The Fatal Duel of Balin and Balan

The Fatal Duel of Balin and Balan is the fatal encounter between brothers who meet as unknown opponents and continue fighting until neither can survive. Its immediate cause is mistaken identity: Balin has exchanged his own shield for an unfamiliar one, and Balan, recognizing the two swords but not the shield, doubts that the approaching knight is his brother. Their recognition comes too late to undo the combat. The scene closes with shared rites and burial, while Merlin’s later inscription restores Balin’s name and makes the brothers’ story part of the continuing history of Balin’s sword.

The Mistaken Meeting

The duel follows Balin’s arrival at an island where a knight cannot pass without jousting. A knight offers him a larger shield, and Balin leaves his own behind. A damsel warns that the change places him in danger because his shield would have made him recognizable. Balin regrets coming into the country, but says he cannot turn back without shame and accepts whatever adventure may follow. The warning establishes the precise vulnerability that will govern the encounter: his arms are familiar, but the sign by which a brother might identify him is gone.

A knight rides out from a castle, wearing red armor and riding a red-trapped horse. Seeing Balin’s two swords, Balan thinks the rider may be his brother; seeing the unfamiliar shield, he decides that it cannot be. Neither brother has the knowledge needed to stop the encounter before it becomes a contest of arms. Their first charge brings both horse and rider down, and Balin’s weariness from travel adds to the difficulty of recovering from the fall. The scene’s danger arises not from a declared family quarrel but from an ordinary-looking test of identity distorted by disguise.

The Battle and Recognition

Balan rises first and draws his sword. Balin gets to his feet and faces him; the brothers exchange blows, and the battle continues in pauses as each regains enough strength to fight again. Balin looks toward the castle and sees its towers full of ladies, but the spectators do not interrupt the combat. The narration emphasizes the duration and seriousness of the encounter: both men receive seven great wounds, and the contest resumes even after each has been badly hurt. The episode’s central reversal is stark: the unmatched opponent Balin believes he has finally found is the brother he has failed to recognize.

At last Balan withdraws and lies down. Balin asks who he is, explaining that he has never before found a knight who could match him. Balan answers that he is Balan, brother to Balin. Balin falls backward in a swoon at the discovery. When Balan removes his brother’s helmet, he cannot identify Balin by his face, which has been so injured and bloodied in the fight; Balin must speak to make the recognition complete. He tells Balan that each has slain the other, and Balan regrets that he could not know his brother. He had noticed the two swords, but the changed shield led him to conclude that the rider was someone else.

The Shield, the Island, and the Cost

Balin identifies the exchanged shield as the immediate cause of their destruction and blames an unhappy knight in the castle for inducing him to abandon his own. He says that if he could live, he would destroy the castle for its ill customs. Balan supplies a further detail about the island’s danger: he had killed the knight who kept it and had since been unable to leave. He believes Balin would likewise have been unable to depart, even had the brothers not fought. The fatal encounter is therefore set within a place that traps its visitors as well as imposing combat on them, though the brothers’ inability to recognize each other makes their own meeting decisive.

The lady of the tower arrives with four knights, six ladies, and six yeomen and hears the brothers lamenting what has happened. Balin and Balan state that they came from one womb and will lie in one grave. Balan asks the lady to have them buried together at the place of the battle; she agrees, weeping, and arranges for a priest so that they can receive the sacrament. Balin asks that an inscription on their shared tomb record that two brothers slew one another, so that those who see it will pray for their souls. Balan dies first; Balin survives until midnight. The lady has an inscription made for Balan but does not know Balin’s name.

Merlin’s Tomb and the Sword’s Afterlife

The next morning Merlin comes and has Balin’s name added to the tomb in gold letters, identifying him as the knight with two swords and the one who dealt the Dolorous Stroke. The correction repairs the omission in the lady’s inscription: the brothers’ shared burial now names Balin as well as preserving the story of his defining deed. Merlin also takes Balin’s sword, removes its pommel, and fits another in its place. A knight tries the weapon but cannot handle it; Merlin explains that only the world’s best knight will be able to do so, naming Sir Launcelot or his son Galahad. The pommel records a further prophecy: with the sword, Sir Launcelot will slay the man he loves best, Sir Gawaine.

The sword’s later history extends the consequences of the brothers’ deaths beyond the tomb. Merlin has a narrow iron-and-steel bridge made to the island, passable only by a man of exceptional goodness and knighthood, and leaves the sword’s scabbard on the near side for Galahad to find. Through Merlin’s craft, the sword is set in an upright marble stone that floats above the water and eventually reaches Camelot, identified in the account as Winchester. Galahad later arrives with King Arthur, brings the scabbard, and draws the sword. The duel is thus both a closed tragedy of mistaken kinship and the beginning of the weapon’s separate legendary course: a family catastrophe leaves an object, a prophecy, and a test for a later knight.