The role of the key character, the Reine Fée, in the Roman de Perceforest is an amalgam of the roles attributed to Merlin and to such marginal, ambivalent characters as Morgue la Fée in the Arthurian Vulgate Cycle and its avatars. The romancier minimizes what might seem disturbing in her by capitalizing on her femaleness and by focusing on her as progenitor of what the romance imagines as the later Arthurian kingdom.

The Roman de Perceforest is a veritable gallimaufry of characters: enchanters, dwarves, monsters, loathly damsels and naughty children dog the footsteps of the heroes and, by their positively Dickensian variety, prevent the romance from foundering into commonplace. I concentrate on one of the most unusual of these characters: the Reine Fée. I begin by explaining who she is, and I shall then examine some intertextualities which govern her conception, not in order to explain her away merely as a recycling of previously used motifs, but rather to return to Kristevan intertextuality which supposes an engagement with, a dual-focused reading of, the later and deriving text. I argue that the Reine Fée of the Perceforest is an absorption and transformation of certain figures culled from those most authoritative models, the Vulgate Cycle of Arthurian romances, and the Prose Tristan: Merlin particularly, but also, in certain of their manifestations, that curious constellation of women who operate on the dubious, ill-reputed margins of the Arthurian world like Morgue la Fée, the Dame du Lac, Sebille, Niniane. …