown mounted during that stay in #1330, Panel 2, the horse that he was riding was dark-colored (except for a splash of white on its forehead). This must be another of Foster’s continuity errors.

1303. Panel 1. It is uncertain which final sack of Rome by the barbarians Foster is alluding to here; he might have been thinking of Odoacer’s deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, but it was a relatively peaceful event, not a plundering on the level of that by Alaric the Goth or the Vandals (and took place mainly at Ravenna, for that matter). Later on, Rome underwent a more serious sack at the hands of the armies of the Eastern Roman Empire under Belisarius in the 6th century, as a result of Justinian’s effort to reclaim as much of the Western Roman Empire as possible, although that was obviously not due to the barbarians. As we know, Rome would indeed recover, thanks to its being the residence of the Popes, who would hold spiritual sway (and also temporal sway of a sort, though the latter was frequently contested by the kings that they claimed temporal sway over) over western Europe until the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.

1304. Panel 3. The Visigoths were indeed in control of southern France (and Spain) during the late 5th century; however, Foster takes liberties from history in portraying them as wandering bands of marauders. In actual history at this time, the Visigoths had formed a kingdom in this area, ruling over the locals, and had even embraced a certain amount of Roman culture.

1313. Panel 3. The Visigoths’ decision to invade Hispania may be a loose adaptation of 5th century history, for the Visigoths did indeed expand their rule into Spain in the 5th century (though in the form of their rulers extending the boundaries of their kingdom, rather than simply the disorganized migrations of raiding war bands that Foster depicts here); after King Clovis of the Franks conquered the Visigoth kingdom in southern Gaul, the Visigoths ruled over Spain until they were defeated by the invading Moors in 711.

Panel 4. Foster here alludes to perhaps the most famous moment in the chivalric epics and romances of medieval Europe aside from the Arthurian cycle, the final stand of Roland at Roncesvalles.

The Battle of Roncesvalles was based on an actual historical event, though the legend (as legends have a way of doing) amplified the story to make it more dramatic. On August 15, 778, Charlemagne, following an abortive campaign against the Moors in Spain, was crossing the Pyrenees on his way home to France when the Basques ambushed his rearguard and slaughtered it. One of the officers killed in the fighting was a certain Roland, Count of the Breton March (Brittany). The event does not appear to have been more than a minor setback to Charlemagne in actual history, but legend soon magnified it into a battle of epic proportions, culminating in The Song of Roland, composed apparently somewhere in the 11th century.

In The Song of Roland, Roland and his companions are attacked, not by mere Basques, but by a mighty Moorish army led by their king, Marsilla; Ganelon, a treacherous nobleman of Charlemagne’s court (almost the Carolingian counterpart to Mordred), has provided Marsilla with the information needed to make the attack. Roland’s own stature is likewise increased; he is portrayed as Charlemagne’s nephew and the most able of his knights. When the Moors begin their attack, clearly outnumbering the Frankish rear guard, Roland’s best friend Oliver urges him to blow a blast on his mighty horn to summon Charlemagne to their aid. Roland refuses, however, considering such an act one of cowardice; instead, he leads his men to fight the Moors, and although all of them are slain in the end, they inflict considerable damage upon their assailants before being overwhelmed. After Roland receives his death-wound, he at last blows his horn - not as a call for aid, but to alert Charlemagne to the treachery so that he can avenge his death and those of his followers. Charlemagne hears the horn’s blast, but arrives too late to save the rear guard; all that he can do is to defeat the Moors and then give Roland and his companions a proper burial. Ganelon’s treachery is afterwards revealed, and he is put to death.

The story of Roland’s last battle was a popular heroic tale in medieval Europe; it is even reported that, at the Battle of Hastings, a Norman minstrel named Taillefer sang about Roland’s exploits in order to spur on his comrades, until the Saxons slew him. I strongly suspect that Foster alluded to the Battle of Roncesvalles here as a deliberate hommage to this saga (just as I strongly suspect he paid his respects to another non-Arthurian knightly hero when he had Val take on the alias of "Cid" during the Oswick adventure).

1314. Panel 7. Note the spy listening in on Val’s conversation with Arn and Justin. Only shortly afterwards, Duke Sadonick is clearly aware that Val had befriended Stephan; could Foster have intended in this picture to suggest that Sadonick had discovered this through one of his agents overhearing Val’s very warning? It would be delightfully ironic; unfortunately, Foster did not confirm it in the pages that followed.

1317. Panel 8. Foster reuses the art from #1316, Panel 7. Only now, in the text, he changes the identity of the man whispering in the evil Duke’s ear from his chamberlain to a spy (unless he imagined the chamberlain to have received the spy’s message and passed it on to his master).

1319. Panels 4-5. Foster returns a bit of the magic of the Singing Sword to the story, when the Sword’s song only recovers its full beauty when Val refuses to murder Stephan and turns on the evil Sadonick instead. (Though one could always see this as really Val’s perception of the sword, colored by his own thoughts.)

VOLUME THIRTY: ARN, SON OF VALIANT.

1330. Panel 3. On this page, Foster reprinted some of the art from Val’s original taming of Arvak, a few years before. In this panel, we see a reprint of #1068, Panel 3.

Panel 4. The art here is a reprint of #1068, Panel 5.

Panel 5. Here Foster reprints the art from #1072, Panel 5, showing Val’s joust with Sadoc.

Panel 7. Foster here reprints the art from #1070, Panel 7.

At the same time, Foster here (and in Panel 6) calls the priestess whom Val had first met while taming Arvak a "druid priestess", forgetting that during their second encounter, on #1192, Panel 3, she had revealed herself to be not a Druidess at all, but one of the Beaker People.

1331. Panel 5. One cannot help wondering where the knights obtained the horses that they rode on for the parade; their steeds were inaccessible thanks to Arvak (which was the very reason why they were helping Val, so that they might recover them).

1333. Panel 4. This is a genuine Biblical reference, but misquoted; the original, in First Timothy 6: 10, states "the love of money is the root of all evil."

1342. Panel 6. The art for this panel is a reprint from #1249, Panel 2. In the next few pages, in fact, there would be many reprints of art from earlier pages.

1343. Panel 1. Here a reprint from #1189, Panel 8.

Panel 2. Here a reprint from #434, Panel 8, depicting Val and Aleta’s first kiss.

Panel 3. Here a reprint from #466, Panel 7.

Panel 4. Here a reprint from #1189, Panel 5. In the text, Foster deviates from his original description of how Val came to give Aleta a spanking; she was not portrayed then as having slapped him, but as merely protesting Val’s insisting on riding off on yet another quest on King Arthur’s business.

Panel 5. And here a reprint from #1293, Panel 6.

1346. Panel 2. Here and in the next two panels, Foster reprints scenes from the very early days of Prince Valiant, dealing with Val’s youth in the Fens. This one is a reprint from #3, Panel 9.

Panel 3. Foster here reprints the art from #3, Panels 10 and 11, and #4, Panel 3. In his text, he engages in two pieces of retrocon. The first comes when he describes the couple portrayed in the lower right-hand part of this panel as the parents of his boyhood friend in the Fens; in the original art, they were Horrit and Thorg; the second is when he claims to have showed that same friend how to catch pike (in the original, it was the other way around).

Panel 4. The art here is reprinted from #4, Panel 4, and #91, Panel 8. Foster again engages in retrocontinuity when he portrays the dinosaur skeleton that Val discovers as the remains of a "creature that dwelt in the marsh in olden times". Could this have been an attempt on Foster’s part to cover up his anachronism of a surviving dinosaur at the beginning of the strip?

1349. Panel 4. Foster reprints here his depiction of Val’s previous encounter with Thorg from #313, Panel 6, as a foreshadowing of the ogre’s final appearance in Prince Valiant.

1351. Panel 6. From the information given here and in earlier panels (Panel 5 on the same page above, and #1345, Panel 7), we can deduce something about Val’s seaborne route. Val and Wojan’s camp lay to the west of the Fens, close enough to the marshes for Val and Arn to see them from a scaffold in that same camp, and therefore would presumably be somewhere not far from where Cambridge is today. Foster located Camelot at Winchester, so the sea voyage would be moving along the southeastern coast of Britain past what are now East Anglia, Essex, Kent, and Sussex. Ethwald’s taking passage with Val and asking to be dropped off at his castle near Hastings, which is in Sussex and which Val, on this route, would thereby reach before arriving at Camelot/Winchester, would thus be geographically feasible.

1352. Panel 2. The Weald is or was a forest in the southeast of England, mostly gone now.

1357. Panel 2. This is the first time that Arn is portrayed as serving as a page (or as training for knighthood) at Camelot. Sir Baldwin, who had earlier supervised Geoffrey’s training, now returns to the strip.

Panel 3. Foster reprints the scene of Aleta disciplining Arn from #840, Panel 6.

1358. Panel 1. Cidwic and his campaign to annex northern Britain are Foster’s invention, but North Wales was portrayed by Malory as often at odds with King Arthur. At the beginning of his reign, the young Arthur had to face two hostile kings of North Wales, in fact. The first, King Cradelmont, was one of the eleven kings who, under the leadership of King Lot, fought against Arthur at the Battle of Bedegraine; he disappears from Malory’s pages immediately afterwards, however. The second was King Rions, a brutal and barbaric chieftain who had the bad habit of shaving off the beard of any king whom he defeated and sewing it onto the borders of his mantle. Having taken the beards of eleven kings this way and only needing one more beard to complete his collection, he demanded that Arthur surrender his beard. Arthur indignantly refused (though preserving enough of a sense of humor to add that due to his youth, his beard was not full-grown enough to suit Rions), which led to a war between the two kings. Rions, needless to say, was defeated, and disappears from Malory afterwards as well.

Thereafter, North Wales (or Northgalis, as Malory called it) was portrayed in Le Morte d’Arthur as ruled over by an anonymous king, who appeared mainly as a participant in tournaments. His most noteworthy role came about when he challenged King Bagdemagus to a couple of tournaments, and got the better of him in the first of these thanks to having three knights of the Round Table (including Mordred) on his side. In the second tournament, however, Lancelot took King Bagdemagus’s side (since Bagdemagus’s daughter had rescued him from Morgan le Fay), defeated the King of North Wales, and personally overcame the three Round Table knights in the lists. Even this anonymous King of North Wales, while not openly hostile towards Arthur, was still noted for keeping bad company; alongside his alliance with Mordred mentioned above, his wife, the Queen of North Wales, was a sorceress and close friend of Morgan le Fay, associated with her in many schemes against Arthur and his knights (though, oddly enough, she, like Morgan, helped carry Arthur away to Avalon at the end of Le Morte d’Arthur), and one of his knights, Sir Phelot, tried to kill Sir Lancelot by tricking him into climbing a tree without his armor and then ambushing him while in that state (Lancelot, needless to say, was still able to defeat and slay Phelot, even at this disadvantage).

The history of North Wales during the actual 5th and 6th centuries is vague, and much of the information that we have may only be legend. It was claimed by the Welsh that North Wales (then known as Gwynedd; it still bears this name today) was first ruled over by a northern chieftain named Cunedda who came south to drive out the Irish; historians are still divided over whether Cunedda was a real person or a mythical forebear invented to give the kings of Gwynedd a colorful ancestry. In the early 6th century, the King of Gwynedd was one Maelgwn, said to be the great-grandson of Cunedda, who died from plague in or around 547. Maelgwn is generally identified with a British king named Maglocunus, one of the five rulers denounced by a monk named Gildas in his De Excidio Britanniae or On the Destruction of Britain, a work discussing the social rot in Britain during his time. According to Gildas, Maglocunus was a highly intelligent and able ruler (who had even received a formal education), but was also thoroughly corrupt, being guilty of such crimes as usurping his throne by overthrowing its previous occupant (his own uncle), and murdering both his wife and his nephew out of an adulterous desire for his nephew’s wife (who, sad to say, served as Maglocunus’s willing accomplice in these acts). To make matters worse, at one point, Maglocunus had apparently been stricken enough by conscience to abdicate his throne and become a monk, only to desert the monastery and take up his crown again, thus breaking the vows that he had sworn when he received the tonsure. So wicked does he seem to have been, indeed, that Gildas, who still held out hopes that the other kings whom he was rebuking for their crimes would someday repent of their evil deeds, had apparently (judging from his words concerning him) given up on Maglocunus as a lost cause.

Foster’s description of North Wales as having previously "extended northward into Scotland" is, so far as I know, his invention.

Panel 2. Carlisle features prominently in Arthurian legend as one of Arthur’s major strongholds (alongside Camelot and Caerleon), appearing often in the French romances under the name of Carduel (and, confusingly, being placed by them in Wales; apparently the French writers were weak on British geography). Foster makes no mention of this here, however; Carlisle’s significance here is due purely to its strategic importance.

1367. Panel 5. Foster once again anachronistically places rabbits in 5th century Britain (see the annotation for #1163, Panel 8).

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