Le Morte Darthur loves to celebrate meetings and partings, and on these occasions it seems a rule that the greater the personages who are involved, the greater is the scale of the narrative depiction. In such moments, the emotions of the story’s good people respect a hierarchy of worthiness, while the bad are distinguished by a contrary response. Malory’s Arthur ‘ma[kes] passynge grete joy’ when Tristram finally comes to Camelot (455/3), and he, the queen, the knights, and the ladies and damsels of the court formally welcome Tristram as ‘one of the beste knyghtes and the jentyllyst of the worlde and the man of moste worship’ (452/32–33). King Mark alone is ‘passynge sory’ about the event (455/6), emphasizing by his singularity the true bond of feeling that others share.

This narrative aggregation of strong feelings around meetings and partings makes up a major thematic and structural element in the Morte, and is apparent both in events involving earthly agents alone and in human interactions with the divine. Jill Mann, describing the French Queste del Saint Graal as ‘a symbolic narrative composed of a whole repertoire of images of wounding and healing, separation and union’, adds that ‘Malory’s Sankgreal reproduces this symbolic narrative’, and ‘makes its patterns even clearer’. In the ‘Sankgreal’, we see this repertoire played out both in secular courtly settings, such as the tournament Arthur stages to see his knights just once ‘all holé togydir’ (672/25–30), and also in the mysteries of the Grail quest, when knights reach their highest spiritual achievements. In what follows here I analyse three of these human–divine encounters – Lancelot’s two visions at Corbenic and Galahad’s death at Sarras, which concludes the tale – and add a comparable episode from the end of the whole Morte, Lancelot’s death. Malory can seem a literal-minded conceiver of the supernatural, who blurs the Queste’s symbolic distinctions between terrestrial and celestial because of ‘his confidence in the unfailing merits of Arthurian chivalry’, and who ‘probably did not even see the invitation to read allegorically’. That second criticism has a long history, with analogues in Reformation objections to Catholic worship and the Catholic Eucharist.