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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 THIRTY-ONE: A JOUST FOR ALETA.

1374. Panel 7. Foster’s description of Pentecost here is inaccurate. First, he locates it in the autumn season, spanning the interval between the end of the harvests and the beginning of winter. Since Pentecost takes place seven Sundays after Easter, it can only take place in May or June. Furthermore, while Pentecost is a single day on the Christian calendar, Foster treats it as though it was a season.

1375. Panel 5. Foster takes liberties here with Malory; in Le Morte d’Arthur, the Round Table seated a hundred and fifty knights, rather than a hundred. (On the other hand, the romances never reached a consistent tally of the full membership. Layamon’s Brut, for example, actually had the Round Table seat sixteen hundred knights; at the other extreme, some of the French romances had the Round Table seat only twelve knights, in memory of the twelve Apostles.)

This is the second time in Prince Valiant that Foster mentions the Siege Perilous. Since he describes it as having "not yet been filled", we can tell from this that Sir Galahad has not yet come to Arthur’s court (though he would appear briefly, many years in the strip’s future).

1376. Panel 4. Foster engages in a little anachronistic comedy (anachronistic even for Arthurian romance), in giving his two rustic knights names that sound more appropriate for a pair of stereotypical rural Americans than for a pair of medieval British knights (even knights at the very bottom of the aristocratic pyramid) - while still giving them a certain measure of credibility for the setting (if one considers the setting to be medieval England rather than 5th century Britain) by making "Chet" and "Bo" abbreviations for the more English-sounding "Chetworth" and "Boswell".

1377. Panel 2. The picture here is a repeat from #1376, Panel 3.

1382. Panel 5. The harpies were another example of the animal-human blends that provided so many monstrous creatures in classical mythology, looking like birds of prey with the heads of ugly women. They were instruments of punishment by the gods, who would send them to exact retribution upon those mortals who had offended them. The best-known case of this was when they were sent to plague King Phineus of Thrace, who had the gift of foresight and used it to publicly foretell events that the gods wished to remain secret. The harpies descended upon him at every mealtime, stealing the food off his table, eating most of it, and befouling whatever they could not carry away. Thanks to this treatment, Phineus was on the verge of starving to death when the Argonauts visited him on their way to Colchis to recover the Golden Fleece. Upon learning of his plight, two of the Argonauts, Calais and Zetes, the winged sons of Boreas (the god of the north wind), decided to help him; they fought against the harpies when they next showed up, and drove them away for good.

The harpies also encountered Aeneas and his companions on their way from Troy to Italy, according to Virgil in Book Three of the Aeneid. In Virgil’s account, after the harpies’ defeat at the hands of Calais and Zetes, they fled to the Strophades (a group of islands in the Ionian Sea), and made their home there. When Aeneas and his followers landed there, they helped themselves to the harpies’ herds of cattle; enraged, the harpies swooped down upon them and befouled the Trojans’ dinner, just as they had done to Phineus’s meals years before. The Trojans angrily fought back, but were unable to harm the creatures; the harpies’ leader, Celaeno, then prophesied that when the Trojans reached their homeland of Italy, they would find themselves so famished as to eat their very tables. This prophecy was fulfilled when Aeneas and his company indeed arrived in Italy, and ate their first meal there using thin loaves of bread for plates, eating the bread afterwards.

These actions led to the harpies’ portrayal as an embodiment of rapacious greed, strong enough to drive whoever was possessed by it to seize the objects that they coveted by force - just as Chet and Bo do in this scene.

1387. Panel 3. Mordred’s assembling his half-brothers here to explain his scheme to expose Lancelot and Guinevere’s love affair echoes the opening scene in Malory’s account of the destruction of Arthur’s kingdom. In Malory, when all five brothers were together, Agravain announced that they should inform Arthur of Lancelot’s affair with the Queen. Gawain, Gaheris, and Gareth all protested, and refused to take part in the scheme; Mordred alone agreed to the plan. Agravain and Mordred promptly informed Arthur, and persuaded him to let them set a trap to catch the lovers together, which led to the war between Arthur and his best knight that destroyed the Round Table.

If this was Foster’s inspiration for the scene, he made some obvious changes. One was to make Mordred, rather than Agravain, the ringleader (not surprising, given Mordred’s more prominent role in both the legend and Prince Valiant). Another was to have Gaheris and Gareth agree to assist Mordred, out of misguided devotion to family. But Gawain still refuses to take part in the plot - though here, out of friendship to Val and Aleta, rather than out of friendship to Lancelot. And, of course, the details of Mordred’s scheme are noticeably different from the scheme that he and Agravain formulated in Malory, so that Foster could have Val and his family involved in the story.

1388. Panel 3. This is one of the extremely rare moments in Prince Valiant where Gawain’s traditional northern origin, as the son of King Lot of Lothian and Orkney, plays a noteworthy role - particularly in Gawain’s displaying (for the only time in the strip) a Scottish accent. This may have been another case of influence by T. H. White, who had Gawain speak in this fashion throughout the latter part of The Once and Future King. (It is not surprising that such a trait never appeared elsewhere in Prince Valiant; it would obviously have clashed with Foster’s regular interpretation of Gawain as a witty, polished courtier.)

Panel 4. Foster differs from Malory in portraying Gareth as one of the members of Mordred’s conspiracy. In Le Morte d’Arthur, Gareth was the noblest of the sons of King Lot, and refused to participate in the vengeful schemes of his brothers, even loudly protesting their misdeeds (such as their murder of Lamorak). He refused outright to help Mordred and Agravain in their plot to expose Lancelot and Guinevere’s adultery, as did Gawain and Gaheris, for that matter. It is a pity that Foster maligned Gareth here, although it was probably necessary in order to force Gawain to face his problem of divided loyalties on his own - and he still depicted Gareth as a good and honorable knight who only participates in the scheme because of his allegiance to his family.

Panel 5. The exact meaning of Mordred’s statement that "Arthur and his father Uther Pendragon humbled our clan" is uncertain, since there are at least two different explanations for it. The first is that this refers to Arthur’s victories over King Lot when the latter went to war with him in the early years of his reign (with Uther’s own part in the "humbling" perhaps being part of his wars of unification, though this event is not found in either Geoffrey of Monmouth or Malory, and would have to be Foster’s invention). However, it is also possible that Mordred could be alluding to the war between Uther and Duke Gorlois of Cornwall over Igraine, resulting in Gorlois’s death and Igraine’s forced marriage to Uther. Morgause, the wife of King Lot and mother of all five knights in the Lothian clan, was the daughter of Gorlois and Igraine, and thus Uther’s actions in that war could be regarded as a humiliation of that same clan. While there is no sign that Mordred or his half-brothers bear any resentment towards Arthur (or Uther) over this deed in Malory or his predecessors, T. H. White made it a major part of his The Once and Future King, where Mordred and Agravain are out to gain vengeance against Arthur partly for the wrong that Uther did to Igraine and her husband. Since Foster had already shown a likely influence from T. H. White in Panel 3 above, it is all the more plausible that he had The Once and Future King in mind while writing this scene.

Lancelot’s victories over the sons of King Lot in tournaments appear in Malory, but it is in T. H. White that these become significant in helping to motivate Mordred and Agravain’s hostility towards him even Gawain is bitter about these defeats). This line of Mordred’s is another indication that Foster was drawing on White here.

Aleta’s foiling of a past scheme of Mordred’s (appropriately enough, involving a prior attempt to reveal the love affair of Lancelot and Guinevere) took place in #504-05; Lancelot’s warning to Aleta in #591, Panel 4, that Mordred would not forget her action now finds fulfilment.

1393. Panel 1. The White Horse Vale is an actual location in southern England, so called after a great chalk carving of a horse that dominates it, also known as the White Horse of Uffington. (Foster’s depiction of the horse is inaccurate; it faces right rather than left, and is drawn in a much cruder style.) Popular legend ascribes the White Horse to Alfred the Great (871-899), who had it carved as a commemmoration of his victories over the Danes (G. K. Chesterton made use of this tradition in his poem about Alfred, The Ballad of the White Horse); if this was indeed the case, then its presence in Arthurian Britain would be yet another anachronism. However, historians and archaeologists believe that the White Horse is older than Alfred, going back to pre-Roman Britain, in which case, it would be already extant by the 5th century after all.

1394. Panel 6. This marks the very first occasion in which Hengist is mentioned in Prince Valiant, over two decades after his brother Horsa was introduced. (For the details about Hengist and Horsa, see the annotation for #101, Panel 2.) Foster correctly links Hengist to Kent, and in so doing, implies once again the existence of a "Saxon Shore" in the east of Britain consisting of lands permanently won from the Britons by the Saxon chieftains, a concept which (as we have seen) has seldom appeared up to this date in Prince Valiant’s handling of Arthur’s Saxon wars. (Bethwald, on the other hand, is - so far as I know - Foster’s invention.)

1395. Panel 1. Arn and Owen’s effort to find out whether the enemy scouts are "of the West Saxons or the East Saxons" clashes with #1394, Panel 2. There, the question was whether the war band was from Kent or Essex. Essex was indeed the home of the East Saxons (from whom its name was derived), but the traditional home in Britain of the West Saxons was not Kent (which was associated with the Jutes) but Wessex (which was not mentioned in that panel at all, or elsewhere in the strip).

1398. Panel 6. The Wansdyke is a great earthwork in the south of England, stretching from Andover in Hampshire to Portishead in Avon. It has been dated to the period of the Saxon invasions in the 5th and 6th centuries, although it is unknown whether it was built by the Britons or by the Saxons. (Arn ascribes it to Vortigern in the next panel, but legend never associates the Wansdyke with him; this linkage seems to have been entirely Foster’s invention.) The name derives from Woden, suggesting that the Saxons were awed enough by the dyke to associate it with the chief of their gods during the time before they were converted to Christianity.

The exact purpose of the Wansdyke is unknown. While Prince Valiant interprets it as a defensive work, it has been suggested that it was made as a boundary marker instead, and was not meant to be used in war.

Panel 7. This is the only time that Vortigern is mentioned in Prince Valiant, and in an untraditional role at that, for as mentioned in the commentary on Panel 6 above, he is never connected to the Wansdyke in any of the legends about him.

Vortigern occupies the hazy ground somewhere between history and legend, though he appears to have been a real person. He is first alluded to (though not by name) in Gildas’s De Excidio Britanniae, which mentions how a certain "superbus tyrannus" or "proud tyrant" and his council foolishly invited the Saxons into Britain to help them against the invading Picts and Scots, only to be subsequently betrayed by the Saxons. Gildas does not mention the name of this "tyrant", but historians and scholars have generally agreed that he is to be identified with the Vortigern of later accounts. His next mention appears in Book One of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by the Venerable Bede, where he is named as the British king who invited the Saxons under Hengist and Horsa to Britain in the 5th century; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives a similar account. The Historia Brittonum has more to say about Vortigern, claiming that he became King of Britain in or around A.D. 425, and describing how he received Hengist and Horsa when they landed at Thanet in Kent and persuaded them to ally with him against the Picts. To strengthen his alliance with them, Vortigern married Hengist’s lovely daughter Renwein. The Britons disapproved of Vortigern’s holding the Saxons in such favor, however, particularly since they were pagans, and at last rebelled against him and had him replaced by his eldest son Vortimer (the product of a previous marriage). Vortigern retreated temporarily into Wales, where he met the boy prophet Ambrosius (see below for details); after Vortimer’s death, Vortigern attempted to make peace with Hengist only to be betrayed by him (see the annotation for #1062, Panel 7 for the details). Two contradictory accounts exist of his end in the Historia; one had him spend his last days as a homeless wanderer, shunned and hated by all, until he died from grief, while the other says that he was pursued by a certain Germanus, hiding from him in one fortress after another, until he was finally consumed in a fire descending from Heaven.

It fell to Geoffrey of Monmouth to provide a full story for Vortigern in his History of the Kings of Britain. In Geoffrey’s account, Vortigern was originally the ruler of the Gewissei, a British tribe apparently located in Gwent or southeastern Wales, during the reign of King Constantine of Britain, Arthur’s grandfather. Constantine was murdered by a treacherous Pictish bodyguard, leaving behind three sons: Constans, the eldest, had entered a monastery, and the younger two, Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther, were still only children, which presented a very difficult problem over who was to succeed Constantine to the throne. Vortigern, a cunning and ambitious man, saw his opportunity, and persuaded Constans to leave his monastery and become King of Britain, breaking the vows that he had sworn when he had become a monk. Vortigern proceeded to become the puppet-master to the inexperienced and apparently none-too-bright Constans, persuaded him to form a bodyguard made up of Pictish mercenaries, and then manipulated the Picts into murdering Constans, after which he put them to death in order to ensure their silence and made himself King. Ambrosius and Uther hurriedly fled across the Channel to Brittany, where the local king, Budic, gave them shelter.

Vortigern did not enjoy his usurped throne for long, however. The Picts in the north of the island were angry at him for exploiting and murdering their compatriots, and proceeded to invade Britain to seek revenge upon him. They were getting the better of the Britons on the battlefield when three longboats filled with Saxons landed at the isle of Thanet in Kent, captained by the brothers Hengist and Horsa. Vortigern urged them to assist him against the Picts, promising them land to settle on in return for their services. Hengist and Horsa agreed to this, and drove back the Picts. However, they now cunningly persuaded Vortigern to keep them in his service, particularly since Ambrosius and Uther had now grown up and were planning to return to Britain to reclaim the throne that was rightfully theirs; with Vortigern’s permission, they sent messengers to their homeland inviting more Saxons to come to Britain, and more after that. The reinforcements also brought with them Hengist’s beautiful daughter Renwein (or Rowena), who first appeared to Vortigern at a banquet where she served him wine. Vortigern was immediately struck by her loveliness, and between this and the muddling of his wits through Renwein’s wine combined, readily granted Hengist still more land, if he could take her to wife.

Vortigern’s marrying Renwein and allowing Hengist to encourage still more Saxons to settle in Britain alarmed his subjects, particularly since the Saxons were pagans who showed no interest in converting to Christianity. Many of the Saxons were even marrying British women, leading to fears among the Britons that they would lead Britain away from the Christian faith. Therefore, Vortigern’s nobles, led by his three sons from a pre-Renwein marriage, Vortimer, Pascent, and Catigern, urged Vortigern to break off his alliance with the Saxons and banish them. When he refused, they deposed him and placed Vortimer on the throne in his stead. Vortimer immediately went to war with the Saxons, and got the upper hand on them until Renwein poisoned him. Vortigern promptly returned to power and entered into fresh negotiations with Hengist, leading to the latter’s treacherous attack on the Britons during a parley at the future site of Stonehenge. Afterwards, Vortigern fled into the mountains of northern Wales, where he met the young Merlin, who prophesied his downfall.

In the meantime, Ambrosius and Uther now decided to return to Britain to deliver it from the Saxons and claim the crown that was rightfully theirs. Their first act was to besiege Vortigern at the castle of Genoreu in southeastern Wales. They set it ablaze (apparently it was a wooden fortress - which fits what we know about the real 5th century Britain), and Vortigern perished in the conflagration.

The legends agree in portraying Vortigern as a thoroughly villainous figure, wicked and treacherous (though, in his betrayal by the crafty Hengist, he does gain a certain pathos). Whether the real Vortigern was like this is unknown; in all fairness, the one act that can be ascribed to him (his employment of the Saxons in defending Britain) was a normal policy procedure among the Romans at that time, enlisting the aid of barbarians as auxiliary troops. Perhaps the legend of him as an evil tyrant was merely a scapegoating for a plan gone wrong. We will never know for certain, however.

In passing, it might be added that the Vortigern of Prince Valiant would hardly have been able to have had a similar career to that of his counterpart in Geoffrey of Monmouth, since Hengist and Horsa are portrayed in the strip as contemporaries of Arthur and his generation, rather than of his predecessors, and consequently could not have had dealings with him - short of being gifted with a very long life-span. (It is tempting to wonder, though, whether his building the Wansdyke as a defensive barrier against "the fierce tribes of the north" could be a reflection of the Vortigern of history and legend’s troubles with the Picts.)

1399. Panel 2. This is the first mention of Badon Hill in Prince Valiant (see the annotation for #1430, Panel 4 below). Judging from the context of its geographical location, Foster located it at Liddington Hill, one of the proposed sites of Badon; more about this below.

Panel 3. Ananias appears in the Book of Acts (5: 1-11) in the New Testament as a black sheep of the early Christian community. At that time, it was the custom of the early Christians to sell their lands and possessions and donate the proceeds of the sale to the young Church. Ananias and his wife Sapphira sold their land, but kept part of the money to themselves while giving the rest to the Church, pretending that they were donating the full price. Peter rebuked them for their dishonesty, whereupon both dropped dead on the spot, apparently out of terror over their crime having been detected. Since that time, Ananias’s name has stood as a byword for lying. (Arn’s evoking "the shade of Ananias" is astonishing, given that Ananias’s falsehoods were exposed; the boy can hardly be wishing the same fate on himself! Of course, the Saxon chieftain to whom he is speaking is obviously no St. Peter.)

1405. Panel 4. The choice of "Glandon" for the name of the castle that Count Brecey offers Hugo is unfortunate; the name seems astonishingly English for a place in Brittany.

1408. Panel 6. Foster’s choice of "The Empty Sheath" as the title of next week’s instalment seems premature; Val does not notice Hugo’s empty sheath until #1410 as opposed to #1409.

1416. Panel 2. Foster now correctly names King Ban (rather than King Bors, as in #84, Panel 8 and #288, Panel 3) as the father of Sir Lancelot, correcting his past mistake.

1418. Panel 3. Arthur’s policy of allowing defeated Saxons to settle peacefully in Britain was depicted in the Kent campaign that Val played a leading part in, in #1117-26.

Panel 5. Foster once more brings "three kings of Cornwall" into Prince Valiant, but these kings are different from the ones who had appeared during Val’s last foray into Cornwall. (Foster evidently did not worry much about internal consistency, and Val’s encounter with Och Synwyn had taken place so many years before in the strip that it is likely that neither Foster nor his readers at the time would have remembered its details.)

VOLUME THIRTY-TWO: THE BATTLE OF BADON HILL.

1419. Panel 4. Foster alludes to Val’s previous visit to Glastonbury during his investigation of the Holy Grail, although in his original description, it was an abbey being built there (an actual feature of Glastonbury) rather than a cathedral.

1420. Panel 4. For information on the Second Sight, see the annotation for #1141, Panel 3. The Evil Eye was the power that a sorcerer possessed to curse someone merely by staring at him.

1421. Panel 3. Foster again engages in retrocon; Val, during his boyhood at Camelot at the beginning of the strip, was never shown studying under Merlin.

1430. Panel 4. The Battle of Badon was first mentioned in De Excidio Britanniae. While the main purpose of Gildas' book was to denounce the corruption and low morals that were rife in the Britain of his time, he began with a brief account of recent historical events leading up to the present (at the time of his writing), including the early wars between the Britons and the Saxons. According to Gildas (in a passage that, unfortunately, was not well-written and whose precise meaning has been much debated over by historians), this struggle reached a climax at the siege of a place called Mount Badon where the Britons won a great victory over the Saxons; Gildas also states (apparently; his Latin is particularly confused here) that it took place in the year of his birth, forty-four years before the time of his writing. (An alternate reading of this passage is that the battle took place forty-four years after the Saxons first began landing in Britain, an interpretation used by the Venerable Bede in the First Book of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.)

Gildas says nothing more about the battle. However, by the 9th century, the notion had arisen that the leader of the Britons in that battle was Arthur. Two works apparently written during that time took that view. One was the Historia Brittonum, which made the Battle of Badon the last of twelve major battles that Arthur fought against the Saxons and won (it is the only one of these battles, incidentally, which found its way into Prince Valiant); it also states that Arthur personally slew 960 Saxons during the fighting. The other was the Annales Cambriae, which dates the Battle of Badon to 518, and claims that it lasted for three days and three nights, and that during this time, Arthur bore the Cross upon his shoulders. (The details of both works indicate that a strong element of legend had already crept into the account.)

Geoffrey of Monmouth included the Battle of Badon in his History of the Kings of Britain as well, locating it at Bath and investing it with an epic flavor (giving a detailed account of Arthur arming himself for the battle, and a speech by the Archbishop Dubricius of Caerleon to inspire the Britons). As medieval Arthurian literature shifted its focus from pseudo-chronicle accounts of Arthur’s battles to romances about the individual adventures of Arthur’s knights, however, the battle declined in importance; Malory does not even mention it, making Arthur’s early triumphs those over the rebellious King Lot. Tennyson had Lancelot describe the battle (and the earlier eleven battles preceding it from the Historia Brittonum) to Elaine of Astolat and her family in his Idylls, and as modern-day Arthurian literature shifted its focus increasingly towards the hypothetical Arthur of the 5th and 6th centuries, rather than the purely legendary Arthur of medieval romance, the Battle of Badon resurfaced once again to be portrayed in such works as Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset as one of the key events of the great king’s career. Foster himself clearly decided to do the same in his strip, which was already taking its inspiration in his depiction of Arthurian Britain as much from the investigation of what really happened in post-Roman Britain as from the chivalric tales of Sir Thomas Malory and his fellow romancers.

Historians are still divided as to whether Arthur really did fight at the Battle of Badon or not; the fact that Gildas never mentioned him and that the earliest mentions of Arthur in connection with Badon in the Annales and Historia contain obviously legendary elements has certainly cast much doubt upon his presence there. The exact location of Mount Badon has also been debated. The strip follows one theory in locating it at the hill-fort of Liddington Castle, but Badbury Rings in Dorset has also been suggested, as has Bath and even a couple of northern hill-forts. (Although Gildas called the battle a siege, we do not know who was besieging whom, and whether the "mount" part of Badon indicates a fortified stronghold or merely a hilltop.)

Foster takes his own liberties with the Battle of Badon, of course. He naturally focuses on the achievements of his invented characters of Prince Valiant and Arn over those of the canonical figures of Arthur, Lancelot, and Gawain, for a start. He gives the role of Arthur’s adversary at Badon to Hengist, even though all the legendary accounts of Arthur’s Saxon wars portray Hengist as long-dead by the time that the battle took place. He also has the battle take place during a single day rather than the three days that the Annales Cambriae assigned to it, and there is no mention made of Arthur bearing a cross upon his shoulders. And the internal chronology of Prince Valiant obviously does not allow the battle to be fought in the year 518, in light of Val’s earlier adventures during precisely datable historical events such as the Vandal sack of Rome that belong to the first half of the 450’s. But Foster still makes it clear that it was a decisive victory over the Saxons, which was its most crucial feature.

1432. Panel 4. A reference to the biblical story of David’s victory over Goliath (I Samuel 17).

1436. Panel 3. Foster introduces Ailianora out of the blue, with no explanation as to who she is (an occasional weakness of his, which he had also used with Rufus Regan when he first appeared with #693, Panel 3).

1442. Panel 1. Foster again uses the notion of Prince Valiant’s story being taken from an "ancient manuscript" (the first time being when he depicted the young Geoffrey as penning the story in #754, Panel 5). This time he makes use of it as a means of hurriedly transporting Val from Camelot to Thule, with the assumption that the illegible scroll covered the transitional period that Foster presumably did not wish to bother with (or maybe had no ideas for) - though it is doubtful that the period between the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Badon and Aguar’s summons was a long one, since Val and his family (particularly the children) seem no older in Panel 5 than in the preceding panels and pages.

Foster’s description of a scroll rendered illegible with age also evokes the unfortunate fact that medieval manuscripts often were prone to decay (when they did not suffer from even worse mishaps), in a manner that would render them fragmentary. For example, the only extant copy of the great Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf not only suffered from the passage of time, but was also damaged by fire in 1731; consequently, a few passages from it have been lost to us (though fortunately not enough to make it unintelligible). Perhaps this helped to inspire Foster’s depiction of the vicissitudes suffered by the original manuscript of the saga of the Singing Sword.

As a delightful side-touch, the scholars depicted examining the manuscript and attempting to piece together the story are given the clothing styles of either the late 18th century, or the beginning of the 19th century, providing us with a glimpse at a "fictional history" for Foster’s imaginary source.

1443. Panel 4. Sognefjord is on the southwestern coast of Norway, north of Bergen and south of Trondheim.

Panel 5. The name "Skogul" is a curious one for the antagonist in this adventure of Val’s, for it appears in the Eddas as one of the Valkyries in Odin’s following. While it is thus a genuine Norse name, it was also borne by a female character, while the Skogul of Prince Valiant is male. Most likely this is simply a slip on Foster’s part, though given the wild and warlike nature of the Valkyries, it would not be otherwise inappropriate for a savage invader with a touch of madness about him to assume one of their names.

Oslofjord is, of course, adjacent to the present-day city of Oslo, modern capital of Norway. Oslofjord is in the southeast of Norway; from this, we can roughly plot Skogul’s course as heading northwest towards Trondheim (at or near Aguar’s castle), presumably hoping to catch it in a pincer movement with his fleet (which would be on the western coast).

1446. Panel 6. Once again, a Viking of Aguar’s Thule incorrectly invokes "Wotan" as opposed to "Odin".

1454. Panel 5. Foster here draws on the theory that the dreaded berserkers of Viking legend entered their fury through eating hallucinogenic mushrooms.

1456. Panel 2. On both this page and the next, Foster reprints several panels from his account of Val’s journey to North America, several years before. This panel is reprinted from #521, Panel 6.

Foster here also bestows the nickname of the "Sea Hawk" upon Ulfrun, which same title he would repeat during the next few pages. However, he never referred to the Viking raider by that name during his original account of Val’s pursuit of him to the New World.

Panel 3. Here Foster reprints #526, Panel 2.

Panel 4. This is a reprint of #527, Panel 5. Foster also has Arn echo his original remark that Val and Ulfrun’s struggle over Aleta kept them from taking full note of the fact that they had increased the boundaries of the known world in reaching Iceland, although it sounds less convincing from the mouth of a boy living amidst these events than it does from the pen of a 20th century narrator with the benefit of knowing the fifteen centuries of history intervening.

Panel 5. Here Foster reprints #531, Panel 5.

Panel 6. Here we have a reprint of #529, Panel 6.

Panel 7. Here Foster reprints #534, Panel 2.

Panel 8. This is a reprint of #535, Panel 5.

1457. Panel 2. Here Foster reprints #538, Panel 2.

Panel 3. This is a reprint of #549, Panel 6.

Panel 4. Here we have a reprint of #573, Panel 6.

Hatha errs in his account of Val and Aleta’s winter in North America, when he claims that it was not followed by a spring famine; in the original account of Val’s sojourn by Niagara, there was indeed a spring famine, so severe that Val had to share his provisions with the starving Indians and embark on a trading mission with the Hurons to replenish his supplies afterwards. But Hatha’s revised story does fit better with Aleta’s "sun-goddess" role.

Panel 5. This is a reprint of #576, Panel 4.

1461. Panel 4. Foster here alludes to Aguar’s decree all the way back in #358, Panel 5, when he promised to his Viking subjects, in giving them permission to return to their sea-faring, "We will reward each one who opens a new trade route and honor him who discovers new lands". The specifics of the reward that Aguar names in the next panel, however, are only introduced here for the first time.

VOLUME THIRTY-THREE: TILLICUM’S COUNSEL.

1467. Panel 4. This marks the second use of "Greek fire" in the series (for the first, see #755, Panel 7).

1476. Panel 2. Foster reused art here from #527, Panel 4. While Foster had already made free use of "recycled" scenes for his flashbacks (where its presence would certainly be not only understandable, but even inevitable), he also made a fairly substantial use of reprints for scenes from Arn’s own visit to the New World.

Panel 5. The art here is a reprint from #540, Panel 8.

1477. Panel 8. Foster reused this scene from #569, Panel 9. In the original, the messenger was sent to summon the various tribes to the council where Val and Aleta would return the sacred mace.

1478. Panel 3. This drawing of Tillicum is a reprint from #577, Panel 2.

1479. Panel 5. Presumably the elder is speaking of the fight with Ulfrun’s men (described in #530, Panel 5).

1483. Panel 1. Once again, Foster reprints the scene of Aleta’s farewell to the Indians and promise of Arn’s return from #576, Panel 4.

There is a chronology nit in this scene. Earlier, Foster had described Val’s journey to the New World as having taken place fourteen years before Arn’s (in #1475, Panel 7). Now, Foster describes Val and Aleta’s departure from North America as taking place fourteen years ago. Since no more than a few weeks can have gone by between #1475 and #1483 in terms of the internal chronology of Prince Valiant, this must be a slip on Foster’s part; the correct dating of Aleta’s farewell should have been "thirteen years ago" rather than "fourteen years ago".

1490. Panel 4. The Ottawa (after whom the capital of Canada is named) were one of the Indian tribes of Algonquin descent; their name derives from the Algonquin word "adawe", meaning "to trade". It was an apt name for them, since they were indeed great traders (particularly with the Chippewa and the Potawatomi, who, together with them, made up the Council of Three Fires, as well as with the French when they came to North America). During the struggle between the British and the French over possession of North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ottawa sided with the French until the latter were forced to cede control of their colonies to the British following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. In the immediate aftermath, an Ottawa chief named Pontiac, concerned about the increasing encroachment of British settlers into the lands of the Ottawa and their neighbors, formed an alliance with many of the neighboring tribes and launched a counter-attack upon the British; while initially successful, in the end, the British got the upper hand (particularly after the Ottawa failed to capture the two key British forts at Detroit and Pittsburgh) and Pontiac was forced to sue for peace. (He was assassinated in 1769 by an Illinois Indian suspected of working for the British.) One consequence of the war with Pontiac was that the British government, hoping to avoid further such outbreaks, issued orders to the colonists in North America, forbidding them to settle west of the Appalachians; this measure turned into one of the bones of contention between the colonists and the home government in London that led to the American Revolution. The Ottawa were eventually mostly relocated by the United States government to first Kansas, then Oklahoma, though some remained in Canada and Michigan.

1493. Panel 3. Foster reuses this panel from #539, Panel 3, repeating not only the art, but even the text!

1502. Panel 4. Arn’s childhood dog, "Sir Gawain", last seen in #1110, reappears here (though left unnamed in the text, it is clear enough that it is him).

1505. Panel 5. The Iroquois are first mentioned here. (They actually called themselves the "Haudenosaunee", or "people of the longhouse", after the great buildings in which they dwelt. The name "Iroquois" derives from the name that their enemies the Algonquins bestowed on them, "ireohkwa", meaning "adders".) Foster errs, however, in portraying them as a tribe; the Iroquois were really an organization of six Indian tribes: the Cayuga, the Mohawk, the Oneida, the Onondaga, the Seneca, and the Tuscarora. Also, their presence in 5th century North America is another anachronism; in real history, the Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca formed this confederation over a thousand years later, in the latter half of the 16th century (the Tuscarora joined them in the early 18th century). Foster was transplanting "Native American politics" back by about a thousand years (though it is not entirely inappropriate for a strip that portrays 5th century Britain as enjoying the culture of the High Middle Ages and permits the Vikings to reach North America five hundred years before Leif Ericson).

As in Prince Valiant, the Iroquois pursued an aggressive policy towards their neighbors (thanks largely to their desire to obtain an additional supply of furs to use in trading with the British and Dutch); thanks partly to their larger numbers (due to their being a confederacy) and partly to their being supplied with guns by their trading partners, they were successful, driving the Hurons and Erie from their homes and expanding their lands to stretch from the Hudson to the Illinois, and from the Ottawa to the Tennessee. They formed an alliance with the British during the wars between the British and the French over the control of North America, and at least two Iroquois leaders even visited Great Britain and paid a call on the royal court. One of these was Thayendanega (also known as Joseph Brant) who led the Iroquois during the American Revolution; since the Iroquois saw the American colonists as a greater danger to them than they did the British, they sided with the British Crown in the war. George Washington responded to Iroquois attacks on those parts of the colonies close to Iroquois lands by sending Generals John Sullivan and James Clinton against them in 1779; Sullivan and Clinton burned down the Iroquois longhouses and crops, forcing them to vacate their lands and fade into powerlessness.

1506. Panel 3. The Indian tribe that befriended Val and his family in the New World is identified as the Algonquins for the first time. The Algonquins lived to the north of the St. Lawrence during early colonial times (the late 16th and early 17th centuries) and, like the Hurons, became allies and trading partners with the French when the latter began settling in North America. Unfortunately, they suffered many defeats at the hands of the British-allied Mohawks, and were even temporarily driven from their homes, ushering in their decline. (Foster’s depiction of the Algonquins as being beset by the Iroquois might be a reflection of their misfortunes from the Mohawks - who were a member of the Iroquois Confederation - in actual history.)

VOLUME THIRTY-FOUR: MORDRED’S REVENGE.

1516. Panel 3. Foster’s depiction of Arn celebrating his fifteenth birthday in the New World supports his revised chronology as opposed to the original one (see the annotation for #1483, Panel 1). Otherwise, it would be Arn’s fourteenth birthday. (Later on in the strip, in #1826, Panel 1, Foster would forget this and describe Arn as still being fourteen.)

1519. Panel 5. Despite this treaty, as mentioned above, in the end the Iroquois would all but destroy the Hurons (see the annotation for #563, Panel 8).

1520. Panel 4. Foster introduces two more real Indian tribes into Prince Valiant. The Mohegans were an offshoot of the Pequots, a prominent Native American people in New England (whose name would later on be bestowed by Herman Melville upon Captain Ahab’s whaling vessel in Moby-Dick); they first entered history as a distinct nation when one of the lesser chiefs of the Pequot, named Uncas (the son-in-law of Sassacus, the most powerful of the Pequot chiefs), left the Pequot lands and settled with his followers close to Long Island Sound. (This took place in or around 1637, making the Mohegans’ presence in the 5th century yet another of Foster’s anachronisms.) They became allies of the English colonists in New England and even helped them defeat the Pequot in 1637 (after which Uncas became the leader of those Pequot that survived the war), but were eventually dispossessed by them. Historians are divided as to whether it was the Mohegans or another local tribe with a similar name, the Mahicans, that were the original for the Mohigans in James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novels such as The Last of the Mohigans (though one of the major characters in Cooper’s book being named Uncas supports the Mohegans’ claim).

The Mohawks (who called themselves the Kanienkahegan or "people of the place of flint"; "Mohawk", which means "eaters of men", was a name bestowed upon them by their Algonquian neighbors) were indeed one of the members of the Iroquois Confederation (though they would not join it for over a thousand years after the time period of Prince Valiant). They lived in the Mohawk river valley, occupying the eastern reaches of the Iroquois Confederation’s territory. The most famous of the Iroquois leaders, Thayendanega or Joseph Brant (see the annotation on #1505, Panel 3), was a Mohawk. The Mohawks shared the fate suffered by the Iroquois Confederacy in general after their defeat by Generals Sullivan and Clinton in 1779.

1529. Panel 3. The Viking tournament shows how Foster’s interpretation of Thule changed over the years. In #112, Panel 8, Val was displayed as taking part in regular tournaments in Thule in a conventional medieval-Arthurian setting of knights jousting on horseback. Now, however, not only do the Vikings display no understanding of the concept of the tournament being an athletic event rather than a battle (though early medieval tournaments suffered from a similar outlook on the part of the knights participating in them), but Val does not even make an effort to give this tourney the trappings of a knightly sport. The Vikings fight on foot rather than on horseback, and in their regular Norse gear rather than in the arms and armor of the High Middle Ages. Jousting would be unthinkable in this setting.

1532. Panel 6. Foster leaves the question that Aguar sets in his conference with Arn and his companions on the second journey to the New World unanswered; no mention is made of which of the two options Aguar would take past this point. Perhaps this is not surprising, for it would have too blatantly contradicted real history to have had a 5th century European ruler either successfully colonizing North America or establishing trade relations with its inhabitants (though Foster could have always had Aguar make an effort at either goal, only to fail and afterwards decide to leave the lands across the Atlantic alone). In any case, Foster himself, I suspect, was not interested in this question; to him, the true significance of Arn’s expedition to the New World lay in its serving as a crucial step during his maturation from boy to man, a means of teaching him how to bear the burdens of leadership. The first two panels of #1533 support this, with their focus on the impact that the adventure had had upon Arn (and Hatha).

Panel 7. Technically, the Picts and the Caledonians were one and the same in actual history. However, the evidence in this story suggests that, when Foster writes "Caledonians", he means "Scots", who were indeed a distinct people from the Picts. The Scots were originally Irish settlers who emigrated to southwestern Scotland in the early 6th century, and founded the kingdom of Dalriada (now Argyll). From there, they spread throughout the rest of Scotland, and according to legend, seized control from the Picts in 843, under the leadership of one Kenneth mac Alpin, who afterwards became the first King of Scotland. Foster makes no mention of the Scots’ Irish origins in this story, treating them as simply another ethnic group in Scotland, independent from the Picts and at odds with them, a rivalry which Val will exploit in this adventure.

Howard’s mention that Arthur "will not admit" that Mordred may be the one responsible for the uneasy league between the Picts and Scots ties in with the admission later on in the story (#1546, Panel 3) that Arthur looks the other way where Mordred’s treachery is concerned.

1534. Panel 2. "The clans" is apparently another term used in this adventure of Val’s for the Scots (as opposed to the Picts).

1535. Panel 1. Foster here repeats his inaccurate claim (originally appearing in #291, Panel 3) that Hadrian’s Wall was built for the purpose of holding back the Picts and other northern tribes; again, despite this popular notion, it was not designed as a defensive barrier.

1536. Panel 2. The "mystery of King Arthur’s birth" is most likely a reference to the fact that, in Malory, Arthur was, immediately after being born, given up by Uther to Merlin in secret; Merlin then conveyed the infant Arthur to Sir Ector, entrusting him with the future king’s upbringing. Thus, nobody (aside from Merlin) knew Arthur’s true parentage at the time that Arthur drew out the Sword from the Stone. Even after Arthur performed this feat, he and the Britons in general apparently (judging from the story as told in Le Morte d’Arthur) still did not know that he was the son of Uther Pendragon and Igraine; Merlin announced this to King Lot and his allies on the eve of their first battle with Arthur, but they did not believe him. After Arthur unwittingly committed incest with Morgause, Merlin told him this information again (as part of his rebuke to the young king for his sin), but Arthur himself did not believe him, even when Sir Ector and Sir Ulfius both seconded the wizard’s words. He announced that he would only believe it if Igraine herself told him; when she came to court, she confessed that all that she knew was that the son which Uther had begotten upon her was taken away from her by Merlin as soon as he was born, and she had never learned what happened to him afterwards. In the end, however, both Arthur and (presumably) the rest of Britain were satisfactorally convinced of the new king’s parentage in this meeting; at least, the issue was never again raised in Malory’s work.

The mystery surrounding Arthur’s birth appears in Tennyson’s Idylls as well, if with different details. For one thing, Tennyson includes a strong hint that Arthur may not have been the son of Uther and Igraine (not surprisingly, given that the circumstances of their conception of Arthur would have been embarrassing from the perspective of Victorian morality), but came from a far grander lineage. In "The Coming of Arthur", Bellicent (Tennyson’s version of Morgause) tells King Leodogran, Guinevere’s father, that Merlin’s tutor Bleys had told her upon his deathbed that, on the night of Uther Pendragon’s death, Bleys and Merlin had descended from the promontory upon which Tintagel Castle stands to the seashore; during the descent, they briefly glimpsed in the heavens "a ship, the shape thereof/ A dragon wing’d, and all from stem to stern/ Bright with a shining people on the decks" (lines 373-75) - Tennyson’s adaptation of the dragon-shaped comet that heralded Arthur’s birth in Geoffrey of Monmouth? When they reached the shore, they both watched the waves rolling in, until the ninth wave brought with it a baby straight "to Merlin’s feet,/ Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried, ‘The King! Here is an heir for Uther!’" (lines 383-85). The baby, of course, according to Bleys, is Arthur; when Bellicent had asked Merlin about it, he merely answered her in riddles, including the words "From the great deep to the great deep he goes" (line 410), words which Sir Bedivere recalls when Arthur is taken away to Avalon after the final battle with Mordred in "The Passing of Arthur".

Foster does not explain what the foundation is of Mordred’s conviction that he, rather than Arthur, has a stronger legal claim to the throne. Even if Arthur truly was not the son of Uther and Igraine, Mordred (according to the traditional account of his family as found in Malory, which Foster followed in Prince Valiant) would not automatically be the rightful king of Britain under the laws of succession. He was the youngest of the sons of King Lot and Queen Morgause of Lothian and Orkney, with Gawain, Agravaine, Gaheris, and Gareth all ahead of him in line for the throne, even if Lot’s family did have a firm claim upon the crown (Morgause was only Uther’s stepdaughter, the child of Igraine by her first marriage to Duke Gorlois of Cornwall, and therefore would not be his legal heir). And obviously Mordred could scarcely use his incestuous birth as Arthur’s son to support his claim; not only would it be undone if Arthur was not the legitimate ruler, but the very nature of Mordred’s conception would be enough to debar him. Most likely, the basis of Mordred’s claim is merely that he is stronger and more ruthless than Arthur, with no support from any law other than that of "might makes right".

1538. Panel 2. Foster again maligns poor Gareth in calling him "stupid" and portraying him as once more an accomplice of Mordred (for the first occasion, see the annotation for #1388, Panel 4), which he was not in Malory. Since, however, Foster later on portrays Gaheris rather than Gareth as a co-plotter with Mordred and Agravain in #1546, Panel 5, it is possible that he intended it to be Gaheris who was present with Mordred, and that Gareth’s name here is merely a slip of the pen.

1542. Panel 3. Foster again alludes to the Roman destruction of the Druidic religion in Britain.

1545. Panel 5. Mordred alludes to his traditional family ties in Malory by describing himself as a member of the "Lothian clan". By his use of the word "clan", Foster may be implying here that he saw Mordred and his family as Scots; in the traditional legend, however, they were portrayed as Britons (the Scots at this point in history being invaders or settlers rather than established inhabitants of what is now Scotland).

1546. Panel 3. This passage contains the strongest hint in all of Prince Valiant (even more so than the occasional mentions of Mordred as Gawain’s half-brother) to the account of Mordred’s conception in Malory, and the French romances before it. According to these works, Mordred was Arthur’s own son, as the result of a brief liaision in his youth with Queen Morgause; Arthur was, at the time, unaware that Uther Pendragon and Igraine were his parents and that Morgause was thereby his half-sister, but his ignorance did not change the fact that he had committed incest, and this incest would produce Mordred, who would destroy Arthur’s kingdom when he grew up.

Presumably Foster alluded to the nature of Mordred’s relationship to Arthur in such vague terms because a direct description of incest would have been taboo in a Sunday newspaper comic strip that would be read by the family. He was definitely aware of the dark nature of Mordred’s birth, however, commenting once in a 1974 interview with Bill Crouch Jr. for Cartoonist Profiles, "They [the people of King Arthur’s time] were forever knocking each other off and even Arthur is supposed to have sired an illegitimate son (Modred) [sic] by his sister Morgawse [sic]. There are still some juicy scandals going around about the days of King Arthur." (Kane, p. 116.)

Foster’s description of Arthur constantly turning a blind eye to Mordred’s treacheries (indeed, since in Prince Valiant everyone in Camelot seems well aware of Mordred’s villainy, Arthur’s failure to recognize this would have to stem from either extreme stupidity or a deliberate refusal to see the man’s true nature) may well have been influenced by T. H. White, whose Arthur knows that Mordred hates him and is plotting his ruin, yet does nothing about it because of the family bond between them. White’s Arthur feels a sense of fatherly affection for Mordred, who is his only son, and is thus unwilling to move against him, no matter what the provocation, finding ways to excuse all his evil deeds as the actions of an unhappy and frustrated young man. This reluctance to act is strengthened by Arthur’s guilt over the wrongs that he and his father, Uther Pendragon, have committed against Mordred and Morgause’s family, including the war with Gorlois over Igraine and an attempt by Arthur himself to drown Mordred at birth to prevent him from fulfilling his dark destiny. He explains his concerns to Lancelot and Guinevere near the beginning of The Candle of the Wind (the fourth and final book of The Once and Future King), even urging Lancelot not to take action against Mordred, no matter what crimes he may be guilty of. (Hence Mordred is the only member of the party that ambushes Lancelot in Guinevere’s chamber shortly afterwards whom Lancelot does not slay.)

But even in Malory, Arthur is portrayed (though without any attention being called to it) as having apparently overlooked Mordred’s offenses (such as participating in the murder of Lamorak), to such an extent that he sees no harm in naming him his regent while he leaves for France to fight Lancelot at the end of his reign. Arthur’s blindness, in fact, was necessitated by the development of Mordred’s story as the Arthurian cycle grew more complex during the Middle Ages. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, Mordred is not guilty of any treachery or villainous deeds at the time that Arthur entrusts the rule of Britain to him during his own absence; his rebellion is his first criminal act. However, the French prose romances and Malory, presumably inspired by his reputation as the betrayer of Arthur, gave him a long career as a false knight, during which he commits all manner of foul deeds (such as murdering Sir Lamorak and Sir Dinadan), and is recognized as a trouble-maker by his peers. At the same time, they had to preserve Geoffrey’s account of how Mordred was in charge of Britain in Arthur’s final days, with the result that Arthur is depicted as appointing an open criminal to the regency. Suggesting that Arthur was making allowances for Mordred on account of their family bonds was probably the best way of handling this discrepancy.

Panel 4. Foster moves Val and his family back into the south tower of Camelot, apparently having forgotten that Aleta had moved them out of it into their own private manor in #1384-85. In fact, he here displays an unusual sense of continuity, ignoring his having earlier relocated the quarters of Val’s family at Camelot, but correctly remembering where they had originally lived before the move!

Panel 5. The fact that Gaheris is here one of Mordred’s co-conspirators with Agravaine, rather than Gareth, suggests that Foster’s mention of Gareth as present in Mordred’s camp in #1538, Panel 2, was a case of thinking one name but writing another, rather than an actual case of making Gareth into a traitor.

1552. Panel 1. Foster not only recalls Arthur’s victory at Badon, but once more alludes to the Quest of the Holy Grail (which, in Prince Valiant, was portrayed as beginning even before the Battle of Badon Hill) and the toll that it exacted upon Arthur’s knights.

Panel 5. Llantwit (also known as Llantwit Major) is not an invention of Foster’s, but an actual place in Glamorgan, which was of some prominence in the real "Arthurian Age". It was the site of a monastery founded by St. Illtud (whom legend makes a former warrior in Arthur’s service, who gave up the sword for the tonsure) at some point in the early 6th century. Illtud was famous as a great teacher, and included among his pupils St. Gildas and King Maelgwn of Gwynedd. No reference is made to the monastery in this story, however.

Panel 7. Foster again makes Merlin’s tower part of Camelot rather than (as in the earliest days of the strip) a remote retreat of the great wizard’s, standing apart from the court.

VOLUME THIRTY-FIVE: DOPPELGANGER.

TITLE: A doppelganger is a "double". In legend and folklore, a doppelganger was an omen, usually foretelling great harm to come to the person who beheld it and whose shape it took, often even a sign of imminent death. Foster provides a more natural role for the "doppelganger" here, as simply a lookalike to Prince Valiant (following the time-honored "double" concept that has even played a prominent role in such classic works as Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper).

1553. Panel 4. Aphrodite’s rising from the sea-foam is a familiar Greek myth (familiar particularly thanks to Botticelli’s famous painting), though no mention was made in the tale of mermaids accompanying her.

In Greek mythology, Leda was the mother of Helen of Troy by Zeus, who visited her in the guise of a swan (which became the inspiration for many paintings and a famous poem by W. B. Yeats). She laid two eggs, one of which hatched into Helen and Polydeuces or Pollux, her offspring by Zeus, the other of which hatched into Clytemnestra (the future wife and murderess of Agamemnon) and Castor, her offspring by her husband, King Tyndareus of Sparta; Castor and Pollux became the famous Dioscuri, twin heroes of classical myth. However, despite Foster’s statement here, Leda was not a water nymph, but a normal human.

Lorelei was a mermaid said to haunt the Rhine and lure sailors to their deaths.

The Sirens were women with the bodies of birds renowned for their sweet singing; so beautiful was it that sailors would jump off their ships and swim to their isle, where they died. When Ulysses (Odysseus in Greek) and his men passed by them on their way home to Ithaca from the siege of Troy, they had been warned in advance about the Sirens’ voices by the enchantress Circe, and so took precautions; Ulysses had his men stuff their ears with wax so that they could not hear the Sirens, while having himself tied to the mast so that he could not escape (since he desired to hear their song for himself). Foster, for reasons known only to himself, has Merlin’s library describing only a single Siren tempting Ulysses (in Homer’s account, the Sirens were plural).

The Lady of the Lake was earlier alluded to in Prince Valiant (see the annotation for #870, Panel 4), as was her gift of Excalibur to King Arthur.

1556. Panel 1. King Bedwin and his domain of Dinmore are Foster’s inventions, but the name "Bedwin" appears in the medieval Arthurian tales as one of the variants on the name of "Bishop Baudwin", a bishop who was one of King Arthur’s leading advisors, though often portrayed as more worldly than a high-ranking churchman ought to be. Presumably, Foster is name-borrowing here once again.

1564. Panel 7. Grosmont is the name of a village and castle in Gwent; it was attacked by Owain Glyndwr (the Owen Glendower of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One) in 1405, but relieved by the future Henry V (1413-22), then Prince of Wales and a more responsible young man than Shakespeare’s portrait of him as Prince Hal would suggest. This allows us to determine the general location of Dinmore on a map of Britain (assuming that Foster meant this to be the real Grosmont and was not simply name-borrowing again) as somewhere in the southeastern part of Wales.

1577. Panel 5. Janus was the Roman god of doors and gateways, depicted as having two faces, one looking forward and one backward; the month of January is named after him. One of Janus’s faces was portrayed as smiling and happy, the other frowning sourly; this stark contrast makes him an appropriate deity for Val to invoke in his amazement at the equally dramatic contrast between Reynolde’s surpassing skill at horsemanship and surpassing lack of skill at arms.

1578. Panel 4. Foster errs slightly in his report on how Val gained his own house in Camelot (which now re-enters the strip despite Foster’s earlier having apparently forgotten it in #1546, Panel 4 - see above); it was Aleta who had bought it while Val and Arn had both been away in North Wales. But he still correctly recalls the reason why they purchased it - to keep the twins from being constantly spoiled in the castle.

1579. Panel 8. Geoffrey, who has been absent from Prince Valiant since #817, Panel 1, now reappears. Fortunately, Foster returned to calling him "Geoffrey" rather than "Arf".

1584. Panel 2. Geoffrey’s recounting of his adventures is filled with reprinted panels, but with a couple of continuity errors that are worth noting. The picture here is a reprint of #645, Panel 2.

Panel 3. Here Foster reprints #645, Panel 7.

Panel 4. This is an amazingly out-of-sequence reprint of #757, Panel 7. Originally, it depicted Geoffrey returning to his father’s home upon his return from Rome with Prince Valiant, after he had lost his leg and relinquished his ambitions of knighthood in favor of becoming a historian. For that matter, if one studies Foster’s reprint closely, one can see that he has here altered his drawing of young Geoffrey to give him two legs rather than one!

Panel 5. Foster engages in a particularly noteworthy piece of retrocontinuity in changing his account of the beginning of Val and Geoffrey’s journey to Rome. In the original story, it was King Aguar rather than King Arthur who dispatched them on this mission. Furthermore, the panel reprinted here (originally #647, Panel 8) was a depiction of Arthur sending Val north to Hadrian’s Wall, which, while still involving Geoffrey, was a different adventure entirely.

Panel 6. Here we have a reprint of #742, Panel 3. However, Foster is again jumbling the reprints; the scene depicted here was of Val and his companions after the crossing of the Alps. Indeed, Geoffrey is portrayed in the picture as seated so close to the fire in order to warm his feet after they were frozen in the mountains.

Panel 7. Here we have a reprint of #741, Panel 2. Note that, in the text, Geoffrey refers to "St. Bernard’s Pass" - an anachronistic comment, since St. Bernard of Aosta, whom that pass was named after, was yet to be born (see the annotation for #740, Panel 1).

1585. Panel 2. Here we have a reprint of #741, Panel 7.

Panel 3. This is a reprint of #742, Panel 2.

Panel 4. Foster reprints #746, Panel 3 - but alters it to have Val dressed in his familiar armor, rather than the Roman garb that he was clad in in the original drawing!

Panel 5. A reprint of #747, Panel 6, but with Val once more redrawn as in Panel 4.

Panel 6. A similarly redesigned reprint of #746, Panel 5.

1592. Panel 4. It is a pleasure to find here that Foster takes care to wind up Reynolde and Ann’s story (even if for just one panel), rather than simply leaving it unfinished as he moves on to Bala’s story, something that he had at times not been so scrupulous about in the past. (For a particular example, see the annotation to #771, Panel 5, above.)

VOLUME THIRTY-SIX: THE DEAD WARRIOR’S SWORD.

1604. Panel 5. Foster alludes again to the notion of berserkers developing their battle-fury through mushrooms (see #1454, Panel 5, above).

1605. Panel 7. The implication is that Arn, while under the influence of the drug, slew both the old hag and her son.

1606. Panel 3. Foster never explains how Gawain was captured by Balda Han to begin with (it probably does not matter to the story). Did Balda’s men raid the British coast and capture Gawain, carrying him back to Dathram as a prisoner? Or did Gawain go on an adventure abroad that led him too close to Dathram? This is another question that we will never find an answer to.

Panel 6. Despite Val’s claim to have visited Dathram before, this is the first time that it is mentioned in Prince Valiant. Evidently we are dealing here with yet another example of one of Foster’s retrocons.

1607. Panel 1. It is tempting to wonder if Arthur’s implicit refusal to grant Mordred’s request for an army had anything to do with the latter’s track record, although earlier in the strip the king had been established as blind (even deliberately so) to the latter’s true nature. (See the commentary on #1546, Panel 3, above.) On the other hand, Foster might equally have intended Arthur to be aware that, in light of the nature of Dathram’s defenses, this was yet another situation where Prince Valiant’s approach of cleverness and wiles would do a much better job than the conventional "clash of arms" methods.

1609. Panel 1. Though Val is indeed a northern knight, one would think that his past adventures in Africa and the Middle East ought to have given him some experience in dealing with the desert heat.

1611. Panel 3. For a change, Foster correctly makes the language of Arthur’s knights "Celtic" (it would have been an early form of Welsh, or at least an ancestor of that tongue) rather than English.

1632. Panel 3. Aleta alludes here to the war with Thrasos.

1634. Panel 4. The Exchequer is a term for "treasury" that arose in medieval England; the kingdom’s expenses and income were calculated on a checkered cloth, hence the name.

1635. Panel 4. Lycia is a region in Asia Minor (now Turkey). In Greek mythology, it was plagued by the Chimera, a monstrous combination of lion, goat, and dragon, until slain by the young hero Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus. In Homer’s Iliad, Lycia was allied to Troy during the Trojan War, its forces being led by Sarpedon and Glaucus (the latter a descendant of the aforesaid Bellerophon, as he comments to Diomedes at the beginning of Book Six), two of the most prominent leaders on the Trojan side in that war.

In the real 5th century, Lycia was part of the Eastern Roman Empire. Foster, however, anachronistically portrays it as ruled by an independent "bey" - all the more an anachronism since "bey" is a Turkish title.

VOLUME THIRTY-SEVEN: THE ADVENTURES OF GAWAIN.

1643. Panel 2. Foster reprints #126, Panel 9, in this first of four panels recalling Val’s past exploits (and, in Panels 2 and 4, giving Val’s name as translated into German and Spanish).

Panel 3. Here Foster reprints #409, Panel 3.

Panel 4. Foster’s picture of Val’s standing before the gates of Saramand is not a reprint, unlike its companion panels, but a new piece of art.

Panel 5. Foster here reprints #1614, Panel 3. One has to admit, however, that news must have travelled fast if Val’s defeat of Balda Han (which had taken place less than fifty pages before) had already become legend on the scale of Val’s other deeds recounted on this page (which had all taken place in the early years of the strip).

1648. Panel 7. The description of the twins as twelve years old is another inconsistency on Foster’s part. Earlier, he had described Hatha Boltarsson (in #1515, Panel 7) as twelve years old during Arn’s visit to North America - but Hatha was born after the twins! Thus, Karen and Valeta, from the perspective of consistency, should be older than that. Presumably Foster had forgotten his earlier mention of Hatha’s age when he drew and wrote this page.

1650. Panel 4. While Foster presumably saw Galan as indeed the last of Val and Aleta’s offspring (thus helping to provide a situation for Katwin to be written out of the strip to wed Helge Hakkon), the Murphys would add a fifth child, Nathan, in the 1980’s. That, however, was so far away in the future (and the work of Foster’s successors, at that), that it makes no difference to the situation as described in this panel.

1652. Panel 3 - 4. Genseric, King of the Vandals, returns to Prince Valiant briefly, and alludes to his sack of Rome and how it disrupted Val and Aleta’s original plans for their wedding.

Panel 7. The Barbary Coast (see the commentary on #223, Panel 4) is again anachronistically introduced into Prince Valiant. The port which Val and his family visit shortly afterwards, to clash with El Muluk, is another case of a medieval Islamic (or pseudo-Islamic) setting placed in the strip, despite the fact that it is set a couple of centuries before Mohammed founded Islam.

1670. Panel 2. In Norse mythology, the original Skirnir was a servant and friend to Frey, the god of fertility. One day, Frey secretly mounted the great throne of Odin, which allowed whoever sat in it to look out over all the world, and saw a beautiful giant maiden named Gerda in Jotunheim, the realm of the frost giants. He fell hopelessly in love with her and began to pine away. Realizing that something was wrong with his son, Frey’s father, Njord, asked Skirnir to find out what was troubling Frey; Skirnir, upon learning of Frey’s love for Gerda, offered to woo her on his behalf, but requested Frey’s magic sword and horse for the journey to the hall of her father, the frost giant Gymir. Frey, anxious to do whatever he could to win Gerda’s love, gave both to his servant. Skirnir made the perilous journey to Gymir’s hall and there persuaded Gerda to accept Frey, leading to their marriage. However, he apparently kept Frey’s sword thereafter, or at least did not return it to him, with the result that when Ragnarok came, Frey, deprived of his mighty weapon, was easily slain by the fire demon Surtur.

Skirnir, strictly speaking, was Frey’s servant rather than the servant of the Norse gods as a whole, making this a slip on Foster’s part (or Arn’s).

1677. Panel 3. Foster gives the French nobleman at Romaygarde (an invention of his rather than an actual French town, unlike Marseilles and Lyons) the title of "earl", although that title of nobility belongs to England rather to France; the French equivalent is "count".

1678. Panel 3. Gawain’s mention of "Franks" as a term for the Earl of Romaygarde’s henchmen is the first reference to the Franks (the Germanic tribe after whom France was named) in Prince Valiant.

1683. Panel 6. Unfortunately, Foster apparently forgot to resolve this story; at least, we see nothing more of Arn’s efforts to solve the problem that his poaching had gotten himself and Skirnir into.

Panel 7. Foster’s description of the Saxons settling in Essex after Badon, apparently with Arthur’s permission - or at least, tolerance - clashes with the king’s resolve, after seeing how so many Saxon settlers had joined Hengist’s army of invasion, never to allow such settlements in Britain again (see #1435, Panel 1).

Anglia is now known as East Anglia, but it would be appropriate to have it be known as Anglia during Arthur’s reign. It received the name of "East Anglia" after enough Angles had moved westwards into the heart of Britain to found the kingdom of Mercia, from whose standpoint Anglia would be "east"; this, however, would still be in the future from the perspective of both King Arthur and Prince Valiant.

The Vikings did indeed settle in and conquer East Anglia, but in the 10th century, long after Arthur’s time.

1684. Panel 7. Val refers to King Aguar’s words in #358, Panel 5, where he told his Viking subjects, "Land in Britain only in peace, else you will have to fight against your own prince who is knight of King Arthur’s Round Table!" This is another rare occasion, however, where the "flashback drawing" was a new work of Foster’s, rather than a reproduction of one of the original panels making up the story that was being hearkened back to.

VOLUME THIRTY-EIGHT: PRINCE ARN’S EXPLOIT.

1685. Panel 4. In Foster’s reference to the Battle of Badon, he contradicts his original account of that engagement by naming the Saxon leader at it Horsa rather than Hengist (falling into his familiar habit of making Horsa, through most of Prince Valiant, the great Saxon chieftain).

Panels 5-6. The account of the reasons for the Saxons coming to Britain is historically accurate. The Saxon chieftain’s words, however, "At first we came as settlers, then invaders", clash with the past portrayal of Saxons in Prince Valiant; they first appeared in the strip as invaders who were always driven back into the sea by Arthur before they could establish lasting settlements, and only later on began to take on the role of settlers.

1687. Panel 4. Thorkell’s words indicate that Aguar has himself embraced Christianity, like his son, fitting in with the mission to Rome for religious instruction that he had dispatched many years earlier in the strip.

1700. Panel 3. Foster repeats his inconsistency in #1685, Panel 4, of making Horsa rather than Hengist the leader of the Saxons at the Battle of Badon.

1701. Panel 5. The mention of the chalk cliffs, clearly the famous chalk cliffs of Dover, indicates that Thundros’s base is in or near Kent, the part of Britain most strongly associated in legend with the Saxon invasion of Britain.

1703. Panel 1. Perseus was the Greek hero who slew the Gorgon Medusa. He was the son of Zeus by a princess named Danae, the daughter of King Acrisius of Argos (Zeus descended into Danae’s chamber in the form of a shower of gold); upon Perseus’s birth, Acrisius, alarmed at this event since he had been informed by an oracle that Danae’s son would kill him, placed them both in a chest which floated out to sea. The chest reached the island of Seriphos where Perseus grew up; unfortunately, the local king, Polydectes, lusted after Danae and decided to get rid of Perseus, whom he knew disapproved of his intentions. Polydectes therefore sent Perseus off on a quest to slay Medusa and bring back her head - a difficult task, since Medusa was one of the Gorgons, three snake-haired female monsters whose gaze could turn people to stone. Fortunately, Hermes and Athena decided to come to the aid of their half-brother, providing him with advice and assistance in obtaining the objects that he would need for his quest, such as a mirrored shield by which he could look at Medusa without being turned to stone and a helmet of invisibility. Armed with these, Perseus was able to creep up on Medusa and behead her. Returning to Seriphos (along the way rescuing the princess Andromeda from a sea monster, and afterwards marrying her), Perseus showed Medusa’s head to Polydectes, turning him to stone, after which he gave the Gorgon’s head to Athena, who placed it upon her shield. (Perseus also later on fulfilled the original prophecy concerning him when, while participating in a series of athletic games, he threw a discus that inadvertently struck Acrisius, who was among the spectators, killing him.)

Foster again refers to "Ulysses", the Roman name for the famous wily King of Ithaca and protagonist of Homer’s Odyssey, rather than "Odysseus", the original Greek name.

Jason led a band of Greek heroes on one of the most famous adventures of Greek mythology, the Quest of the Golden Fleece. He was the son of King Aeson of Iolcus, who had been deposed by his brother Pelias; Jason was hidden away with Chiron the centaur until he grew to manhood, when he returned to Iolcus and demanded the throne from his uncle. Pelias, eager to get rid of his nephew without being directly guilty of his death, agreed to step down in Jason’s favor if the latter would present to him the Golden Fleece, the wool of a sacred ram of Zeus’s that was guarded by a sleepless dragon in the kingdom of Colchis, on the shore of the Black Sea. Jason promptly gathered together the finest warriors in all Greece, and set sail with them on board his ship, the Argo; this company of heroes came to be known as the "Argonauts" after the ship. They had many adventures along the way, including a clash with the harpies in Thrace and a narrow escape from the Clashing Rocks that guarded the entrance to the Black Sea. When they reached Colchis, Medea, the beautiful daughter of King Aeetes and a powerful enchantress, fell in love with Jason and helped him win the Golden Fleece, using her magic to overpower the dragon that watched over it. Unfortunately, when they returned to Iolcus, Medea proceeded to arrange the murder of Pelias, which resulted in Jason’s banishment from the kingdom by its outraged people, bringing his adventure to a tragic end. Jason decided to abandon Medea and marry Princess Glauce of Corinth, but Medea retaliated by burning up Glauce and her father, killing her children by Jason, and departing in a chariot drawn by winged serpents (as told by Euripides in his famous tragedy Medea). Jason spent his last years roaming Greece, a lonely, destitute wanderer, until he sat down one day beneath the rotting remains of the Argo; the ship’s figurehead broke off and landed on his head, killing him.

Foster refers to Jason’s voyage as the "argosy", misled by the superficial resemblance of this word to Argo. Unfortunately, the word "argosy" has no connections to the Quest of the Golden Fleece; its name is derived instead from the seafaring town of Ragusa (now Dubrovnik).

Harpies were creatures of Greek mythology (see the annotation for #1382, Panel 5), but unicorns belong to the general legends of medieval Europe; while they first appear in the classical writings of Greece and Rome, they were not specifically linked to Greek myth as were harpies or the legendary heroes whom Aleta mentions in this panel.

Panel 2. Karen errs in describing Ulysses’s absence from Ithaca and his wife Penelope as "a ten-year holiday"; in fact, he was away for twenty years rather than ten. The first ten years were taken up by the long siege of Troy which he left Ithaca to participate in; the second ten years (which, presumably, was the decade that Karen had in mind) were the ones during which his efforts to return home as described in the Odyssey and his many famous adventures (such as his encounters with Polyphemus the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis), took place.

Panel 3. Aleta is almost correct here. According to medieval legend, the only way to capture a unicorn was to use a pure virgin for bait. Unicorn-hunters would leave the girl seated in the open in a wood frequented by unicorns and hide; a unicorn would approach the girl and place its head in her lap, whereupon she would immediately signal the hunters to capture the poor animal. (T. H. White in his The Once and Future King portrayed Gawain and his brothers, as boys, embarking upon a unicorn hunt using this piece of lore, recruiting an unwilling kitchen-maid named Meg to be their virgin, in a manner that parallels Galan’s own recruitment of a less reluctant local girl to assist him on his own quest. The Orkneys’ unicorn-hunt, unfortunately, had a far more tragic ending than Galan’s; when the unicorn made its appearance, Agravain immediately butchered it, in a foreshadowing of his later murder - in Foster’s version of the Arthurian legend - of his mother Morgause and her lover Lamorak.)

No mention is made in any legend, however, of a bridle being a necessary component of a unicorn-hunt. Might Foster have been thinking of the story of Pegasus in Greek mythology, who could only be tamed by a golden bridle from the gods? (Athena gave this bridle to the hero Bellerophon, who used it to tame Pegasus and ride him). Perhaps he confused the two legends here.

1704. Panel 1. The village girl has ulterior motives for her suggestion, of course, as Foster makes clear in the very next panel, but she still speaks accurately; the custom in unicorn hunting was for the maiden serving as "bait" to let the unicorn come to her.

1707. Panel 7. Delilah was the infamous temptress of Samson (Judges 16: 4-20), who brought about his downfall by learning that his strength was in his hair and cutting it, thus rendering him helpless and easy prey for his enemies the Philistines.

Circe was an enchantress in Greek mythology (properly, a demi-goddess, the daughter of Helios the sun-god). She liked to amuse herself by turning those who visited her island of Aeaea into animals of various sorts. Among her victims were Odysseus’s men on their way home from Troy, whom she turned into pigs; Odysseus, however, was warned by Hermes, who gave him a magical herb named moly that rendered Odysseus proof against Circe’s magic. Armed with the herb, Odysseus forced Circe to undo her spell and return his men to normal. He still had to remain with her on Aeaea for three years, during which time he fathered a son upon her named Telegonus (who would come to Ithaca when he grew up, slay Odysseus, and then marry the widowed Penelope, while Odysseus and Penelope’s own son Telemachus married Circe!).

1708. Panel 7. It would have to have been less than a century since the Romans left Britain, actually, according to the internal chronology of Prince Valiant. The "official date" for the Roman departure from Britain, as mentioned above (see the annotation for #294, Panel 5), was in A.D. 410; although many historians now question this date, we will assume that it holds true in the strip. Arn was born a little over a year after the Vandal sack of Rome in 455, and since he is presently in his teens, this point in Prince Valiant cannot be later than the early 470’s.

1709. Panel 4. Adele finally returns to Prince Valiant, after having been absent since #771.

1713. Panel 4. Adele’s description of Yousef here implies that he is (anachronistically) a Muslim.

VOLUME THIRTY-NINE: KNIGHT’S BLOOD.

1729. Panel 4. This is another continuity error; the Saxon war in which Hugh the Fox and his outlaws first entered King Arthur’s service was in Essex, rather than Kent.

Panel 6. Arthur’s command forbidding Hugh and his men to kill the king’s deer was issued in #502, Panel 1. On that same page, however, Val found a loophole in Arthur’s edict, allowing the outlaws to "accidentally" shoot the deer while engaging in target practice. Foster must have forgotten about this by the time that he was drawing and writing this page (or perhaps Arthur had discovered the loophole and put a stop to it).

1730. Panel 3. According to strict continuity, Arthur’s pardon for Hugh must have been issued more than fifteen years before this scene (though the use of the word "some" as modifier might suggest that it was not literally fifteen years). The Essex campaign in which Hugh and his outlaws first assisted Arthur and were pardoned took place a little over a year before Arn’s birth. Arn was described as turning fifteen in #1516, Panel 3, a little under two years before this scene, judging from the progress of the seasons since that time. This appears to be another example of Foster not following a rigid internal chronology in his work.

Panel 4. Foster’s portrayal of Sir Kay here is true to his characterization in medieval romance as a stern and rigid disciplinarian (see the annotation to #83, Panel 7).

1730. Panel 6. Hugh repeats his protest from #502, Panel 3, that he and his outlaws cannot gain their food through farming (as opposed to hunting).

1733. Panel 4. The Age of Chivalry must have begun (from the perspective of Prince Valiant) much earlier than this, before Val even came to Camelot, judging from the strip’s interpretation of King Arthur’s court (and such castles on the Continent as Andelkrag, for that matter).

Panel 7. "Balen, the Strong" may be Foster’s adaptation of Sir Balin le Savage, the Knight of the Two Swords, who appears in the early pages of Malory. In Malory’s account, Sir Balin was a knight from Northumberland, a man of great courage and strength but apparently also of a headstrong disposition. In the beginning years of Arthur’s reign, Balin slew a cousin of Arthur’s (the circumstances are not described) and was placed in prison for over half a year. Shortly after his release, Balin performed a remarkable deed. A damsel came to Arthur’s court, burdened with a great sword in a scabbard that hung from her girdle; she announced that she could only be freed from this sword if a knight of great nobility and without falsehood were to draw it from its scabbard. Arthur and his knights attempted to pull out the sword, but all failed until Balin offered to accept this challenge, and drew the sword free from its sheath. The maiden thanked him, but urged Balin to return the sword to her; Balin refused to do so, being intent on keeping it, and the damsel warned him that if he were to keep it, it would bring about both his death and that of the man whom he most loved. Even these words, however, failed to dissuade him.

Almost immediately afterwards, the Lady of the Lake came to court and demanded of Arthur that he put to death either the damsel who had brought the sword or Sir Balin, both of whom she hated. Arthur refused, even though the Lady made it clear that this was her price for giving him Excalibur; Balin, however, slew the Lady of the Lake, not so much for her bloodthirsty demand as because she had (under circumstances unexplained) brought about the death of his mother. Arthur, horrified, banished Balin from Camelot at once. Afterwards, an Irish knight named Sir Lanceor volunteered to hunt Balin down and punish him for his act (his real motive, though he did not mention it, was envy towards Balin for having passed the test of the sword and scabbard that he himself could not); Arthur, still angry over the Lady of the Lake’s death, gave him permission to do so. Balin, however, slew Lanceor instead when they fought; almost immediately afterwards, Lanceor’s lady, Colombe, arrived on the scene, and was so horrified at the sight of her beloved’s death that she immediately slew herself.

Balin was grief-stricken and remorseful over these two deaths, and longed to make amends. With the assistance of his brother Sir Balan (who joined him shortly after the battle, having heard that he had been released from prison), he decided to do so by helping Arthur against his greatest enemy, King Rions of North Wales and Ireland; guided by Merlin, Balin and Balan ambushed Rions on his way to a tryst with the Lady de Vance, took him prisoner, and delivered him up to King Arthur. Thus Balin re-entered Arthur’s good graces.

Soon afterwards, however, Balin learned of an evil knight named Sir Garlon, who had the gift of becoming invisible and used this talent to assassinate his enemies. Vowing to put a stop to Garlon’s foul deeds, Balin went in search of him, and tracked him to the castle of Carbonek, home of King Pellam of Listeneise, the Fisher King and guardian of the Holy Grail, who was also Garlon’s brother. There, Balin slew Garlon, but King Pellam (either unaware of Garlon’s true nature, or believing that their blood ties were more important than Garlon’s villainous acts) at once attacked him to avenge his brother’s death. He pursued Balin to the chamber where the Holy Grail was kept, alongside the Spear of Longinus (which had been used to pierce Jesus’s body on the Cross). Balin, seeing the Spear as a handy weapon with which to protect himself and unaware of its true nature, immediately snatched it up and struck Pellam in the leg with it. This terrible act was the Dolorous Blow, which laid the lands around Carbonek waste, and inflicted upon Pellam a wound which would not heal until Sir Galahad healed him and restored the Wasteland, years later, during the Quest of the Holy Grail.

Balin did not long survive his unwitting delivery of this calamity. Wandering away from Carbonek, he came to a tower filled with ladies where he was tricked into fighting a mysterious red knight. It turned out that the Red Knight was his own brother Sir Balan, but Balin did not discover this until they had mortally wounded each other. They were buried in a single grave, after which Merlin thrust Balin’s sword into a floating stone and let it drift downstream from the scene of the battle between the two brothers; it would eventually be withdrawn from the stone by Sir Galahad on the eve of the Quest of the Holy Grail.

If one follows Malory’s account literally, "Sir Balen the Strong" cannot be the same as Sir Balin le Savage, of course, since Balin’s adventures took place too early during Arthur’s reign, before Arthur had even wedded Queen Guinevere or founded the knights of the Round Table. However, his being present at Camelot at this point is hardly any worse a deviation from Malory than having Merlin’s permanent departure from Arthur’s side in Nimue’s company take place during the height of Arthur’s reign, or portraying the Quest of the Holy Grail as a series of expeditions rather than a single event. (Tennyson, for that matter, also reorganized the legend’s chronology in his Idylls of the King to have Sir Balin present at Camelot after Arthur’s wedding, and even revised Balin’s story itself to have Guinevere and Lancelot’s adultery serve as the catalyst for his tragedy.) The spelling of his name as "Balen" (if it is not a typo on Foster’s part) might have been due to Algernon Charles Swinburne, who used the same spelling in a poem that he wrote about this tragic figure.

1737. Panel 1. Foster treats the concept of chivalry in the form of a knight’s devotion to his lady as though it had only just arrived in Camelot; however, its customs had already appeared much earlier in the strip, as far back as the young Prince Valiant wearing Ilene’s scarf as a token when he went off to do battle with the Ogre of Sinstar Wood.

1752. Panel 8. The name of "Chariot Garde" for Morgan le Fay’s castle here is most likely derived from the Castle Chariot, the castle where Morgan and her fellow sorceress-queens, the Queens of Northgalis, Eastland, and the Out Isles, held Sir Lancelot prisoner. In giving her stronghold this name, however, Foster contradicts himself again; in his original account of Val’s first encounter with Morgan le Fay, her castle was named Dolorous Garde - and it is clear from the story here that Val and Arn confront Morgan in the same castle that she had imprisoned both Val and Gawain in years earlier.

1753. Panel 7. Foster again strays into inconsistency, in describing how Nimue "led Merlin to his strange doom" at Dozmary Pool. While Dozmary Pool was indeed the location of their first meeting in the strip, Nimue did not bring about Merlin’s permanent departure from the world until Val encountered the great wizard again near King Oswick’s castle, a few years later. (Also, Val had already been given the keys earlier, while researching mermaids, in #1552-53.)

1754. Panels 2-3. Foster shows once again how his perception of Merlin has changed from the early days of the strip, when Merlin was a genuine wizard; now, the great magician is depicted as a medieval scientist whose "magic" is merely his knowledge and learning as misinterpreted by his contemporaries, and feats of sleight of hand rather than true wizardry.

Panel 4. Just as Foster has rationalized Merlin’s magic above, now he does the same with Morgan’s. This panel implies that her uncanny servitors, whom Val and Gawain had viewed as demons in their encounter with Morgan le Fay long before, are not genuine evil spirits after all, but merely humans subjected to her drugs to such an extent that they have become horribly distorted, in both body and spirit. (This does not explain their fear of the cross in the original story, however - unless it was a side effect of their condition, as in fearing the cross because they believed themselves to be demons and subject to the weaknesses of such beings.)

1755. Panel 2. Val’s statement that his first encounter with Morgan le Fay was "eighteen years [ago] to the day" is highly improbable from the perspective of the strip’s continuity. For one thing, if Arn is at least fifteen (as he would have to be according to the mention of his turning fifteen during his New World adventure), then Val’s imprisonment by Morgan could have taken place no more than three years before Arn’s birth to fit this statement. But according to the strip, Val spent three years adventuring throughout the world between the recovery of Thule from Sligon and his return to foil King Valgrind’s attempted coup, and another two years on his quest for Aleta and return with her to Britain and Thule. Thus, it would have to have been at least twenty years since Val first came to Morgan le Fay’s castle to rescue Gawain.

For that matter, since Val’s second encounter with Morgan le Fay is portrayed as taking place during winter, it cannot be set on the same day of the year that his first encounter happened. A close look at the depiction of the seasonal background in the panels illustrating Val’s youthful adventures in Britain indicates that his imprisonment by her took place in the summer, or at least, some time before winter. Foster must have forgotten that as well.

1758. Panel 5. It tells us much about Arn’s concern to prove himself to be his own person and not remain in his father’s shadow, that the desire to go his own direction during the escape from Chariot Garde rather than simply repeat Val’s original actions was so uppermost in his thoughts during this life-and-death situation.

1763. Panel 4. The inclusion of Arabic among the languages that Aleta’s children must learn is another indication of Foster anachronistically thinking of the Mediterranean in a later period of history than the 5th century. Until the time of Mohammed and of the Muslim conquests that followed his death, the Arabs were an obscure desert people from the point of view of the centers of civilization in the Mediterranean and Near East; it is unlikely that their language would have been considered as important to know as Greek and Latin (the crucial languages from the perspective of the late Roman Empire). It would only have been after the Muslim Arabs not only conquered the Middle East but became more culturally refined that Arabic would take its place among the languages that a well-educated person in that part of the world would need to know.

Panel 6. We get a brief glimpse, in this depiction of Gundar Harl’s home life, of Sigrid, whom he has clearly married (though Foster never directly reported their wedding).

VOLUME FORTY: FOREVER VALIANT.

1773. Panel 4. Foster’s mention of the holiday at Llantwit is an allusion to the story where Aleta was mistaken for a mermaid (#1552-54).

1774. Panel 4. Foster’s mention of a "King of Wales" contradicts his description elsewhere of Wales being divided under many kings.

The red dragon is the traditional emblem of Wales, and thus an appropriate heraldic device for a Welsh king. It is appropriate that Foster alludes to it here, shortly before Val’s visit to Merlin’s former home of Carmarthen (see the annotation for #1776, Panel 2), since the Red Dragon of Wales is traditionally linked to a boyhood adventure of the famous wizard. As Geoffrey of Monmouth tells it, Vortigern, after his betrayal by the Saxons, fled into the mountains of northern Wales, and at the advice of his magicians and soothsayers, began to build a tower at Dinas Emrys, to take shelter in. But the foundations had somehow become unstable, so that the walls refused to stand. Vortigern consulted his magicians again, and learned from him that in order to solve this problem, he must find a boy without a father, kill him, and sprinkle his blood on the building materials. Vortigern sent out messengers to search for such a child; when they came to Carmarthen, they discovered the young Merlin, learned that he indeed had no earthly father, and brought him back to Vortigern. There, however, Merlin calmly informed Vortigern that the real reason why his castle refused to stand was because of an underground lake beneath the building site, which was weakening the foundations. Vortigern had the site excavated and discovered that the lake indeed existed. Merlin next told him to drain it, saying that at the bottom there were two dragons, one red and one white. Vortigern emptied the pool, and, sure enough, the dragons were revealed. They awoke and proceeded to fight each other. Merlin explained that the red dragon represented the Britons and the white dragon the Saxons, and that their battles stood for the future conflicts between these two peoples, which Vortigern had helped to bring about. (This story is also told in the Historia Brittonum, which, however, calls the prescient boy Ambrosius rather than Merlin, and identifies him as Ambrosius Aurelianus; Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed, in his version, that Ambrosius was another name of Merlin’s. The Historia Brittonum also makes the symbolic beasts mere serpents, rather than dragons.)

1775. Panel 5. Foster alludes once again to the "man-killer" who had owned Arvak before Val.

1776. Panel 2. Myrddin is Foster’s name for Carmarthen, a town in southern Wales said to have been Merlin’s birthplace in legend. (The Tywy river indeed runs alongside it.) Myrddin is Merlin’s name in Welsh, and, indeed, the original form of his name.

The link between Merlin and Carmarthen appears to have begun from a piece of linguistic confusion. The name "Carmarthen" is based on the old British name for the town, "Moridunon", meaning "sea-fort"; as the language of Wales changed from British to Welsh, the name of the town was also altered to "Caermyrddin", the word "caer" being an additional Welsh word for "fortress" or "castle". Later on, the name was apparently misinterpreted as "Caer Myrddin" or "Fortress of Myrddin", and so the notion began of Carmarthen being the home town of Myrddin or Merlin (who had originally been associated with the Caledonian Forest of southern Scotland, rather than with Wales). Geoffrey of Monmouth cemented this notion in his History of the Kings of Britain, when he portrayed Vortigern’s messengers as finding the young Merlin here.

Panel 6. There is indeed a "Merlin’s hill" close by Carmarthen (a little over two miles to the east of it), also known as Bryn Myrddin (Welsh for "Merlin’s Hill"). It was one of the places where Merlin was said to have been imprisoned by Nimue (though there are other candidates, such as a cave somewhere in Cornwall, or an invisible tower in the forest of Broceliande in Brittany).

The mention of Merlin spending his boyhood years studying in a cave near Carmarthen raises another question. In 1970, Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave, a popular and well-known Arthurian novel dealing with Merlin’s youth, was published. In Stewart’s book, the young Merlin was portrayed as studying in the cave at Bryn Myrddin under a wise old scholar and hermit named Galapas, and later, after Galapas’s death, making the cave his quiet retreat (it would appear again in that role in her two sequels to The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment). Foster’s own story of Val’s visit to Carmarthen and Merlin’s cave nearby came out in early 1971, the following year. Is it possible that Foster had read The Crystal Cave upon its release and was inspired by it to give Val this adventure? We do not know, unfortunately, but if this scene in Prince Valiant had nothing to do with Mary Stewart’s book, it is certainly an amazing coincidence.

1777. Panel 5. Lionors is Foster’s invention, but the name is found in Malory, though as a female name. (Its chief bearer was a mistress of Arthur’s in his youth, before he met Guinevere.)

Panel 6. Val again misleadingly suggests that Merlin vanished forever at Dozmary Pool, neglecting to mention his later encounter with the great wizard near King Oswick’s castle.

1778. Panel 4. Here we have another continuity error; the Dragda Khan died from exhaustion in dancing for Aleta before Val could enter his city, and did not fall to the Singing Sword or anyone else’s blade.

1781. Panel 2. Sir Palamides (his name is more commonly spelt as Palomides) was a noted Saracen knight of the Round Table (who eventually converted to Christianity). His leading role in Malory was as a rival with Sir Tristram over Isolde; the two of them frequently fought over her, but in the end became reconciled (indeed, the two of them had always respected and admired one another despite their quarrel). Palomides undertook many adventures, particularly the liberation of the Red City from Sir Helius and Sir Helake, two villainous knights who had murdered its king and usurped his throne; he also went in pursuit of the Questing Beast after King Pellinore’s death. A French version of the story of the Quest of the Holy Grail (which Malory evidently had not read) even had him going on quest for the Holy Grail and achieving it, alongside Galahad, Percival, and Bors.

In Malory, Palomides joined Lancelot during the civil wars that ended Arthur’s reign, went with him into Gaul, and was there made Duke of Provence. In the French romances, he was slain by Gawain (who had a bitter feud with him) after achieving the Holy Grail, but died forgiving Gawain, praying that God would do the same, and regretting only that he had not been able to serve his Maker longer.

Odoacer (also known as Odovacar) was a Gothic chieftain best known for deposing the nominal Emperor of Rome, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 (the event that traditionally ended the Western Roman Empire) and becoming King of Italy until 493, when he was slain by Theodoric the Great.

Panel 3. Foster is correct in his description of the original Alsvin.

1782. Panel 7. Boltar refers to his first encounter with Lancelot in #288-89.

1783. Panel 7. Foster errs in stating that the prehistoric stone monuments of Brittany and Britain, such as Stonehenge, were raised by the Celts; the historical and archaeological evidence that we have strongly indicates that they were erected by earlier peoples. Indeed, he had already stated in #1192 that Stonehenge was built by the "Beaker People" as opposed to the Celtic peoples of Britain.

On the other hand, he is correct in stating that Brittany derived its name from the Britons who settled here during the 5th and 6th centuries. And "Little Britain" is indeed an early name for Brittany.

1787. Panel 2. The Goths are again portrayed as a half-savage wandering horde, using the "pop culture" version of 5th century history as opposed to what really happened.

1790. Panel 4. The Barbary Coast is given another anachronistic mention (see the annotation to #223, Panel 4).

1800. Panels 4-5. Foster’s satiric description of the city of Sardaroc may have been influenced or inspired by a brief passage in Lord Dunsany’s "Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller". At one point in the story, Dunsany’s protagonist passes by the city of Tor, whose people attack all visitors "lest any foreigner should alter their laws, which are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens" (Wonder Tales, p. 6).

Panel 5. The Bedouins are portrayed as bowing towards Mecca as per Muslim custom, another anachronism (though Mecca as a "sacred place" is not).

Panel 6. The name of Allah appears in Arabian worship even before Mohammed, but nevertheless, the context of the adventure suggests that Foster is having Val encounter anachronistic Muslims here.

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