Pelleas and Nimue

Pelleas and Nimue form a lasting partnership through a reversal of love and rejection: when Ettard’s betrayal leaves Pelleas intent on dying, Nimue saves him, redirects Ettard’s affections by enchantment, and takes Pelleas away with her. He rejects Ettard even after she falls in love with him, while his relationship with Nimue endures for their lifetimes.

Despair and intervention

After discovering that Gawaine has deceived Ettard about his fate, Pelleas returns to his pavilion and tells his knights that he will give them his possessions, then go to bed and never rise again. He instructs them that, once he is dead, they should take his heart and carry it to Ettard between two silver dishes, telling her how he found her with Gawaine. His threatened death is therefore bound to the betrayal he believes he has suffered and to a final message meant for Ettard.

Nimue encounters one of Pelleas’s knights walking in the forest in grief. When the knight explains that his lord has been betrayed and means to remain in bed until he dies, Nimue asks to be taken to him and promises to protect his life. She puts Pelleas to sleep by enchantment, then goes to Ettard and orders that no one wake him until she returns. Her intervention interrupts Pelleas’s movement toward death before he can carry out his plan.

The reversal with Ettard

Nimue brings Ettard to the sleeping Pelleas and tells her she should be ashamed of having brought such a knight to ruin. She then enchants Ettard so that Ettard loves the man she had previously hated. Ettard is bewildered by the sudden change in her feelings and asks how she has come to love him; Nimue calls it God’s righteous judgment.

When Pelleas wakes and sees Ettard, the reversal does not restore their relationship. He recognizes her and tells her to leave, saying she must never come into his sight. Ettard weeps, but her new love cannot undo Pelleas’s sense of betrayal: the enchantment changes her feelings, not his.

A life with Nimue

Nimue invites Pelleas to leave the country with her and promises that he will love a lady who will love him. Pelleas agrees, explaining that Ettard has caused him shame and injury. He tells Nimue the story’s beginning and end, including his intention to stay in bed until he died, and says that he now hates Ettard as much as he once loved her.

Pelleas arms himself, takes his horse, and orders his men to follow with his pavilion and belongings to wherever Nimue directs. The narrative reports that Ettard dies of sorrow, while Nimue and Pelleas love one another for the rest of their lives. Their departure resolves Pelleas’s crisis not by restoring his former attachment, but by separating him from Ettard and establishing a new, enduring bond with Nimue.