There was once a time when the devil came to women disguised as their husbands. In this way was Merlin conceived, and indeed King Arthur himself, in a manner of speaking. What a strange thing it is to learn that the denizens of an Otherworld can make a woman pregnant. They take on the form of another man because they have no form of their own; or, at least, so the clergymen tell us and I shall not dispute this here. But I shall tell you of a fairy child who led his mother a merry dance with his wild deeds!
The narrator wastes little time in getting to the meat of the matter. These opening lines set the stage for what is to come and then immediately introduces the major players: an Austrian duke who can’t seem to get his wife pregnant after ten years of trying and announces he wants a divorce because, of course, the fault must lay in her barren cliffs rather than his own incapacity to purchase a foothold.
One day, as he was out with his dogs, he came across a convent. As he rode towards it, the prioress and her nuns quickly came out in procession. He and his men raped them all, then herded them into their church and burnt them alive. Why should I conceal the truth?
Why, indeed? Well, apparently reason does exist for concealment. Of the two version of this work, it is only the National Library of Scotland manuscript which retains this particular passage. Sir Gowther’s—the “fairy child”—ascension to duke stimulates a crime wave against the Church. In addition to your low-scale desecration of relics and such, hands were turned upon priests and nuns alike. The women apparently received the worst of the deal, but this is only in keeping with historical and future precedent. Such explicit acts of malevolence always serve a moral purpose, of, and the heightened intensity of his particular version goes toward enhancing the intensity of Gowther’s ultimate pivot toward salvation.
“Son, I shall tell you the truth, then. A fiend lay with me in the orchard on the day that you were conceived. I thought that it was your father because he looked just like him. It was underneath a chestnut tree.”
Now, the most obvious explanation for what happened in the orchard that fateful day would that the duchess, emotionally devastated by her husband’s request for a divorce, decided to get even by having a little fling and then, when her pregnancy disproved the duke’s supposition, invented the idea that she thought it was her husband since, after all, the man in the orchard looked just exactly like him. But this being a time of widespread belief in unsupported religious superstition and factual testimony without any actual facts—unlike modern times, obviously—pretty much no one questions the duchess. Especially after the child begins behaving pretty darn badly. This is not the first reference to a “fiend.” In fact, an earl who served with Gowther’s father had just accused himself of being some “fiend’s son.” Gone are the days when one could with such felicity attribute breaking bad to the fiendishness of the Otherworld. Too bad, really, since it made things so much easier.
