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

Abstract 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.