Medieval Romance Quotes

Ah, my princess. Noble steed. How does the morning find you both?

Who is this? And what is here? And in the lighted palace near Died the sound of royal cheer; And they crossed themselves for fear, All the Knights at Camelot; But Lancelot mused a little space He said, "She has a lovely face; God in his mercy lend her grace, The Lady of Shalott.

As a boy, I found myself drawn to Arthurian legends, and then to Celtic mythology, and then further east into the mysticism of Asian religions.

We were talking about the prince,' Sansa said, her voice soft as a kiss. Arya knew which prince she meant: Joffrey, of course. The tall, handsome one. Sansa got to sit with him at the feast. Arya had to sit with the little fat one. Naturally.

I'm sure you can even find ménage à trois in medieval tales.

Fairy damsels met in forest wide / By knights of Logres, or of Lyones, / Lancelot or Pelleas, or Pellenore.

The romantic chivalric tradition takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man's eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.

The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.

But my last conscious thought was an image of Prince Char when he'd caught the bridle of Sir Stephan's horse. His face had been close to mine. Two curls had spilled onto his forehead. A few freckles dusted his nose, and his eyes said he was sorry for me to go.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!

It goes back a long way. I wanted to make Tristan + Isolde as my second movie. My first movie was The Duellists. And I was standing in a very romantic part of France looking around me thinking, "My God, this would be perfect for Tristan," and to cut a long story short it never happened because I did Alien instead.

Lady Madelyne had sealed her own fate. She'd warmed his feet.

Maid Marion, who said to Robin Hood, I will not live in a house with a Little John. Never got a dinner!

That's really why I wanted to do it. I wanted to be a part of this generation's telling of Camelot, and also get the chance to play a fantastic, complex, interesting, emotionally passionate, young lead role.

One of my earliest inspirations was the 'Allan-a-Dale' character played by Elton Hayes in the 1954 movie 'The Story Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men.' He was a wandering minstrel with his guitar.

You end up with this succession of periods when everything was marvellous - from King Arthur to the medieval times, Ivanhoe, chivalry, Henry VIII, Merry England, the Blitz

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.

Obscure as still remains the origin of that 'genre' of romance to which the tales before us belong, there is little doubt that their models, if not their originals, were once extant at Constantinople.

In another life I would be a medievalist. I loved Chaucer, far more than Shakespeare.

Guinevere is not the Morgan type, where she's sultry and she knows she has this incredible female energy that she can use and utilize, and she's not necessarily used to having this power over men.

She hath no loyal knight and true, The Lady of Shalott.

There are Arthurian legends in 14 or 15 medieval European languages. They are the product of no one time or place. On the contrary, in sum they represent a tremendous mine of human understanding, rather as the Bible does.

In the Middle Ages, the troubadour poets invented the concept of courtly love--a fantasy love, a noble passion, which was also extra-marital and thus inevitably thwarted, illicit, adulterous. One of the medieval terms for it was amour honestus (honest love). I've always wondered why this passionate ideal--masochistic, spiritual-travelled with such wildfire throughout Europe. My poem, a ghazal, takes up the subject.

If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on.

I've always wanted to play Guinevere. I just asked Chris what he thought, and he steered me in the right directions. We just wanted to make her young and able to make mistakes, which I think is important.