Emotional Pain and Self-Harm in the Prose Lancelot and the Alliterative Morte Arthure

Medieval romance often associates anger, sadness and distress with self-harm when these emotions reach a high level of intensity. In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Arthur’s knights protest that the king is ‘blundering himself’ (that is, injuring himself) when mourning Gawain and feeling overwhelmed with sorrow. In the Prose Lancelot, Galehaut asks Lancelot, who has spent the night beset by heart-wrenching grief, why he is ‘killing himself’. In both works, the self is foregrounded in episodes that involve intense emotions and self-inflicted injury. The purpose of this essay is to investigate this recurring association of extreme emotions with self-harm in medieval romance.