Mar 27 2012
King Arthur at Parliament No.3 – The Vision of Sir Galahad
![]() The Vision of Sir Galahad Pic: explore-parliament.net |
This is the third part in our new series of animated stories of King Arthur based on artwork found around the Houses of Parliament, courtesy of a wonderful Virtual Tour found at explore-parliament.net. In this piece, called Religion, we can see Sir Galahad, Sir Percival and Sir Bors. These were the three pure knights who alone of Arthur’s court were to succeed in the search for the Holy Grail. Here they represent Religion. Following a hart and four lions they come to a hermitage where there was a holy man, and there they see a vision of Christ and the Four Evangelists. |
And they entered in and heard the mass. And they saw the hart become a man, the which marvelled them, and he sat upon the altar in a rich siege; and they saw the four lions were changed, the one into the form of a man, the other to the form of an ox, and the third to an eagle, and the fourth was changed into a lion. And when they were come to themselves, they went to the holy man. ‘Ah lords,’ said he ‘now wot I well ye be the good knights the which shall bring the quest of the Holy Grail to an end.’
- Malory
The hart represented Christ, as the fresco shows: ‘a white hart without spot’, while the four lions changed into the forms traditionally ascribed to the four Evangelists: lion, eagle, ox and man.
Religion was the first subject to be completed by Dyce, in 1851, and this is the most important and most successful of his Arthurian series.
Personal Note
I find it fascinating that as the medieval culture that prompted Malory derived from the earlier myths and stories, possibly found in the Mabinogion, we see the highest ideal of Spirituality, the Christ, represented by the archetypal Celtic symbol of that ideal and as ambassador fo the Otherworld, the White Hind or White Stag. There is some contention as to the cross-fertilisation between the author(s) of the Arthurian Tales in the Mabinogion (especially the later courtly ones) and the work of Malory, both contemporary 15th Century works – although much of the Mabinogion dates back to the middle of the 14th Century. There are also linguistic hints that elements may derive from much earlier 6th Century work about Taliesin.
Maybe we’ll never know the true originators of these later Arthurian tales, but to see the symbols being used by Dyce in the 19th Century in the English Parliament leaves me with a warm feeling of continuity between the ancient Celtic beliefs and our modern traditions.
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