Peredur’s Quest for the Castle of Wonders

Peredur’s Quest for the Castle of Wonders turns a search for a named destination into a sequence of trials that gradually discloses the purpose behind them. The route leads through unfamiliar country and a royal court before Peredur reaches a lake-bound castle where apparently living chessmen, a destructive black man, and a monstrous stag stand between him and the truth about his family.

The Search Begins

Peredur has been wandering across the island seeking news of the black maiden, without success. In an unknown land, in a river valley, he meets a horseman dressed as a priest and asks for a blessing. The priest rebukes him for travelling in armour on Good Friday. Peredur explains that he did not know the date: it is a year since he left his country. He dismounts and leads his horse, changing his conduct in response to the warning.

After crossing a wood, Peredur comes upon an inhabited but unfortified castle and again encounters the priest. This time the priest blesses him and offers him lodging. When Peredur tries to depart the following day, the priest tells him that no one may travel that day and asks him to stay two more days, promising help in finding his destination. On the fourth day, he gives Peredur directions: cross a mountain to a river valley, where a King’s palace stands. The King had stayed there during Easter, and the priest says that Peredur may learn of the Castle of Wonders there.

At the river, Peredur meets the King and a hunting party. The King offers him a choice: join the hunt, or go to the palace, where the King’s daughter will provide food and drink until he returns. A yellow page accompanies Peredur to the palace. The daughter welcomes him and seats him beside her at the meal; she laughs loudly at what he says. The page interprets her response as evidence that she is in love with Peredur, or will soon be, and advises the King to have him seized until the matter is clarified. The King’s men arrest Peredur and put him in prison, temporarily interrupting the search just as he approaches the court that can guide him onward.

The King’s Reward and the Chessboard

The King’s daughter provides Peredur with horse and arms so that he can watch the conflict between her father and a powerful Earl who possesses two earldoms. Peredur enters the fighting in a scarlet robe over his armour and with a yellow shield, then returns to prison after each day’s combat without revealing who he is. For three days he defeats the Earl’s men; on the fourth he kills the Earl. The daughter identifies the victorious knight to her father, and the King, now secure in the two earldoms, offers Peredur his daughter in marriage, half his kingdom, and the earldoms. Peredur declines the offer because he has not come to seek a bride: he is still pursuing news of the Castle of Wonders. The daughter says she loves him and arranges a guide and provisions, directing him to a castle in the middle of a lake. Its name is known, she explains, but its wonders are not.

Peredur finds the castle’s gate and hall open. Inside, chessmen play a game by themselves. When the side he favours loses, he becomes angry, gathers the pieces into his lap, and throws the chessboard into the lake. The black maiden appears and tells him that he has deprived the Empress of a board she would not have surrendered for all her empire. To recover it, Peredur must go to the Castle of Ysbidinongyl and defeat a black man who lays waste the Empress’s lands; the maiden warns that he may not return alive. Peredur goes, fights the black man, and grants his request for mercy on condition that he restore the chessboard to its former place. When the maiden says the board has not been restored, she orders Peredur to return and kill him. Peredur does so. The trial turns his impulsive destruction of the chessboard into an obligation to confront the force harming the Empress’s dominions.

The Stag, the Cromlech, and the Turn Toward Revenge

The black maiden next bars Peredur from seeing the Empress until he confronts a monster in the forest. She describes a stag swift as a bird, with a single spear-length horn, that ruins the forest’s best trees, kills the animals it encounters, and drains the fish-pond each night, leaving the fish exposed. Since no mortal has entered the forest for more than a year, she gives Peredur a little dog belonging to the Empress to rouse the beast and lead it towards him. The stag charges; Peredur lets it pass and cuts off its head. A mounted lady arrives, takes the dog in the flap of her cap, and reproaches him for killing the finest jewel in her dominions. Peredur explains that he was asked to do so, then seeks a way to win her friendship. She sends him to a grove on a mountain, where he must challenge a man beneath a cromlech three times.

A black man rises from beneath the cromlech on a bony horse; both rider and horse wear oversized, rusty armour. Peredur repeatedly casts him down, but the man springs back into the saddle each time. When Peredur dismounts and draws his sword, the black man vanishes with both horses, leaving Peredur unable to find him again. The encounter does not resolve the challenge or explain the strange trials. Instead, Peredur crosses the mountain and reaches a castle in a river valley, where an open hall contains the lame, grey-headed man and Gwalchmai. Peredur finds his horse in the same stall as Gwalchmai’s, and they are glad to see him. The arrival brings the wandering quest back into contact with Arthur’s company, just before the meaning of the black maiden’s appearances and the earlier marvels is disclosed.

Recognition and Revenge

The lame, grey-headed man and Gwalchmai’s welcome marks a return to Arthur’s company, but the encounter’s purpose becomes clear when a yellow-haired youth kneels before Peredur and asks for his friendship. He reveals that he had appeared as the black maiden and had also brought to Arthur’s Court the bloody head on a salver and the lance streaming with blood. The head belonged to Peredur’s cousin, killed by the Sorceresses of Gloucester; they had also lamed Peredur’s uncle. The youth identifies himself as that cousin and discloses the prophecy that Peredur would avenge these deeds. The apparently disconnected marvels of the quest now converge on a family grievance and a foretold reckoning.

Peredur and Gwalchmai take counsel and send to Arthur and his household, asking them to come against the sorceresses. In the ensuing fight, one sorceress kills an Arthurian man before Peredur, and he orders her to stop; when she kills another, he warns her again. Only after a third death does he draw his sword and strike her helmet. She calls on the other sorceresses to flee, identifying Peredur as the man who had learned chivalry among them and was destined to kill them. Arthur’s company joins the assault, and the Sorceresses of Gloucester are all slain. The Castle of Wonders adventure thus ends not with Peredur claiming the Empress’s chessboard or meeting her, but with the revelation that his sequence of trials has led to the vengeance foretold for his family.