Author Perlesvaus

as a good knight and illegitimate son of King Arthur, in Perlesvaus he is apparently the legitimate son of Arthur and Guinevere, and he is slain treacherously by Arthur's seneschal Kay, who is elsewhere portrayed as a boor and a braggart but always as Arthur's loyal servant (and often, foster brother).[3] Kay is jealous when Loholt kills a giant, so he murders him to take the credit. This backfires when Loholt's head is sent to Arthur's court in a box that can only be opened by his murderer. Kay is banished, and joins with Arthur's enemies, Brian of the Isles and Meliant. Guinevere expires upon seeing her son dead, which alters Arthur and Lancelot's actions substantially from what is found in later works. Though its plot is frequently at variance with the standard Arthurian outline, Perlesvaus did have an effect on subsequent literature. Arthur's traditional enemies Claudas, Brian and Meliant appear for the first time in its pages, as does the Questing Beast (though in a radically different guise than it would take). The story of Kay murdering Loholt is mentioned in the Lancelot-Grail cycle as the one evil deed Kay ever committed, but the details and retribution are left out. Perlesvaus was adapted into Middle Welsh as part of Y Seint Greal, and one episode was rewritten in verse and included in Fouke Fitz Warin. Nothing is known of the author, but the strangeness of the text and some personal comments led Roger Sherman Loomis to call him "deranged"[4]; similarly the editor of a French Arthurian anthology including extracts from the work notes an obsession with decapitation.[5] Loomis also notes an antisemitic air absent from most Arthurian literature of the period, as there are several scenes in which the author symbolically contrasts the people of the "Old Law" with the followers of Christ, usually predicting violent damnation for the unsaved.[6]