Finding Avalon: The Place and Meaning of the Otherworld in Marie de France’s Lanval

Abstract

The brunt of scholarship on Marie de France’s Lanval portrays Lanval’s fantastical “Otherworld” as “utopic” in the term’s oldest sense: it is a world that has “no place.” Such scholarship severs the linkage of Otherworld and reality indicated by the lai; the relationship between earth and Avalon, in which one achieves the other, is dis-placed for a simple and disjointed “multivalence of reality” (Hodgson 23). This article discusses Lanval’s Otherworld/Avalon using Anne Wilson’s psychoanalytic approach to a fantastical text “as if the text were a human subject.” Through this approach, this article hopes to reclaim the latent, universal significance of the notion of “Otherworld.”