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| The Siege Perilous |
Today, The Grandma wants to remember Italian people who celebrates Ferragosto, a special day for them. In Barcelona, August, 15 is a festivity but without all the importance that it has in Italian lands.
It has been an interesting chapter about the Siege Perilous, a special seat which only can be occupied by a special knight who had accomplished a special and sacred mission. After reading, The Grandma has studied one new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Chapter 49).
More information: Spelling and Pronuntiation 1
In Arthurian legend, the Siege Perilous, also known as The Perilous Seat, is a vacant seat at the Round Table reserved by Merlin for the knight who would one day be successful in the quest for the Holy Grail. The English word siege originally meant seat or throne, coming from the Old French sege, modern French siège; the modern military sense of a prolonged assault comes from the conception of an army sitting down before a fortress.
In Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, in an account taken from the Vulgate Queste del Saint Graal, the newly knighted Sir Galahad takes the seat in Camelot on Whitsunday, 454 years after the death of Jesus.
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| The Siege Perilous |
The Siege Perilous is so strictly reserved that it is fatal to anyone else who sits in it. Another version of this story is related in Alfred Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
Originally, this motif about the seat and the grail belonged to Perceval, but the Lancelot-Grail Cycle transferred it to the new Cistercian-based hero Galahad. It appears, for example, in the earlier De Boron Didot Perceval, where Perceval occupies the seat at Arthur's court at Carduel.
According to many scholars, the motif of the dangerous seat can be further traced to Welsh, Cornish, and Breton mythology, where the bulk of the Arthurian legend was derived from. According to this theory, the Siege Perilous was a half-remembered version of a Celtic kingship ritual that has parallels in the Irish Lia Fáil.
The Siege, from the French siège, seat, Perilous is the seat at Arthur’s Round Table in which only the chosen knight can sit. In the prose rendition of Robert de Boron’s Merlin, the empty seat is reminiscent of the seat that Judas vacated.
There is also an empty seat at Joseph of Arimathea’s Grail Table which destroys anyone unworthy of sitting there. In his Continuation to Chrétien’s Perceval, Gerbert de Montreuil says that it was sent to Arthur by the fairy of Roche Menor.
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| Merlin introduces Galahad to the Round Table |
Six knights tried to sit in it and were swallowed by the earth before Perceval sits it in and completes the adventure. When he does, the six are restored to Arthur’s court.
In the thirteenth-century Vulgate Cycle, Merlin instructs Uther to build a table in commemoration of the Grail Table; at the table, there is an empty seat reserved for the Grail knight.
In the Queste del Saint Graal, the Siege Perilous is said to parallel the seat of Christ at the Last Supper and the seat occupied by Josephus at the Grail Table. Two brothers, jealous of Josephus, objected to his having a special place, and one of them sat in it, only to be destroyed; so it came to be called the Feared Seat.
Galahad is the knight for whom the Siege Perilous at Arthur’s table is destined. In the Lancelot, a knight named Brumand, trying to perform an act that Lancelot never dared to do, sits in it and is burned to a crisp. Malory says that Merlin made the Siege Perilous for the greatest Grail knight. When Galahad arrives at Camelot, his name appears on the seat destined for him.
More information: King Arthur's Knights
No man could sit but he should lose himself...
Merlin
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