Lionel attacks Bors and is stopped by divine intervention

The brothers’ battle at the hermitage is a defining crisis in Sir Bors’s Grail quest: a choice to rescue a damsel rather than his brother Sir Lionel brings Bors to the edge of death, while Lionel’s insistence on vengeance costs the lives of two intervening men. Their conflict ends not by either brother’s victory but through divine intervention, which prevents Bors from killing Lionel and sends him toward the next stage of his quest.

Background and the brothers’ grievance

The confrontation grows from an earlier moment in the quest when Bors saw two knights leading Lionel away and chose instead to aid a gentlewoman. When the brothers meet again near a hermitage, beside a castle where a tournament is to take place, Lionel treats that decision as a betrayal and says Bors left him in danger of death. Bors does not contest the account by force; he kneels and asks forgiveness, appealing to the love that ought to bind brothers.

Their unequal positions sharpen the dispute. Lionel is the elder, and Bors believes he owes him reverence; he also maintains that his reluctance to fight comes from fear of God’s wrath, not fear of Lionel. Lionel, by contrast, threatens death and refuses to accept Bors’s plea. The Grail quest’s demand that a knight act for another person thus collides with the bonds and obligations of kinship.

The attack and its cost

When Bors will not rise to fight, Lionel rides over him, leaving him badly hurt and unconscious. Lionel then dismounts and moves to kill him. An aged hermit who has heard the brothers’ exchange falls between them, pleading that Lionel spare both himself and his brother from the sin of fratricide. Lionel warns the hermit to move, then kills him when he does not withdraw.

Sir Colgrevance, a fellow of the Round Table, arrives and finds the hermit dead and Lionel still threatening Bors. He identifies himself as one of Lionel’s companions and challenges him rather than allow him to kill his brother. Lionel wounds Colgrevance in the ensuing fight. Bors, recovering enough to rise, sees the danger in both outcomes: if Lionel kills Colgrevance, the shame will be his; if Colgrevance kills Lionel, Bors will lose his brother. He is unable to intervene physically while Colgrevance fights.

Colgrevance continues to plead with Bors to save him, but Lionel defeats and kills him. Before dying, Colgrevance calls on Jesus Christ for mercy and asks that his effort to save a worthy man count toward his soul’s good. Lionel then turns back toward Bors and strikes him again. Bors asks him to stop, warns that either brother’s death would bring sin, and finally draws his sword while weeping—not out of eagerness to fight, but to defend his life and protest Lionel’s killing of the hermit and their companion.

Divine intervention and separation

As Bors raises his hand to strike, a voice orders him to flee and not touch Lionel. A cloud like fire descends between them; the brothers’ shields burn, and both fall to the ground in a swoon. When they recover, Lionel is unharmed. Bors fears that God has punished him, but the voice gives him a specific command: he is to leave Lionel’s company and go directly to the sea, where Sir Percivale is waiting.

Bors asks Lionel’s forgiveness for whatever wrong he has done, and Lionel grants it. Their reconciliation does not restore their fellowship: Bors departs as instructed. After resting that night at an abbey near the sea, he again hears a voice directing him onward. He makes the sign of the cross, takes his horse, and rides to the shore, where a ship covered in white samite carries him away. On board he finds Percivale, and the two recognize one another with joy. The episode therefore converts a family conflict into a decisive separation that redirects Bors toward his Grail companions.

Narrative and religious significance

The scene turns on a reversal of the expected knightly remedy. Bors’s first response to accusation is humility and entreaty; Lionel answers with violence, and the two men who try to restrain him are killed. Only when Bors begins to defend himself does a supernatural command and cloud halt the exchange. Divine authority, rather than a victor’s strength or a negotiated settlement, prevents the brothers’ fight from ending in another death.

The episode also distinguishes Bors’s intention from the outward appearance of his earlier choice. Lionel reads the rescue of the damsel as a betrayal of kin, but Bors’s conduct in the present scene—his repeated appeals for mercy, sorrow at the deaths, and reluctance to strike his brother—shows the moral cost he attaches to violence within the family. The intervention spares Lionel and directs Bors onward, preserving the conflict’s consequences while placing the continuation of the quest under explicit divine guidance.