Le Morte d’Arthur: Foreshadowing 5 key examples

Arthur's cruelty is startling here. He kills children under four weeks old simply because he thinks one of them will bring about his downfall one day. The story of a king who kills so indiscriminately as an insurance policy would have been familiar to Malory's readers, however. In the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus is born, King Herod of Judea orders all male children under the age of two to be killed so that he will not be dethroned by Christ. This story, called the "Massacre of the Innocents," also resembles a story from the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament. Here, Pharaoh hears that baby Moses will grow up to threaten his power, so he orders all the Israelite children killed. Moses's parents, having foreseen the danger in a dream, conceal Moses so that he survives. Like Moses and Jesus, Mordred too survives Arthur's tyrannical attempt to cling to his power:

And so by fortune the ship drove unto a castle, and was all to-riven, and destroyed the most part, save that Mordred was cast up, and a good man found him, and nourished him till he was fourteen year old, and then he brought him to the court, as it rehearseth afterward, toward the end of the Death of Arthur.

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The narrator explicitly states that Mordred's survival works "toward the end of the Death of Arthur." But the biblical allusions strengthen the foreshadowing. With the allusions in mind, Mordred is as destined as Moses or Jesus are in the Bible to become an important figure who upsets the social order. Instead of saving himself, Arthur ironically seals his fate to be dethroned by his own son.

The allusions also capture the book's ambivalence toward Arthur and what he represents. Arthur is committed to certain honorable principles and represents a time for which Malory is somewhat nostalgic. Still, he is also deeply flawed. In this instance, he maps onto the antagonists of the two Bible stories. Mordred will grow up to be bitter and deceitful, but part of the tragedy of "the death of Arthur" is that there is less glory in it than one might expect. Arthur is not just a glorious king toppled by an evil son. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that he is a bad father who gets exactly what he bargained for.

Everyone in the book seems to take at face value the idea that a king might have a prophetic dream. They understand that the dream portends a "great battle." Still, dreams do not deliver a clear and complete forecast of the future. No one knows exactly what the "great battle" will look like or who will win. The reader, the King with the Hundred Knights, and the people he shares the dream with are all left in suspense about the battle the dream foreshadows.

In Volume 1, Book 5, Chapter 4, Arthur too has a mysterious dream that he asks a philosopher to interpret:

‘Sir,’ said the philosopher, ‘the dragon that thou dreamedst of betokeneth thine own person that sailest here, and the colours of his wings be thy realms that thou hast won, and his tail which is all to-tattered signifieth the noble knights of the Round Table; and the boar that the dragon slew coming from the clouds betokeneth some tyrant that tormenteth the people, or else thou art like to fight with some giant thyself, being horrible and abominable, whose peer ye saw never in your days, wherefore of this dreadful dream doubt thee nothing, but as a conqueror come forth thyself.’

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The philosopher helps Arthur get a clearer picture of what his prophetic dream meant than he was able to get on his own, but still the dream raises as many questions as it answers. Arthur might have to fight "some giant" personally, or his people might be plagued by a "tyrant." What is clear, the philosopher claims, is that Arthur is the "dragon" who must prepare himself to "as a conqueror come forth thyself." Arthur's dream foreshadows but does not explicitly name a trial in Arthur's future, during which he will have to prove himself as king.

As a motif, these prophetic dreams demonstrate that humans have a complex relationship with fate: they can sometimes change it, but certain events are laid out by God. They also reveal that people's gifts and abilities are sometimes determined by their social position. For instance, Arthur and the King with a Hundred Knights both have these strange dreams because they are kings and need to prepare themselves for conflict to come. The philosopher, on the other hand, is especially well-suited to interpret the dreams. It may be that the philosopher chose to be a philosopher because of a talent in this area, but more likely the book imbues him with this power because he is a philosopher. After all, Arthur and the King with a Hundred Knights were both fated from birth to be kings. The book seems to hold that certain societal positions confer certain abilities on people.

Gaheris takes the opportunity to preach to Gawaine about the necessity of mercy in chivalry, but the irony does not solely lie in Gawaine's failure to act like the knight he is supposed to be. On a deeper, more human level, Gawaine is utterly convinced that killing the knight in revenge will right the wrong that has been done. His rigidity in this conclusion makes him unable to react to further information (either the request for mercy or the sudden appearance of the man's lover before his blade). Ironically, his total confidence that he knows how to right the situation causes him to make everything worse. As Gaheris says, "that shame shall never from [him]" (he will never be rid of the shame of what has just happened).

This moment is formative for Gawaine in that afterwards he must commit himself to defending women, but he does not learn from it as much as he ought to. His ill-fated certainty that revenge will right a wrong foreshadows his reaction to his brothers' deaths at Launcelot's hand. Launcelot kills Agravaine, Gareth, and Gaheris not because he wants to, but because he is cornered. In the case of Gareth and Gaheris, he is not even defending himself, but rather Guenever, who has been sentenced to death. He charges in and kills the people he thinks are going to kill her before even realizing that Gareth and Gaheris are among them. When Gawaine learns that Launcelot has killed his brothers, he is again so angry that the only path that he can see is revenge. His need for revenge becomes one of the primary reasons Arthur escalates the fight against Launcelot to the point that they destroy one another. If Gawaine had learned to suppress his appetite for revenge, the knights of the Round Table may never have fallen as they do at the end of the book.

Everyone in the book seems to take at face value the idea that a king might have a prophetic dream. They understand that the dream portends a "great battle." Still, dreams do not deliver a clear and complete forecast of the future. No one knows exactly what the "great battle" will look like or who will win. The reader, the King with the Hundred Knights, and the people he shares the dream with are all left in suspense about the battle the dream foreshadows.

In Volume 1, Book 5, Chapter 4, Arthur too has a mysterious dream that he asks a philosopher to interpret:

‘Sir,’ said the philosopher, ‘the dragon that thou dreamedst of betokeneth thine own person that sailest here, and the colours of his wings be thy realms that thou hast won, and his tail which is all to-tattered signifieth the noble knights of the Round Table; and the boar that the dragon slew coming from the clouds betokeneth some tyrant that tormenteth the people, or else thou art like to fight with some giant thyself, being horrible and abominable, whose peer ye saw never in your days, wherefore of this dreadful dream doubt thee nothing, but as a conqueror come forth thyself.’

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The philosopher helps Arthur get a clearer picture of what his prophetic dream meant than he was able to get on his own, but still the dream raises as many questions as it answers. Arthur might have to fight "some giant" personally, or his people might be plagued by a "tyrant." What is clear, the philosopher claims, is that Arthur is the "dragon" who must prepare himself to "as a conqueror come forth thyself." Arthur's dream foreshadows but does not explicitly name a trial in Arthur's future, during which he will have to prove himself as king.

As a motif, these prophetic dreams demonstrate that humans have a complex relationship with fate: they can sometimes change it, but certain events are laid out by God. They also reveal that people's gifts and abilities are sometimes determined by their social position. For instance, Arthur and the King with a Hundred Knights both have these strange dreams because they are kings and need to prepare themselves for conflict to come. The philosopher, on the other hand, is especially well-suited to interpret the dreams. It may be that the philosopher chose to be a philosopher because of a talent in this area, but more likely the book imbues him with this power because he is a philosopher. After all, Arthur and the King with a Hundred Knights were both fated from birth to be kings. The book seems to hold that certain societal positions confer certain abilities on people.

The narrator is commenting on the state of the world "nowadays." "Nowadays" could refer to the moment when Malory is writing, or it could refer to some unspecified time between Arthur's death and the 15th century. This vagueness is deliberate. It conveys the sense that history is divided into two parts: before Arthur died, and after. During "King Arthur's days," people practiced "the old love." This older kind of love was steadfast: people could stay devoted to one another for a long time without "licours lusts" (lecherous desires) interfering with their faithfulness. By contrast, the narrator claims, "nowadays" people are hot and cold with each other. They stop loving each other as soon as they have a single desire that goes unmet.

The book's title, "The Death of Arthur," gives away the fact that this bleaker, post-Arthur world is just over the horizon. But it won't necessarily be Arthur's death in itself that causes love to weaken. Instead, the fickle love the narrator describes here is what leads to Arthur's death in the civil war that is soon to come. Agravaine makes clear to Arthur that Launcelot has been having an affair with Guenever. In the chaos that follows, Launcelot ends up killing Gawaine's brothers. Even more than Guenever and Launcelot's infidelity, it is Gawaine's desire for revenge on Launcelot that motivates Arthur to fight against his former best knight. The steadfast love all these characters once had for one another fails under the pressure of high passions, just as love "nowadays" does according to the narrator.

In the passage about love, the narrator is clearly building up to the revelation that the bonds among the Knights of the Round Table are going to break. Two chapters earlier, in Volume 2, Book 18, Chapter 23, Launcelot's family members fought against Arthur's knights in a tournament. Although the knights often form friendly factions, the pitting of Launcelot's supporters against Arthur's foreshadows the way Agravaine and Mordred will turn these two against one another until they are both destroyed. In fact, Launcelot even strikes down Gawaine and his brothers in the tournament, previewing the killings that tear everyone apart. "King Arthur's days" and all they entail are coming to a close.

Agravaine has never much liked Launcelot. For one thing, Agravaine has been disfavored with Arthur ever since he and his brothers killed their mother and her lover. Launcelot, on the other hand, is a favorite of Arthur, and he gets a lot of glory. This moment, when he lies in wait to strike at Launcelot and Guenever, is the last in a series of hints that Agravaine might stir up trouble. In Book 18, Chapter 2, for instance, Launcelot tells Guenever directly that he is afraid Agravaine or Mordred might reveal that they have been having an affair. Agravaine seems to be growing more bitter, and there is a sense in this moment at the end of Book 19 that he is about to complete his transformation into an antagonist.

Many characters in the book are associated with lions (representing Christ) or snakes (representing the devil). The depiction of Agravaine as someone who quietly "awaits" the right moment to strike could support an association between him and either one of these animals, but his seething bitterness and his obsession with "shaming" his enemies suggests that he is rather snakelike or devilish. He wants to expose Launcelot and Guenever not because it is the noble thing to do, but rather because he wants to cause them pain. Additionally, like the snake in the Garden of Eden, Agravaine urges Arthur to start the civil war that leads to the end of the golden Arthurian age.

Agravaine's outright betrayal of Launcelot and Guenever, as well as his betrayal of the peace in the Arthurian court, has been a long time coming. He initially participated in his mother's and Lamorak's killings because he thought it was dishonorable for his mother to sleep with the man who killed his father. The book is inconclusive about whether or not these killings violated codes of chivalry. Being kept at a distance by Arthur ever since that time seems to have driven Agravaine to a dangerous sense of self-righteousness. Now, he is ready to hurt people out of a desire for vengeance rather than a desire to uphold any kind of moral code.