Blaming the Victim: Stalking and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur

Examples of what we now call stalking comprise three important episodes in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur. The first is well-known: Merlin stalks Nynive, the Lady of the Lake, in pursuit of her maidenhead. Widely unrecognized as stalking is Pelleas’s action in the later episode of Pelleas and Ettarde. The condemnation of Ettarde for her “crime” of rejecting Pelleas’s attentions appears throughout Malory’s account of the event, coming to a head in her magical murder by the same Lady of the Lake who refused (and interred) Merlin. The third stalking has not been recognized as stalking because it is the man who is being stalked—Elaine of Ascolat’s stalking of Lancelot.