ANOTHER CASTLE: THE STOLEN PRINCESS NARRATIVE

IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE AND VIDEO GAMES

BY ERIK FREDNER

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

BACHELOR’S DEGREE WITH HONORS.

MARCH 5, 2012

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Introduction

This thesis explores the historical development of the stolen princess narrative, a

structure familiar to anyone who has ever heard a story that begins, “Once upon a time.”

Variable though it may be depending on culture, language, time, and place, the stolen

princess narrative runs something like this: Once upon a time, there was a princess. She may

have been fair-skinned, golden-haired, chaste, kind, generous, lovely, or all of the above. By some

villain’s machinations—whether that villain was an evil knight, dragon, monster, or her

oppressive father remains unclear—she vanished. She might have been taken to the monster’s

hold, jailed in the depths or towers of some forbidding castle, or trapped in a deathlike sleep.

Wherever she had gone, word of her disappearance made its way back to her own or a neighboring

province, where a king (occasionally her father), enraged as he was by her imprisonment, set a

trusted, strong, and handsome knight to the task of rescuing her.

Though exceptionally skilled in at least one regard, this knight was as yet unprepared to

rescue the princess. He may have been lacking fundamental knowledge, religious piety, a magic

sword, a magic shield, a secret weapon, a spell, a horse, the princess’s whereabouts, the help of his

friends, courage to face his deepest fear, or some combination of all these. He learned that he

would be unable to succeed in his present form from a failed attempt, or from a fortune-teller, or

from a wise elder who had witnessed this years before with disastrous results that could have been

averted if only the knight then had known or had that crucial Thing. But, knowing now what he

must do before rescuing the princess, the knight began his quest.

On his way he encountered a number of obstacles. It may be that he needed another item

in order to reach the absolutely necessary one, or that some person or monster was guarding the

way, and would allow the knight to pass only if he first proved his faith or ability by completing a

task on their behalf. Moved by necessity, he traveled far, distancing himself from his home by

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entering into a forest, desert, volcano, tundra, or other untamed region in search of that crucial

Thing. Because he persevered in circumstances that would have completely stopped a man of

lesser faith, strength, ability, morality, intellect, courage, etc., the knight eventually got what he

needed, and, thus armed, made his way to the castle or lair or tower where the princess was being

held captive.

Sensing the arrival of her savior, the princess may have found a means to communicate

with the knight, offering him a final piece of essential information about her captor’s weakness, or

how he might break the lock, magical or physical, that was holding her. With a surge of strength,

a sudden insight, or help from a third party—whether the princess herself, a loyal animal, or a

benevolent god approving of the knight’s faithfulness remains unclear—the knight overcame the

princess’s captor and rescued her. They returned to her home, where, perhaps at her father’s

insistence, or perhaps because of their own newfound yet admirably passionate love, the brave

knight and beautiful princess were wed, and so lived happily ever after.

Well known and widely used across all media, this stolen princess narrative has

stitched itself into the fabric of popular culture, though it has changed over the centuries

that have passed since it first became popularized. We can see its beginnings within the

Greco-Roman tradition. One of the most prominent of these is the myth of Andromeda.

As Ovid tells it, Queen Cassiope boasted that she and her daughter Andromeda were

more beautiful than the Nereids, which made Neptune so angry that he sent a sea

monster called Cetus to ravage the coast of the kingdom. Sacrificing Andromeda to the

monster to appease Neptune’s wrath seemed to be the only solution, so the king chained

his daughter to a rocky cliff. These narrative movements established the princess-

monster connection that would become the basis of the stolen princess narrative across

pop history—for example, Fay Wray plays the part of Andromeda well against King

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Kong’s Cetus in the 1933 King Kong.1 The brutality, sexuality, and the sense of disgust

the pairing of princess and monster evoke are the forces that animate the hero and pique

the reader’s interest.

In Andromeda’s case, her suffering calls Perseus to her rescue. Evoking a trope

common to nearly all explanations of heroic motivation in stolen princess narratives,

Andromeda’s beauty overcomes Perseus to the extent that he loses thought of himself.

Ovid writes,

[Andromeda’s] beauty quite astounded [Perseus],

and left him witless, to the point that he

almost forgot to keep his wings in motion.2

What we see happening to Perseus here also happens to almost all heroes in stolen

princess narratives. The beauty, purity, wisdom, or whatever trait of the princess’s the

knight most admires catches him completely off guard, pulling him temporarily from

that which he has mastered—the physical worlds of exploration and combat—into the

untested territories of beauty, love, and romance. The knight loses thought of himself as

he comes to identify both his feelings for the princess, thereby privileging her need

above his own self-interest. So it follows that Perseus, compelled by Andromeda’s

beauty, flies into battle; swords slash, blood flows after him, and soon the beast lies dead.

With all concomitant chivalry that accompanies his position, Perseus frees Andromeda,

and the king holds a feast in honor of their marriage, an unlikely series of events were it

1 Cooper, Merian, dir. King Kong (1933). Turner Home Entertainment, 2006. Film.

2 Ovid and Charles Martin (trans). Metamorphoses. 1st ed. United States: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Print. 112-113

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not for the hero’s complete self-identification with his task prompted by the princess’s

beauty and need.

The myth of Andromeda contributes three major points to a history of the stolen

princess narrative: First, while Ovid’s vision of Andromeda and Perseus does not

correspond word-for-word with the modern view of the type traced in italics above, it is

a clear antecedent of the narrative’s full flourishing in the age of romance. Second, it

shows all of the major players—the princess, the adversary, the knight—in the roles they

play in a standard stolen princess narrative. Third, and most importantly for our

purposes here, it introduces the trope of the hero subsumed by his quest. This near-

religious extinguishment of the self is a major theme of the stolen princess narrative,

both from a religious perspective, and, as we will see later, a major factor of the story’s

success and prevalence in the world of video games.

As the type developed and adapted to contemporary tastes through and beyond

the Middle Ages, the “princess” no longer needed to be royalty and the “knight” no

longer needed to be wearing shining armor. Thousands of popular books, films, and

video games derive their plot and narrative structure from this archetype in spite of the

political and gender issues it brings to a modern audience. While keeping its original

structure, the story has been modified in recent years in light of feminist critiques that

have rightfully attacked its gender politics, leading to modern popular fictions such as

Tangled3 or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo4 that invert the traditional male-saves-female

relationship. Stieg Larsson’s posthumous bestseller, originally titled Män som hatar

3 Greno, Nathan, dir. Tangled. Walt Disney Pictures, 2011. Film.

4 Larsson, Stieg. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Vintage, 2011. 672. Print.

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kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”), concludes with a male protagonist being trapped in

a basement—a role in crime fiction traditionally fulfilled by a woman who gets too

involved in the “man’s work” of solving the mystery, such as Grace Kelly’s character

Lisa in Rear Window,5 and is punished for it. Larsson inverts this derivative of the stolen

princess, the damsel-in-distress, by having his male protagonist saved by the female

protagonist. This rearrangement of the variables that make up the stolen princess

narrative’s structure is characteristic of the narrative’s omnipresent cultural influence, its

malleability, and its broad usage in all forms of narrative drama.

Like traditional folk songs that borrow chords and melodies from one another

though their words may change, the stolen princess narrative has been recast in every

medium and every age to suit popular tastes. It appears in visual art, oral tradition,

theater, the serial novel, comics, graphic novels, radio plays, film, and television, to

name a few. This thesis takes special interest in the relationship between the

development of the narrative as a popular form in the medieval era and its widespread

usage in contemporary video games.

Establishing this connection between the literary history of the stolen princess

narrative and its usage in video games serves three purposes. First, it demonstrates the

long history the stolen princess narrative has enjoyed and how the narrative has

changed in and been changed by the new medium of games.6 Second, connecting

literary tradition to video games will begin to cement the status of games as an

5 Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Rear Window. Universal Studios, 1954. Film.

6 The word “games” is used herein as shorthand for “video games;” as it is used here, it does not refer to all

types of games (e.g. board games, children’s games, etc).

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artistically and culturally significant medium, a view that has gained more proponents

than opponents in recent years.7 Third, analyzing the games discussed here will build

upon the emerging, but by no means fully developed, lexical set used to discuss games

critically.

Up to this point, traditional video game criticism has focused on metrics like

graphics, gameplay, and sound, placing these on a continuum from good to bad, and

then scoring the game based on those criteria. Game criticism in its present form is more

a form of culturally sanctioned advertising than an avenue for critical thought about

new media.8 Video game criticism should focus less on comparing games against their

peers and predecessors, and instead focus on games as cultural, social, and literary

artifacts. The driving question in game criticism should not be “Why is it good?” as it

has been for the last twenty-five years, but “Why is it at all?” In order for the prevailing

understanding of games as toys and distractions to change, we must ask serious

questions of them and expect them to offer serious answers, not just well-lit explosions.

Games provide a direct form of experience; interactivity makes them non-vicarious, and

they are the only medium that creates meaning this way.

7 It is a view that is also haunted by Roger Ebert’s now famous (and recently retracted) aphorism, “Video

games can never be art.” cf. Ebert, Robert. "Video games can never be art." Chicago Sun-Times. Chicago Sun-

Times, 16 Apr 2010. Web. 19 Feb 2012.

8 cf. Totilo, Stephen. "How we will review games." Kotaku. Kotaku, 30 Jan 2012. Web. 19 Feb 2012.

<http://kotaku.com/5880486/how-we-will-review-games>.

cf. Musgrove, Mike. "An inside play to sway video gamers." Washington Post. (2007): n. page. Web. 19 Feb.

2012. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/02/AR2007070201743.html>.

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These three purposes are backed by lofty goals. While they will not be realized

overnight, five years from now, I hope that video games, already in a moment of

transition in popular conception from toys to an artistic medium all their own, will be

popularly recognized as art.

What is the stolen princess narrative?

Finding the academic Holy Grail that is “The Beginning” of a subject like the

stolen princess narrative is all but impossible. Stories about their interactions were told

from the time that there were such things as knights and princesses, but because an oral

tradition of this sort preceded the narrative’s written instance, it is unfeasible to identify

the first time and place the story appeared. Moreover, it would be counter-productive to

do so. For a narrative type that has been so completely integrated into art and literature,

finding the “first” stolen princess narrative is less important than the general impression

the type has left on the modern cultural consciousness. After all, thousands of stolen

princesses have had their stories told based not on the one original stolen princess, but

the widely branching variants the narrative’s existence brought about.

Because the history of the narrative lacks a single starting point, we must look to

the folk-tales that were influenced by the narrative’s oral tradition to find its roots. In

1910, Antti Aarne (whose work was later translated and enlarged by Stith Thompson)

took on the massive project of classifying over 2,500 folktale types and plots, the stolen

princess narrative among them.9 While Aarne sets out the types as distinct units, many

9 Aarne, A. (1981). The Types of the Folktale. Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Hereafter referred to

as TFT.

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modern stories that engage with the stolen princess narrative borrow elements from

multiple tale types. Aarne begins his analysis of tale types that contribute to the stolen

princess narrative at the beginning of section II of his classification, which he deems the

“Ordinary Folk-Tales.”10 The first fifty-nine of these are further sub-typed as “Tales of

Magic” that feature “Supernatural Adversaries.”11 The way in which Aarne’s

classification system nests this particular folk-tale cues some of the primary traits of the

stolen princess narrative.

First, it is “ordinary” in the sense that it is a commonly told story. Broadly

defined, the stolen princess narrative appears across cultural history—in the Greco-

Roman myth of Andromeda, in the Faerie Queene,12 in Rapunzel,13 in 1,001 Arabian

Nights,14 in Shrek.15 It is a base for much mythmaking in cultures across the world. After

all, are James Bond and Lancelot really so different from one another if they are both

“out to get/save the girl?” Both struggle with what they need to do and what they are

expected to do. Both suffer from a breed of selflessness that manifests itself in suicidally

close encounters with death. Both typify the masculine ideal. Though roughly 800 years

separate their literary invention, not much changes for the part of the leading man

10 TFT 88

11 TFT 88

12 Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. 3. G. Routledge, 1855. Web.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=PGvPLxiWTQkC&dq=faerie queene&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.

13 Grimm, Jacob, Wilhelm Grimm, and Dorothée Duntze.Rapunzel. 1st ed. North-South Books, 2007. Web.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=GJXImZKHMRoC&q=rapunzel&dq=rapunzel&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MTJ

BT4OFB-Xh0QH1r43WBw&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAg>.

14 Burton, Richard. The Arabian Nights. Digireads, 2008. eBook.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=NXa7TXBBsfwC&dq=arabian nights&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.

15 Jenson, Vicky, dir. Shrek. Dreamworks Animated, 2001. Film.

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between Lancelot and Bond. In this sense, the stolen princess is “ordinary;” it is a

common, well-known, and dependable narrative type.

Second, Aarne’s requirement of a “supernatural adversary” sits nicely with the

popular conception of the stolen princess narrative. A dragon seems the natural

candidate for a knight’s “supernatural adversary,” and as such they are often portrayed

holding a princess against her will. Paolo Uccello’s c. 1470 paintings16 of St. George

defeating a dragon to save a captive princess portray this narrative relationship linearly:

Riding a white horse, St. George spears a dragon with his lance as the princess, newly

freed from her captor, looks on with joy. Uccello’s dragons are not as imposing in scale

as those in modern fantasy representations often are,17 but they look unearthly all the

same, standing in sickly green relief against the landscape and other life forms, their

already-misshapen bodies all the more bent by the damage St. George’s lance has just

done. In each painting, the princess stands behind the dragon in the left third of the

canvas, the narrative end of the movement begun by St. George on the right to eliminate

the obstacle in the middle separating them. To expand this knight-adversary-princess

relationship to include the non-supernatural stolen princess narratives, how much

narrative difference is there between Meleagant, “the personification of evil,”18 who

captures Guinevere and defends his right to have her against her will, and a dragon?19

Yes, Meleagant articulates more complex motivations than a dragon would, but their

16 Uccello, Paolo. Saint George and the Dragon 1 & 2. c. 1456, c. 1470. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London.

17 We may look to films like Shrek or video games like Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011) to see how big dragons have

gotten in 21st century minds.

18 Staines, C. d. T. D. (2010). The Complete Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (Updated). Bloomington,

Indiana, Indiana University Press.

19 Staines xix

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narratological functions are identical: They are obstacles for the knight to overcome. On

top of that, they are villains blown out of realistic proportions by the narrative need to

make a clear distinction between good and evil. Making the hero’s adversary maniacal,

grotesque, or supernatural is the easiest means to this end, and the stolen princess

narrative often uses this device to show the reader which side to be on when weighing

the hero’s merits and faults against those of his “supernatural adversary.”

Just as Aarne’s placement of the stolen princess narrative within the broad

spectrum of folk-tales gives us some information about the features of this type relative

to the other types he defines, its further specification within the linked type numbers 300

to 359—the group of narratives in which “The Ogre (Giant, Dragon, Devil, Cobold, etc.)

is Defeated”—gives Aarne’s reader a sense of the narratives that are related to the stolen

princess narrative.20 Though they may not have characters who are actually knights or

princesses, these linked narratives often use characters or types whose narratological

function is identical to the knight-adversary-princess triangle that defines the stolen

princess narrative, though, as Aarne’s title suggests with its parenthetical et cetera, it

matters little what the enemy actually is so long as the hero defeats it.

Type number 301, with which we are primarily concerned, is called “The Three

Stolen Princesses,” and its sub-types—301A, B, C, and D—cover some of the most

common narrative turns in stolen princess narratives. Aarne identifies the following six

major narrative points associated with type 301 (Ellipses omit story-specific references

Aarne makes.):

I. The Hero is of supernatural origin and strength…

20 TFT 88

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II. The Descent. [The Hero] comes to a house…and follows [a monster] through a hole into the lower world.

III. Stolen Maidens. Three princesses are stolen by a monster. The hero goes to rescue them.

IV. Rescue. In the lower world, with a sword which he finds there, he conquers several monsters and rescues three maidens…

V. Betrayal of the Hero. He is left below by his treacherous companions, but he reaches the upper world…

VI. Recognition. He is recognized by the princesses when he arrives on the wedding day…secures the punishment of the impostors and marries one of the princesses.21

This structure provides a useful entry point into a broader consideration of the type by

identifying the chief plot points that make up a stolen princess narrative, though every

story that might be categorized in that way will vary at the level of specific detail. For

example, while we may depend that every stolen princess narrative will have some evil

force to take the princess away, certainly not every narrative will have a “Magic air

journey from biting ear” nor will every “Hero [feed his] own flesh to helpful animal.”22

It is at this level of detail that Aarne’s classifications become less useful for the purpose

of studying the broader narrative structure.

Aarne’s work in Types of the Folktale remains useful, however, in that it shows not

only the general structure and specific motifs common to many stolen princess

narratives, but also the universal appeal and far-reaching presence of the story. Aarne

identifies stories that conform to his type 301 and its lettered sub-types in a wide variety

of vernacular language literatures.23 As is evident from the breadth of nationalities

21 TFT 90-91

22 TFT 92

23 Including French, Anglo-Saxon, Livonian, Lapish, Swedish, Scottish, Irish, English, Catalan, Flemish,

German, Austrian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovenian, Serbocroatian, Polish, Russian, Chinese, English-American,

12

reproduced in part above—and noted only by Aarne’s turn-of-the-century work without

including many tales uncovered since the “completion” of The Types of the Folktales in

1910—the stolen princess narrative is present in some form in nearly every culture.

Though this study will take a Eurocentric approach to the literary history of the stolen

princess narrative, Aarne’s work suggests the universal value of and a cross-cultural

interest in the narrative type.

The stolen princess narrative is also a perennial pop phenomenon. 1,001 Arabian

Nights, The Iliad, Robin Hood, Rapunzel, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, Beauty and

the Beast, Hercules, Shrek, Hansel and Gretel, Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, King Kong,

Godzilla, James Bond, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Scooby Doo, Popeye the Sailor Man,

Mickey Mouse, The Fifth Element, Star Wars, The Princess Bride, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc.,

WALL-E, and thousands more popular narratives from across cultural and political

boundaries all draw on the tradition of the stolen princess, though the exact term for

who gets stolen—whether “girlfriend,” “wife,” “daughter,” “friend,” or “robot”—shifts

outside the royal family in accordance with popular preference.

So, what, if anything, has changed between Helen of Troy and Princess Peach?

How has an old type like the stolen princess narrative remained popular for thousands

of years when many of its brothers and sisters in Types of the Folktale have fallen by the

wayside?

Franco-American, Spanish-American, West Indian, Swahili, Turkish, Indian, American Indian, Estonian,

Basque, Danish, etc. TFT 92

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How did the stolen princess narrative develop?

A case study of the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story

After Andromeda there came a number of none-too-well documented stolen

princess narratives, many of uncertain dating and nationality, passed down largely

through the oral tradition. In 1949, folklorist Paul Delarue analyzed eighty-one French

variants of the Aarne-Thompson type 301—The Quest for the Stolen Princess—in an

article in the Nouvelle revue des Traditions Populaires.24 The stories Delarue discussed had

largely informed the Aarne-Thompson outline of the type, which essentially accords

with the western tradition of the stolen princess. The Brothers Grimm also record their

own versions of type 301, particularly in the stories “The Gnome” and “The Two

Brothers,” both of which, like the rest of the Brothers Grimm corpus, are derived from

extant folk sources.25 But because any textual version of a stolen princess from the oral

tradition is essentially the precipitate of a centuries-long game of Telephone,26 we turn

our attention to the somewhat better documented life of St. Gildas, which includes the

first mention of the most famous stolen “princess” of medieval literature, Queen

Guinevere, wife of King Arthur.

24 Delarue, Paul. Nouvelle revue des Traditions Populaires. September-October 1949, 312ff.

25 Grimm, Wilhelm, and Jacob Grimm. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. Digireads, 2009. eBook.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=KA_Pt9jfIAwC&dq=complete brothers

grimm&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.

26 A children’s game in which the players whisper a phrase quietly from person to person in a chain. As

links in the chain mishear the phrase, it changes, and the new form is passed on to the next link. The object

of the game is to see the difference between the starting phrase, which no one knows for sure except the first

player, and the mangled final result.

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Two different near-contemporary biographies of St. Gildas provide modern

readers with most of what is “known” about his life. His biographers, an unidentified

monk of Rhys and Caradoc of Llancarfan, present slightly different pictures of the saint,

one noting St. Gildas’s mediation between Arthur and Melwas over the capture of

Guinevere where the other excludes it. According to Caradoc of Llancarfan,

[Glastonia] was besieged by the tyrant Arthur with a countless

multitude on account of his wife Gwenhwyafar, whom the

aforesaid wicked king had violated and carried off, and brought

there for protection, owing to the asylum afforded by the

invulnerable position due to the fortifications of thickets of reed,

river, and marsh. The rebellious king had searched for the queen

throughout the course of one year, and had at last heard that she

remained there. Thereupon he roused the armies of the whole of

Cornubia and Dibneria; war was prepared between the enemies.27

What makes this episodic mention of Arthur and Guinevere in the context of St. Gildas’s

life interesting is the presence of the villain “Melwas,” the competing king mentioned as

Arthur’s enemy in the passage above. Melwas is the Welsh reflex of Meleagant, the

sinister prince who steals Guinevere away again in Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the

Cart, among other versions of this particular stolen princess narrative. The relationship

shown here between Melwas, Meleagant, Arthur, and Guinevere not only connects the

story of Guinevere’s abduction, which will be told and re-told tens of times over the

27 Carador of Llanrarfan, , and Hugh Williams. Two Lives of Gildas. Reprint. Felinfach: Llanerch Enterprises,

1990. Print. pp. 99.

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years following the writing and publication of Caradoc’s biography of St. Gildas, but it

suggests the interconnected nature of the stolen princess narrative at a metatextual level,

the debt each new variation of the story owes to its predecessors, and the recurring

characters and character types that populate each iteration.

Alongside the recurring characters and narrative structures, many—though not

all—stolen princess narratives share one other common ground: a sense of unambiguous

moral clarity. As suggested both by the rigidity of Aarne’s structural outline and the

standard cast of characters a stolen princess narrative that outline requires (the “good

guys” and the “bad guys”), good and evil play off of one another in stark relief. The

conflict is obvious, the characters’ motivations equally clear, and with those certainties

come the reader’s inborn hope for the knight to defeat the monster and save the princess,

the instinct to cheer on the good guys. A foundational binary, good and evil often play

against one another in stark terms within a stolen princess narrative, but as we will see,

authors and game developers have taken this expectation readers and players use to

approach what they recognize as a stolen princess narrative and deliberately subverted

it, blurring the lines that once so plainly separated Perseus’s noble heroism from Cetus’s

monstrous destruction, and so destabilize the reader’s expectations, opening a trap door

that yawns far deeper than that single story. In fact, it may lead the reader to distrust his

or her expectations, exchanging the known for the unknown.

We now turn our attention from this first mention of Guinevere’s abduction to

both its fullest and most problematic retelling in the medieval tradition, Chrétien de

Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart. But the transnational and pan-historic sense of

interconnectedness described above and below does not end with the Middle Ages; it

accompanies each iteration of the stolen princess narrative up to the present.

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The romances of Chrétien idealize courtly love, the means by which new stolen

princess narratives would be told in the Middle Ages. Gaston Paris coined the term

“courtly love” in an 1883 article, “Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du

Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette,” which discussed the conventionalization of love in

Chrétien’s The Knight of the Cart.28 Now Paris’s article holds greater significance in the

intellectual history of courtly love than it does academically, but many later studies29

have focused on the highly conventionalized narrative structure of courtly love begun in

The Knight of the Cart and described by Paris.

A knight in Chrétien’s works lives the life of the court, one defined by comfort in

self-knowledge and mastery of one’s environment, until fate or duty pulls him from that

comfort. Removed from the court and forced into an unfamiliar environment, his

suffering—either physical from the hardships of his travel or emotional from an

unrequited love—subsumes him during his quest, reaching its apex when he confronts

his enemy in an attempt to resolve the principal conflict of the narrative (often, though

not always a vanished princess). Without the changed perception of life during the

28 Boase, Roger. “Courtly Love” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Vol. 3, pp. 667-668. 1986.

29 Southern, Richard William. The making of the Middle Ages. Reprint. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.

eBook. <http://books.google.com/books?id=1yAuAPxIOL0C&dq=southern making of the Middle

Ages&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.

O'Donoghue, Bernard. The courtly love tradition. Reprint. 5. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982.

eBook. <http://books.google.com/books?id=2Z3oAAAAIAAJ&dq=o'donoghue courtly love

tradition&source=gbs_navlinks_s>.

Maddox, Donald. The Arthurian Romances of Chrétien de Troyes: Once and future fictions. 1st ed. Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Print.

Bruhn, Jørgen. Lovely Violence: Chrétien de Troyes' Critical Romances. 1st ed. Newcastle Upon Tyne:

Cambridge Scholars, 2010. Print.

17

Middle Ages as a journey rather than something to be endured,30 romances focused on

uniting and blurring the boundary between devotional and sexual love would never

have become popular, let alone the “dominant non-devotional genre.”31

What is it in the story of The Knight of the Cart that Chrétien’s audience, his

contemporaries, and centuries of critics afterward found so compelling? One answer to

this question can be found in the way Chrétien’s story has survived up to the present.

The Knight of the Cart exists in eight separate manuscripts; no two manuscripts are

exactly alike in phrasing, but all follow the same narrative arc.32 This implies that it is

not Chrétien’s language that holds interest for his readers so much as the strength of the

narrative itself, a story that is both a foundational tale in the courtly love tradition and

also an archetypal stolen princess narrative exemplary of the type’s popular appeal.

The brief summary of The Knight of the Cart that follows serves two purposes.

First, it describes in concrete terms the abstract narrative suggested by Aarne’s type 301

outline and suggested piecemeal by the stories already mentioned. Second, though it is

rooted in Caradoc of Llancarfan’s biography of St. Gildas, the Lancelot-Meleagant-

Guinevere story that we know today originated with Chrétien and subsequently became

30 cf. Southern, Chapter V “From Epic to Romance”

31 Chism, Christine. "Romance." The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Literature 1100-1500. Ed.

Larry Scanlon. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge University

Press. 19 February 2012.

32 Uitti, Karl. "Background Information on Chrétien de Troyes's Le chevalier de la charrette." Chrétien de

Troyes and some poetic issues. Princeton, 22 Jul 1997. Web. 19 Feb 2012.

<http://www.princeton.edu/~lancelot/romance.html>.

18

one of the most popular tales in the Arthurian mythos, making it a perfect vehicle for

analyzing the development of the stolen princess narrative over time.

The Knight of the Cart follows the general arc of Aarne’s type 301 structure,

though it lacks the supernatural elements characteristic of the folktales that Aarne

studied. Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight33 and Beowulf,34 the conflict in The Knight of

the Cart starts with the arrival of an unknown enemy at a feast. Suited in battle armor,

the unknown knight issues King Arthur a challenge with all the hubris expected of a

villain explaining his evil plan: “‘King Arthur, in my prison I hold knights, ladies, and

maidens of your land and your household. But I tell you the news not because I intend

to return them to you. On the contrary, I simply wish to inform you and serve notice

that you don’t have the force or wealth to free them. You can be certain you will die

before you ever bring them aid.’”35 This introduction casts Meleagant in an evil light that

he does not leave until Lancelot beheads him at the end of the story, an assurance for the

reader on the first page of The Knight of the Cart that the fixed character types of knight,

adversary, and princess will be at play.

As with any stolen princess narrative, a knight, guard, or soldier must first fail in

his duty to protect in order for the princess to be taken from the safety the castle

provides and represents. Kay, a knight of Arthur’s court, takes up and fails Meleagant’s

challenge; he and Guinevere get captured as a result. Sir Gawain then sets off from

Arthur’s court on a rescue mission and meets a nameless knight on the road in need of a

33 Gawain Poet, and Simon Armitage. Sir Gawain and the Greek Knight. Illustrated. New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 2007. Print.

34 Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf: a new verse translation. reprint. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. Print.

35 Staines 171

19

new horse. Though it is not revealed until The Knight of the Cart is almost over, that

nameless knight who becomes the protagonist of the narrative thereafter is Lancelot.

Theories abound as to why Lancelot remains nameless for such a great amount of the

story—to imply the great shame inherent in his riding the cart, to give the story a twist

ending, to protect Lancelot’s image by partially disassociating him from the adultery he

eventually commits with Guinevere. But one of the simplest explanations of his

anonymity proves to be the most fruitful; he remains the nameless “knight” throughout

because he personifies both the literary and courtly knight figure. This is evidenced in

his endurance of the trials put before him, his honor-bound conduct, and his eventual

success where other knights (Kay, Gawain) fail to save the queen.

In the solitary tradition of the knight-errant, the still-nameless Lancelot and

Gawain choose two different paths to approach the castle where Meleagant is keeping

Kay and Guinevere. Because the traditional knight-errant travels alone with his horse,

he spends much of his time thinking as he travels from place to place. While epic

literature tends to gloss this uneventful travel time, Chrétien and other writers in the

courtly love tradition take it as an opportunity to explore the psychology of a knight on

a quest. This exploration humanizes the knight in a way that lacks precedent; no longer

was the knight presented as a simple servant of God and king, but as an agent with his

own will, thoughts, and desires external to his duty. Chrétien imagined the knight as

equally susceptible to physical and emotional danger, particularly in the struggle

between love and reason. Chrétien’s image of the knight as powerful and chivalrous yet

emotionally vulnerable has far reaching historical implications for the development of

the knight-figure in literature and popular conception across both France and England.

20

Once he has fallen in love, the knight’s devotion to his princess (or, in Lancelot’s

case, queen) becomes all-consuming, a reflection of the increasing interest in the

individual already suggested by Chrétien’s exploration of the knight’s psychology.

Chrétien’s knights, and especially Lancelot, whose love was “a hundred thousand times

greater” than that in “all other hearts,” often become so completely lost in thought

during their travels that they become unaware of their external surroundings.36 As

Lancelot follows the road to Meleagant’s castle, Chrétien writes,

Like one powerless and defenseless against Love’s control, the knight of the cart fell into such thoughts that he lost thought of himself. He did not know if he was alive or dead, did not remember his own name, did not know whether he was armed or not, did not know where he was going or whence he was coming. He remembered nothing except one person, and for her he put everyone else out of mind. He thought so much about her alone that he heard, saw, understood nothing.37

Cutting against the side of Lancelot the reader sees when he is active, Chrétien adds

emotional depth to the knight-figure in a moment of inactivity by showing how

completely love can overpower the strongest of warriors. On another level, the narrative

conceit that love can overpower a knight suggests the selflessness of his quest, a

selflessness which, rejoined by bravery and chivalry, completes the character of the

typified medieval knight-figure. As Chrétien writes, “[The knight,] powerless and

defenseless against Love’s control…fell into such thoughts that he lost thought of

himself.” While he is on the quest, the knight identifies himself more as a means to the

end of that quest—saving the princess—than as an individual. That union of person

with purpose proves the depth of the knight’s feelings of obligation. He literally cannot

36 Staines 227

37 Staines 178

21

be himself again until he completes his quest; while he is on it, the quest becomes his

identity.

In this passage, Chrétien also achieves a narratological end by introducing the

internalizing effects meditating on love produces. He says that, “[Lancelot] thought so

much about [Guinevere] alone that he heard, saw, understood nothing.”38 This

daydreaming becomes a plot device when another knight shouts three times at a

dreamy-eyed Lancelot, warning him not to allow his horse to drink from a brook.

Lovestruck Lancelot, lost in thought, does not hear, so his horse drinks and the two

knights suddenly have good reason to fight. Pulled from his idle thoughts by need of

action, Lancelot defeats the other knight but the narrator notes the physical weakness

that had befallen him because of love: “If yesterday [Lancelot] had come upon a

hundred such knights in a valley, they would not, he thought and believed, have offered

him any resistance. Now he was angry and unhappy to be missing strokes and wasting

the day because of exhaustion.”39 That exhaustion is as emotional as it is physical. His

waning sense of self in light of his new quest weakens his fighting, demonstrating the

physical manifestation of emotions in courtly love.40

The knight’s challenge at the brook represents the first of many brought about by

Lancelot’s need to progress on his path. With each obstacle he encounters, the challenge

grows, each preparing him to overcome final obstacle between himself and Guinevere,

Meleagant. After lifting a stone that ten men could not; saving, escorting, and gaining

38 Staines 178

39 Staines 181

40 cf. Yvain in another Chrétien romance, “Yvain, The Knight of the Lion.”

22

the respect of another maiden; receiving a ring that reveals enchantments; and being

constantly haunted by the ignominy of having ridden in a cart on his way, Lancelot

finally arrives at the sword bridge, the last obstacle to entering Meleagant’s castle. In

order to cross the sword bridge, Lancelot must remove his boots and gauntlets, causing

him to cut his hands and feet badly as he crosses. In spite of the cuts and Meleagant’s

father’s insistence that Lancelot heal before fighting his son, Lancelot demands to fight

Meleagant for Guinevere’s release the next morning. Narratologically, a reader sees two

possible outcomes of this brash decision. In the first, Lancelot’s choosing to fight

Meleagant in a weakened state could make him lose, requiring him to either grow

stronger before challenging Meleagant again, or else die in the fight. In the second,

Lancelot could prove victorious against all odds, rescue Guinevere, and return to a

hero’s welcome in Arthur’s court. But the reason The Knight of the Cart and the stolen

princess narrative have remained so popular among is that this battle only hints at

success before the hero must endure his greatest challenge. In Aarne’s system, this first

encounter between Lancelot and Meleagant corresponds to part four, “The Rescue,”

which immediately precedes the ominously titled “Betrayal of the Hero.”

Cutting against the both of the reader’s natural expectations, Lancelot’s hard-

fought battle with Meleagant results in disaster, though he seems to win. Guinevere

stops their fighting at Meleagant’s father’s insistence; it is clear that Lancelot will kill

Meleagant if no one intervenes. Meleagant, furious, demands that Lancelot agree to fight

him one year from that day at King Arthur’s court. Declared the winner, Lancelot had

freed Guinevere and all of Meleagant’s prisoners from captivity, yet the “joy…among

23

the crowds of people” contrasts sharply with what happens next between Guinevere

and Lancelot.41 Even though he just saved her, Guinevere refuses to see him. Lancelot

assumes that she refuses because he shamefully rode in a cart, and is miserable to the

point of suicide that the woman he loves would refuse to speak with him. This

unexpected narrative turn falls in line with Aarne’s “Betrayal of the Hero,” and is

important because it provides Lancelot the opportunity to show an as-yet untouched

emotional dimension: despair. At no other point in the narrative is Lancelot completely

hopeless; he had done everything that generic and social convention expected of him,

everything expected of a knight on a rescue mission. So it stands to reason that, having

done everything else right, his saving the queen would be the joyous affair it should be,

but Chrétien plays with Lancelot and his reader’s expectations by making Guinevere

illogically deny Lancelot. This cuts against generic convention and seems almost

irreconcilable at first glance. Queen Guinevere’s internal monologue explaining her

actions—the only other extended look into a character’s thoughts in The Knight of the Cart

besides the scene where Lancelot loses himself in thought of Guinevere—creates

dramatic irony by showing that Guinevere and Lancelot want each other, though

Guinevere’s actions purposefully delay that satisfaction. Guinevere explains that her

denial of Lancelot was “a jest, but he did not take it that way, and has not forgiven

me.”42 Guinevere goes on to say, “None but I delivered [Lancelot’s] death blow, this I

41 Staines 217

42 Staines 221

24

know,” a response that seems melodramatic until Lancelot unsuccessfully attempts to

hang himself from his galloping horse on the ride back from Meleagant’s castle.43

This dramatic irony resolves itself soon afterward. The pair express their feelings

for one another, and Lancelot and Guinevere then spend their first night together after

Lancelot bends the bars at Guinevere’s window to gain access to her room. He replaces

the bars afterward, itself an interesting metaphor, Bruhn argues, for the adulterous

aspect of courtly love as a rule easily “bent” then “unbroken.”44 Like his false victory

over Meleagant earlier, the consummation of Lancelot and Guinevere’s love spells

disaster for Lancelot, who must thereafter face his greatest challenge. Deceived by one of

Meleagant’s henchmen after leaving Guinevere, Lancelot becomes trapped in a high

tower, an interesting inversion of the princess-in-a-tower trope found most famously in

Rapunzel.

His plan to make Lancelot look weak as secure as the tower holding Lancelot

captive, Meleagant arrives in Arthur’s court on the appointed day he and Lancelot are

meant to fight. His trapping Lancelot while demanding that he come forward to fight

both protects himself and shames Lancelot. Because Lancelot had gained the love and

respect of another maiden on his quest to rescue Guinevere, however, she set out to find

him, knowing that he would not have disappeared for such a long time unless he were

trapped or dead. After searching for months, she finds the tower in which he has been

trapped and helps him escape. This subverts the tradition of the stolen princess

narrative more so than even Lancelot’s original imprisonment, flipping the traditional

43 Staines 221

44 Bruhn, “Making Love While Staying a Virgin” in Lovely Violence (full citation at footnote 30).

25

gender roles of the iconic tower rescue scene. Though weakened by bad bread and

inactivity,45 Lancelot returns to King Arthur’s court to meet Meleagant on the appointed

day. Shocked by Lancelot’s arrival, Meleagant attempts to fight, but is easily

overpowered, and finally, “Lancelot advanced, unlaced Meleagant’s helmet, and cut off

his head.”46 Considering the many obstacles Lancelot faced throughout The Knight of the

Cart to reaching this end, the narrator makes it clear that the matter is settled by

tautologically concluding, “Never again would Meleagant deceive [Lancelot]. He had

fallen dead. His life had ended.”47

Although this concludes the main narrative of The Knight of the Cart, it would be

false to say that it is the end of the text. In fact, The Knight of the Cart is bookended by

both an introduction and conclusion from the author that have as much to say about

chivalry and courtly love as Lancelot’s actions do. Chrétien makes clear from the outset

of The Knight of the Cart that his purpose is to write a romance. Introducing the poem, he

writes, “Since my lady of Champagne wills me to undertake the making of a romance, I

shall undertake it with great goodwill, as one so wholly devoted that he will do

anything in the world for her without any intention of flattery.”48 This introductory

passage sets up the story’s generic positioning—Chrétien has consciously tried to write a

romance to please his “lady,” who is traditionally thought of as Marie de Champagne,

one of the daughters of Eleanor de Aquitaine. This conscious engagement with romance

suggests that Chrétien was not attempting to blur boundaries between genres or upend

45 A state that rarely affects tower-trapped princesses elsewhere in the tradition.

46 Staines 256

47 Staines 256

48 Staines 170

26

conventions. Yet we cannot ignore the moments throughout The Knight of the Cart where

he does just that, allowing Lancelot to be saved from a tower by a woman and the issue

of Guinevere’s adultery and its political implications.49 A subtler aspect common to both

the introduction and the story that follows it is the toady devotion Chrétien shows to his

patroness, a cloying excessive courtesy that he shows in the same way that the knights

of his story do with the ladies they meet.

Though Chrétien’s twelfth-century rendering is the foundational popular telling

of the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story and brings to the fore many interesting

political, social, and narratological problems of its age through the dependable form of

the stolen princess narrative, it is by no means the last rendering of the Lancelot-

Meleagant-Guinevere story to achieve this. The Vulgate Cycle, alternatively known as

the Lancelot-Grail or Prose Lancelot,50 is a five-volume prose account of Arthurian legend

written in French. Often dated to the early thirteenth century, though the exact year is

disputed, the Vulgate Cycle follows Chrétien. Though it departs from Chrétien’s work in

both style and form, the Vulgate borrows directly from his narratives, and particularly

the innovations from The Knight of the Cart. Although the Vulgate holds the main line of

Chrétien’s narrative, it differs in a few important respects.

First, the Vulgate opens with an explanation as to where Lancelot is at the

beginning of the story, a piece of information elided by Chrétien. According to the

Vulgate, Lancelot begins the story in a maddened state, recovering with the help of the

49 Adultery and politics in Knight of the Cart are treated in much greater detail by Maddox (1991).

50 Lacy, Norris. Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian vulgate and post-vulgate in translation. reprint. 4. New

York: Garland Publishing, 2010. Print.

27

Lady of the Lake. After a few days of recovery, she informs him that he must return to

King Arthur’s court before Ascension Day. When he asks why, she prophesies that “‘the

queen [Guinevere] will be abducted. If you are present, you’ll rescue her from the place

from which no one has ever been rescued.’”51 This type of divination is absent in

Chrétien, a sign of the increasing religiosity and spirituality that will become

intrinsically bound up with the Arthur myth as the legend develops between the twelfth

and fifteenth centuries. Moreover, this first scene with Lancelot in the context of his

larger narrative precludes the possibility of the Vulgate using one of Chrétien’s main

narrative devices: anonymity. Lancelot cannot be anonymous for any part of the tale as

Meleagant’s abduction of Guinevere is just one in a series of events in his life treated by

the Vulgate Cycle. That detail, which amplified Lancelot’s personification of the knight-

figure in Chrétien, removes the narrative interest in his identity being hidden from the

reader, though he remains anonymous to many of the other characters in the story,

including Gawain and the female attendants at each castle. Despite this difference in

presentation, the tale acknowledges its debt to Chrétien for developing this storyline,

saying “[Lancelot] set off two weeks before Ascension, so that he arrived precisely at

noon in Camelot…just as the story of the Charrette tells it.”52 As this passage suggests by

invoking “the story of the Charrette” as a shorthand to fast-forward through the events

leading up to Guinevere’s capture, the Vulgate rendition of the story remains all but

identical to Chrétien’s in terms of narrative. The largest narrative-level difference

between The Knight of the Cart and its paired section in the Vulgate Cycle is the addition

51 Lacy 187

52 Lacy 188

28

of the Lady of the Lake, who did not figure in Chrétien at all. In the Vulgate, she

catalyzes Lancelot and informs Guinevere of Lancelot’s capture, two crucial moments of

redirection in the narrative, but moments that happen outside of the main body of

Chrétien’s.

Minor narrative details as well as idiosyncrasies of form and language aside, the

Vulgate Cycle’s portrayal accords with Chrétien’s. This tells us two important things

about the development of the stolen princess narrative in the estimated half-century that

separated the two texts’ composition dates. First, the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere

story remained popular. As a whole, the Vulgate Cycle includes a wealth of Arthurian

tradition, including the quest for the Holy Grail, the life of Merlin, and the death of

Arthur. However, the Lancelot Propere, the section that traces the romance between

Lancelot and Guinevere, makes up more than half of the complete Vulgate Cycle,

implying not only the breadth of literature that emerged surrounding the Lancelot-

Guinevere romance following Chrétien’s innovation in the late twelfth century, but also

a stronger interest in the Lancelot-Guinevere relationship than almost any other aspect

of Arthurian tradition. Second, the strong structural similarities between Chrétien and

the Vulgate suggest that the story did not need to change in order to hold readers’

interest. As archetypes of the stolen princess narrative, the structural similarities

between the two suggest not just a popular interest in the characters and the Arthurian

connection, but also the intrinsic the narrative movements of the story create. What

makes a stolen princess—or, in Guinevere’s case, queen—compelling is how the

characters interact and the turns the narrative turns based on their actions, not who the

knight, adversary, and princess are personally. Like pieces on a chess board, in a system

as clearly oppositional as the stolen princess narrative of the Middle Ages is, moving

29

one affects all, and the delicate balance of speech, action, and inaction as characters

respond to one another not only drives the narrative, but also sustains the audience’s

interest in it. Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur53 adds weight to this claim by

substantially varying the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere narrative at the level of fine

detail while maintaining the broad narrative movements that define the general

understanding of the story.

It must also be noted here that although the Vulgate Cycle was the last major

French collection of Arthurian legend to include the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere

story, it was followed by another collection known as the Post-Vulgate Cycle,54 a

rehashing of the same material found in the Vulgate Cycle with some notable

emendations and exclusions, the most egregious of which is the Lancelot-Guinevere

romance, which was pulled from the Post-Vulgate for the blind eye it turns to adultery.

The first difference a reader will notice between Malory’s rendering of the

Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story and its predecessors in Chrétien and the Vulgate

Cycle is that it is much shorter. Chrétien told the story in about 45,000 words, while the

Vulgate Cycle used about 30,000 to the same end. Malory, on the other hand, packed the

entire narrative into fewer than 10,000. Several factors influenced this narrative

tightening, including Malory’s authorial style, its contextualization within Malory’s

larger project, and his significant cutting of the battle scenes. But the general

compression of the narrative from the twelfth to fifteenth century also supports to one

53 Armstrong, Dorsey, and Thomas Malory. Morte D'Arthur: A new modern English translation based on the

Winchester Manuscript. 1st ed. West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2009. Print.

54 cf. Post-Vulgate Cycle in Lancelot-Grail (full citation at footnote 50).

30

compelling hypothesis: As the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story was told and retold,

it became a part of the popular culture of the age, a known entity that did not need as

much explanation to be well understood. Chrétien, pioneering the Lancelot-Guinevere

connection at the end of the twelfth century, explained his story at length, dipping into

the psyches of his major characters and analyzing the social and legal milieu alongside

the mainline of the narrative. By the time Malory is writing his Morte D’Arthur at the end

of the fifteenth century, the major tenets of courtly love and the peculiar social and

political constraints they imposed are not just well known—they are implicit in and

inextricable from Arthurian legend as a whole. With that new level of inborn cultural

knowledge, Malory can strip the tale down to its essential pieces, leaving out much of

the detail that had brought Chrétien’s to life, and replace it with his own motivations for

retelling the tale.

Malory begins his tale, which follows the same familiar path laid by Chrétien

and the Vulgate Cycle, at a much quicker narrative pace than either of his predecessors.

Guinevere is captured almost immediately by Meleagant, and Lancelot comes galloping

to her rescue. As in the Vulgate Cycle, Malory cannot make Lancelot anonymous

because of his appearance in the scenes immediately preceding, and, as a result,

Malory’s narrative lacks the unknown that helped drive Chrétien’s. Instead of arriving

as a nameless threat to the safety of King Arthur’s court, Meleagant’s motives and plan

are revealed immediately: “This knight [Meleagant] had loved Queen Guinevere for

many long years; the book says that on this day he lay in wait to steal away the queen.

31

He had not done so in the past because of Sir Lancelot.”55 If Malory’s work had been

anything other than a known legend, it would have been bad storytelling to give away a

villain’s motivations so flatly, and to foreshadow that Lancelot, the one knight

Meleagant fears, will inevitably upset his plans. Why then does Malory begin his story

in this way? By the end of the fifteenth century, the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story

has become such a staple of Arthurian tradition—and, implicitly, French and English

culture—that its audience hardly needs to be reminded who its principal characters are

and why they do what they do. Telling the reader that Meleagant loved Guinevere and

intended to abduct her directly is a narrative shortcut Malory takes, but it is taken with

the assumption that Meleagant’s motivations will not surprise the reader.

Shortcuts of this kind are peppered throughout Malory’s narrative. The narration

only hangs on a detail when it is crucial to the story’s positioning in relation to its

predecessors. For example, to sustain the framing point that one must fight for God

before worldly love in order to make it pure, Guinevere prays to protect Lancelot as he

arrives to Meleagant’s castle on the cart, saying, “’Ah, Jesus! Defend [Lancelot] and

protect him…from such a shameful end!’”56 Invocations of this kind to God and Christ

happen rarely in Malory’s predecessors; his is the first Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere

tale to engage directly with the Christian themes that defined many Arthurian legends

such as the Holy Grail from their inception.

Differences of time, place, and frequency imposed by the shortcuts aside,

Malory’s story remains deeply connected to its predecessors at the structural level.

55 Armstrong 572

56 Armstrong 576

32

Though the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story varies in specificity with its author and

its age, it remains in all cases a stolen princess narrative, a type that makes meaning not

through the personalities, morals, and consciences of the individual characters that

inhabit it, but the structural dialogue, actions, and inactions of those characters.

As we have learned by following Lancelot, Meleagant, and Guinevere’s strand

within the larger history of the stolen princess narrative, the type is a popular form that

changes in subtle ways with each iteration, not one that needs to be remade to

accommodate its era, but one that creates meaning by operating within a codified

narrative structure. Like the lines a villanelle repeats or the end-rhymes a ballad

guarantees, much of a stock stolen princess narrative’s plot is decided before the story

begins. The authors of these texts made the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story their

own by engaging with previous iterations, varying the presentation of characters, and,

in their best moments, subverting the reader’s expectation of what comes next while

remaining recognizable. But subversion is only possible within the constraints of form.

Just as the rhymed couplet at the end of a sonnet stands out after seven pairs ABAB, so

too does the stolen princess narrative make its deepest connections and challenge its

readers’ assumptions most when it walks away from the well-trodden path. But, as we

will see next in the history of the stolen princess narrative in video games, a path must

first be laid in order to step from it.

How are the narrative’s major themes and motifs reflected in and affected by its use in video

games?

By contrast with the contestable and uncertain nature of medieval history, the

history of video games is wonderfully clean-cut. While debates surrounding the ever-

33

present question of the first video game still raise the blood pressures of those at the

epicenter of that debate (which is itself more a question of how we define “video games”

than of chronology), we can be certain that by the time Sears-Roebuck started selling

Atari 2600s in 1977 and Pong was being booted up in homes across America, video

gaming as we know it today had begun.

Although where video games start is less important for us than where they have

ended up, an overview of the form’s history will provide important context for the

transition from a pre-narrative to a narrative mode of gameplay. A too short and

altogether incomplete timeline of video game history would bullet the following points:

On December 14th, 1948, Thomas Goldsmith and Ray Estile applied to patent a “cathode

ray-tube amusement device” that would play an air defense57 game in which the player

shoots down enemy planes.58 Then, in 1952, A.S. Douglas created a graphical version of

tic-tac-toe—OXO—for the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge.59 Fast-

forward to 1961 and over the Atlantic to the other Cambridge, where MIT students were

putting the finishing touches on Spacewar!, a player-versus-player air defense game,

similar in some respects to Goldsmith and Estile’s “cathode ray-tube amusement

device.”60

57 A genre of games related to Asteroids (1979) in which players use their ship to shoot down enemy ships.

58 "Bibliographic data: US2455992 (A) ― 1948-12-14."Espacenet Patent Search. Espacenet, 12 May 2011. Web.

19 Feb 2012.

<http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=US&NR=2455992&KC=&FT=E&locale=e

n_EP>.

59 Campbell-Kelly, Martin. "The Edsac Simulator."Warwick Department of Computer Science. Warwick, 2006.

Web. 19 Feb 2012. <http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/>.

60 Graetz, J.M. "The Origin of Spacewar." Creative Computing. Aug 1981: 56-67. Print.

34

Gaming then moved rapidly out of the computer science departments of

universities and into arcades. The first widely distributed arcade game, Pong, was

released in 1972.61 Ralph Baer, the so-called “Father of Video Games,”62 led the

development of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console, to completion that same

year.63 Its release in August of 197264 began the international transition that would move

games out of the arcade and into the home. The Atari 2600 (1977), the Odyssey 2 (1978),

the Intellivision (1979), and the ColecoVision (1982) made up the second generation of

home consoles. They played games like Pac-Man, Pitfall!, Missile Command, and Demon

Attack—high-stakes scenarios with success and failure determined entirely by player

skill. Their characters were often drawn using fewer than eight pixels, millions fewer

than those that skin the casts of current generation games. Traditional narratives did not

feature in these games; by and large, they were games that brought about play for play’s

sake.

That second generation was followed by the Sega SG-1000 (1983) and the

Nintendo Entertainment System (1985), which were the first consoles to grab the

attention of the American public and their money, beginning the shift in industry focus

away from Japan and toward the United States. During this generation, games changed

61 Goldberg, Harold. All your base are belong to us: how fifty years of video games conquered pop culture. 1st ed.

New York: Three Rivers Press, 2011. Print.

62 Hatfield, Daemon. "GDC 2008: Ralph Baer Receiving Pioneer Award." IGN. IGN, 20 Dec 2007. Web. 19 Feb

2012. <http://psp.ign.com/articles/842/842808p1.html>.

63 Winter, David. "Magnavox Odyssey: First home video game console." Pong Story. Pong Story, 2010. Web.

19 Feb 2012. <http://www.pong-story.com/odyssey.htm>.

64 All console and video game release dates are given based on their availability in North America;

frequently console and game release dates vary by as much as a year in order for them to be translated,

localized, adapted for the market, etc.

35

with the new technology and a growing international interest in gaming. But with that

increased popularity play could no longer happen for its own sake. Narrative began to

feature highly in games, especially those in the adventure genre. Players needed

narrative motivation to plug away at seemingly impossible Mega Man levels. As the

game industry began to expand, so too did the number of devices on which games could

be played. That same timeline of game history would peg the following as significant

home consoles, though dozens more exist: Sega Master System (1987), Sega Genesis

(1989), TurboGrafx-16 (1989), Super Nintendo (1991), Neo-Geo (1991), Mega-CD (1992),

Atari Jaguar (1993), 3DO (1993), PlayStation (1994), Saturn (1995), Nintendo 64 (1996),

Dreamcast (1999), PlayStation 2 (2000), Xbox (2001), GameCube (2001), Xbox 360 (2005),

PlayStation 3 (2006), Nintendo Wii (2006).65 As of this writing, the eighth generation of

consoles is currently in development, with the Wii U, Xbox 720, and PlayStation 4 all

expected to be released within the next few years. The many consoles across four

generations that followed their predecessors were marked by ever-increasing

technological power, a ballooning game-playing market, and an expansion in

competition, from the establishment of rival game studios to the modern phenomenon

of the indie developer.66

And gaming is not just for nerds anymore. The current generation of consoles

has sold over 438 million units over five platforms, not including the rapidly expanding

65 "A Video game timeline (1967-Present)." Online Education. Education Database Online, n.d. Web. 19 Feb

2012. <http://www.onlineeducation.net/videogame_timeline>.

66 Indie (i.e. independent) developers produce games on their own computers, working outside of the

traditional game studio setting, usually distributing their work through online platforms like Steam,

PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, or as packs of games like the Humble Indie Bundle or the IGF

Pirate Kart.

36

market of mobile gaming, which, including iOS and Android devices alone, adds

another 500 million users to the mix.67 Seventy-two percent of American households

play computer or video games.68 Steering away from its masculine roots in the

stereotype of the thirty-something perennially single male playing games in his mother’s

basement, the gaming demographic is increasingly female, with women now

representing almost forty percent of console gamers and fifty-three percent of mobile

gamers.69 Based on the numbers, it would seem that baseball, the so-called “Great

American Pastime,” has long since been taken down from its pedestal, making way for

video games to stand in its stead.

But, for the mercurial ascent this data suggests, what was it that brought video

games out of the arcade, into the basement, and has now placed them in the living

rooms of most American households and millions more worldwide? Addressing the

variables at play in response to that question would require a book on its own. What we

are concerned with is the same thing that made the serialized novel succeed, Hollywood

boom, the nation obsess about radio and television, and has now made video games an

economic, social, and artistic phenomenon: the ability to tell a story through a new

medium.

In many ways, a history of the stolen princess narrative in video games is also a

history of narrative video gaming itself. Some of the most important games in video

67 VGChartz Ltd., . "Video Game Charts, Game Sales."VGChartz. VGChartz, 19 Feb 2012. Web. 19 Feb 2012.

<http://www.vgchartz.com/>.

68 Entertainment Software Association, . "Industry Facts."Entertainment Software Association. ESA, 19 Feb 2012.

Web. 19 Feb 2012. <http://www.theesa.com/facts/index.asp>.

69 Lynley, Matthew. "Do women play more games than men?." VentureBeat. Venturebeat, 22 Feb 2011. Web.

19 Feb 2012. <http://venturebeat.com/2011/02/22/do-women-play-more-games-than-men/>.

37

game history, those that occupy what “canon” games currently have—Super Mario Bros.,

The Legend of Zelda, Sonic the Hedgehog, Half-Life, Bioshock, Uncharted, Prince of Persia,

Resident Evil, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Final Fantasy, to name just a few—use this

narrative type to support and structure their play. Beyond the exemplary works,

hundreds more middling, not so good, and shockingly awful games tell this same story,

almost as if it were the story video games were meant to tell. Certainly it is the story that

games have the most experience telling. From this arise two questions. First, how did the

stolen princess narrative told in these games change over time as technology advanced,

platforms changed, and new narrative techniques in gaming were developed? And

second, why has the stolen princess narrative been the dominant story told in narrative

games for the last twenty-five years? Put another way, what is it about the art of

gameplay that dovetails so well with a narrative of courage, challenge, despair, heroism,

and rescue?

To explore these questions, we will briefly analyze the development of The

Legend of Zelda series—sixteen games released over twenty-five years—many of which

are widely considered to represent the highest achievements of their respective consoles.

Moreover, to address our purpose here, the narratives of the games have not only

remained static throughout, conforming to the stolen princess type within each game,

but they are also iterative like the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story. Each game

presents known characters in a known situation with variations in detail. The hero’s

name is always Link, the princess’s name is always Zelda, the villain’s name is almost

always Ganon or Ganondorf, and the kingdom’s name is almost always Hyrule. Not

only does The Legend of Zelda series show the history of narrative gaming across its

entries, each responding to trends and innovations that came between installments, but

38

it shades in that development by retelling and refining the telling of its stolen princess

narrative in each game.

In order to profitably discuss the development of The Legend of Zelda narrative

across more than two decades of gaming, we must first understand the means by which

a video game tells a story. Relative to the libraries that could be filled by the criticism,

philosophy, and psychology dedicated to the communication from author to reader

through text, the volume of thought surrounding the narrative theory of video games

could barely make for a nightstand reading list. That narrative in games deserves

serious academic attention is a relatively young idea and the divergent theories share

little in consensus.

That which separates video games from all other media also divides their critics

on the best means of approaching games. We are talking about gameplay, the enaction

of player agency in the gameworld, and, thus, ability to affect the outcome of the game.

If we consider gameplay a component of video game narrative—and we must for the

narrative conceit of a game to work—we must therefore consider the player an agent in

the narrative. But the addition of that third person problematizes all traditional

understandings of narrative structure. In a gamespace, narrative stops being teleological;

instead, it becomes idiosyncratic. Unlike a book, film, play, piece of music, visual

artwork, or other traditional media, the audience affects video games. While traditional

media forms communicate the narrative to their audience (e.g. a reader reads a book, a

viewer watches a film, a listener hears a piece of music), a gamespace allows the player

to communicate his or her vision of the narrative to it by modifying the scene and

39

outcome in response to player input. Games have given the audience control in places

they have always wanted, but never had. Think of a horror film like Dawn of the Dead.70

Romero succeeds at creating a suspenseful dramatic experience because of the

anticipation dramatic irony builds in, the Don’t-go-down-that-dark-hallway! horror that

comes from an audience member who must watch the characters make choices without

any control over their outcome. Dawn of the Dead creates a replicable effect; that

experience is common to everyone who sees the film, and it will be the same every time

one watches Dawn of the Dead. But analyzing video games cannot be like interpreting a

repeatable experience. Every playthrough of a game is unique. Although any round of

Pac-Man that has ever been played has been obedient to the same rules and shares some

commonalities with any other player’s experience of the game, each playthrough will

differ at the level of the individual action, the player’s choice. Should I go right or left here?

Pick this up now or later? Kill this man or let him live? Such paths are predetermined for

Stephen Andrews in Dawn of the Dead just as they are for Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of

the Artist as a Young Man. But in a gamespace where such choices have multiple

outcomes and players one choose just one of many possible paths, meanings change,

intentions fall away, and games leave critics to pick up the pieces of possibility within

their structures. An individual’s experience of a game says as much about the game

itself as it says about how he or she plays games. Anarchy and tradition often come

preloaded on the same cartridge, but which one the player experiences when he or she

plays is determined by the choices the player makes on behalf of the game’s characters.

70 Romero, George, dir. Dawn of the Dead (Ultimate Edition). Starz/Anchor Bay, 2004. Film.

40

To demonstrate the difficulties this creates for the purpose of analysis, imagine

what it would be like if Chrétien’s readers were able to make choices about what

happens to Lancelot. On one path of a gamified Knight of the Cart, the reader might

accidentally kill Lancelot when he reaches the river, losing in combat with the knight

who challenged him. On another, he might make it past the river, but die just as easily at

the sword bridge. On a third, he may choose not to quest after Guinevere at all, and,

finding himself comfortably settled in Arthur’s castle, leave all the work up to Gawain.

These three paths lead to a trick question: What unified meaning is there in the multiple

possibilities suggested by these player-directed outcomes? Using the critical tools

familiar to literary and film theorists to attempt to answer this question, we would only

be able to successfully account for one possible result of the narrative. Borrowing from

Hamlet to address the problem of multiple irreconcilable meanings in games, it has

become something of a mantra in game studies that “the play’s the thing”71—that game

critics ought not be so concerned with the different narratives generated by those

possibilities, but the play those narrative possibilities accommodate.

Play guides narrative in games in the same way that the reading and watching

draw out narrative in literature and film. Yet, despite being fundamentally different

from all types of media that preceded them, video games have borrowed certain devices,

clichés, and story structures from their predecessors in order to convey their narratives.

And among all things that have been co-opted for games, nothing has been borrowed

more conspicuously nor more pervasively than the stolen princess narrative. Super Mario

71 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. 2. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1878. eBook.

<http://books.google.com/books?id=sfp4WY8id1cC&dq=hamlet&source=gbs_navlinks_s>. II.ii.604.

41

Bros. may not have been the first narrative video game, but it was the first widely

popular console game to feature a narrative, spare though it is. The evil king of the

Koopas steals away the Mushroom Princess. The back of the box provides the rest of the

explanation the player needs to justify his or her play: “Do you have what it takes to save

the Mushroom Princess?”72 This language is central to the narrative conceit of games, the

metaphor of the player-as-character, and, to the purpose at hand, it is also a motivating

factor for the pervasive use of the stolen princess narrative in single-player adventure

games, challenging the player to embody the hero.

If we were to ask ourselves what was most entertaining73 about reading The

Knight of the Cart, many of us would say that the quest itself, particularly the moments of

high action such as Lancelot’s battle with Meleagant, was the most entertaining. Playing

out the stolen princess narrative gives the player the opportunity to take up Lancelot’s

sword, no longer being entertained vicariously by the pleasure of imagining Lancelot

fight, but fighting themselves. It seems a point so obvious and trite as to be almost

beneath consideration, but it must be said: Video games allow their players the

opportunity to exist outside of themselves temporarily. Video games enable players to

fight, explore, improve, and make difficult choices that they do not often get the

opportunity to make in their real lives. In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal argues that

gamespace is an idealized form of experience, that we can feed human instincts like the

72 Nintendo of America. "Super Mario Bros Box Art." GameFAQs. GameFAQs, n.d. Web. 19 Feb 2012.

<http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/bigboxshots/3/525243_49519_back.jpg>.

73 Note that this is not synonymous with “interesting,” “problematic,” or any other such academic sources of

“engagement,” but synonymous with the type of entertainment that draws people to James Bond and

summer blockbusters.

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yearning for adventure, challenge, and exploration through games; that games, through

their engaging participatory nature, have a greater potential for cathartic, positive, and

life-altering experiences than any other medium.74 Her claims may be broad and rooted

largely in possibility, but they speak to the subjective experience of playing games and

suggest that any narrative—the stolen princess included—can realize its full potential as

a cathartic experience through gameplay.

Analyzing the fine distinctions among all fourteen of the games in the Legend of

Zelda series would be a monumental task that would ultimately reveal less in spite of its

completeness than selecting a few representatives from the series would. To that end, we

will analyze The Legend of Zelda series within the context of the history of the stolen

princess narrative by looking to its first and last games, starting with The Legend of Zelda

(1986) and closing with the most recent release, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (2011).

Released in 1986 on the Nintendo Entertainment System, The Legend of Zelda

makes use of its story in much the same way that Super Mario Bros. did the year before

on that same system. That is, it tells enough of the story for the player to understand

why they begin playing, but lets the story fall into the background once play has

actually begun. Most of the story is told in the opening segment, saying,

“Many years ago prince darkness GANNON [sic] stole one of the

triforce with power. Princess ZELDA had one of the triforce with

wisdom. She divided it into 8 units to hide it from GANNON

74 McGonigal, Jane. Reality is Broken. 1st ed. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Print.

43

before she was captured. GO FIND THE 8 UNITS LINK TO SAVE

HER.”75

Other details of the narrative can be found in the game’s manual, a paper insert that

comes pre-packaged with the game. The manual explains how Zelda, concerned by

Ganon’s advances, broke the triforce of wisdom into eight pieces, then sent her

nursemaid Impa to find “a man with enough courage to destroy the evil Ganon.” Impa

was intercepted by Ganon’s forces and cornered. As one might expect, all seemed lost

until she was suddenly saved by “a young lad,” Link, who she then tasked with Princess

Zelda’s mission. This narrative introduction concludes as follows, “Can Link really

destroy Ganon and save Princess Zelda? Only your skill can answer that question. Good

luck. Use the triforce wisely.” Nine dungeons and about as many hours of gameplay

later, the player sees his or her last bit of story-related game text. For defeating Ganon,

Zelda says: “Thanks Link, you’re the hero of Hyrule.” And, a few seconds later, the

narrative concludes: “Finally, peace returns to Hyrule. This ends the story.” Text like

this is partially responsible for the current cultural perception of video games as low-

brow entertainment. Critically speaking, the story in The Legend of Zelda is not “literary”

in the traditional sense of the word. It is not especially poetic. There are glaring errors in

translation from the Japanese. It is not a pastiche of the stolen princess narrative, nor a

reimagining of an extant story. Its text is mostly given in all-caps, favoring bold and

colored compass words that devalue those around themselves, merely telling the player

75 Nintendo of America. "Zelda Shrine." Legend of Zelda (1985) Game Manual. ZeldaShrine, n.d. Web. 19 Feb

2012. <http://zs.ffshrine.org/legend-of-zelda/english-instruction-manual-scans.php>.

44

where to go and what to do. Whether speaking in terms of graphics or narrative, it does

not have rounded characters. But criticisms of this kind are easy to pile onto an avant-

garde artifact. In fact, without the critical and historical context that adumbrates it, much

medieval literature might seem flat to modern readers with modern expectations of

narrative. Yes, The Legend of Zelda is a starting point for the stolen princess narrative in

games, but it is also starting point for both narrative console gaming and player agency.

In The Legend of Zelda, the stolen princess narrative is a shortcut taken toward

play. The game is really about the player mastering his environment, about exploration,

about growing stronger and smarter. The way it started, Zelda was a narrative

justification for the gameplay, and a perfect excuse at that. After all, the game is The

Legend of Zelda, not The Legend of Link. It is not about the player (Link), but the quest

(Zelda). This hearkens back to the centuries-old idea of the anonymous knight on the

quest, like Lancelot in The Knight of the Cart, who loses all thought of himself in pursuit

of the princess. Chrétien’s story may follow his every action, just as a game obeys every

command input by the player, but the purpose is not found in the action itself, but the

larger aim. As readers, we take interest in the individual actions, but find greatest

satisfaction seeing the results of those individual actions resolved in the conclusion.

Every sword swung, every bomb planted, every arrow shot had the long term goal of

rescuing princess Zelda, with the short-term goal of destroying the enemy or solving the

puzzle blocking our way.

Every Zelda game plays around with these same basic emotions—the rewarding

sound played when a player gets a correct solution, the new item received in exchange

for a hard-fought battle—and, odd as it may seem, they are the reasons why we play

games: overcoming the small obstacles in order to find satisfaction in their conclusion.

45

We jump from one ledge to the next in order to get to the end of a level. When we get to

the end of a level? Another level, until you reach the end. The chain of actions in a Zelda

game can get impossibly long: You get the sword in order to defeat the enemies in order

to enter the dungeons in order to find the items in order to solve the puzzles in order to

defeat the bosses in order to earn the pieces of the Triforce in order to complete the

Triforce in order to save Zelda (and, depending on the game, potentially the world).

This resounds universally. Why do we wake up at 7:15 AM, Monday through Friday?

To be on time for work. Why do we work? To earn money. Why do we earn money? To

eat, to live better, to buy this or that, to marry, to not marry, to go on vacation, to

provide for our families and loved ones, to retire from work, to die with something left.

As it is presented in games like The Legend of Zelda, the stolen princess narrative touches

on universal themes of finding purpose in a challenging environment—the “quest” of

life—and its resolution. It is successful because it is essentially impersonal, in line with

the Christian theology that plastered the cross on Link’s shield in the first game and

always echoes Holy Trinity alongside the Triforce. We like heroes who are not out to

benefit themselves, but benefit others. If it takes someone ten hours to complete The

Legend of Zelda, Princess Zelda will only have been on screen in the game for about one

minute in those ten hours, or 1/600 of the time the player spent playing. In that one

minute, all she says is, “Thanks Link, you’re the hero of Hyrule,” hardly a fitting amount

of gratitude for the number of times the player has died just trying to get there. Yet the

player knows that without the actions he had taken before getting there, this ending

would not have happened. The conclusion of a game is not the same as flipping to the

last page of a mystery novel in the bookstore, or having a friend “ruin” the ending of a

book or film for you. It’s a terrible platitude to say that “the journey is what matters” as

46

a justification for a hackneyed plot or unsatisfying conclusion in a piece of media like a

summer blockbuster that draws crowds not for its storyline but for its explosions. But

that is not a defense in games. In games, the journey is the means and the end.

As Marshall McLuhan insists in his famous aphorism “the medium is the

message,”76 we must understand the means by which the game enables experience in

order to understand the importance of the journey. The Legend of Zelda is a two-

dimensional game that uses a top-down perspective.77 This mode of representation was

guided as much by the technical limits of the NES as it was by the fact that no console

games had attempted to represent depth in any other way up until 1986. The gaming

paradigm was two-dimensional, and that usually looked quite a lot like Super Mario Bros.

and Sonic the Hedgehog—characters moving from left to right, jumping up and down,

and doing it all within the same spatial plane. The Legend of Zelda broke from that mold,

and the experience of interacting with this “false” third dimension was (and remains)

strange for most players. To get a sense of the experience of this false third-dimension,

imagine a paper person (we will call him Link for argument’s sake) taped to a popsicle

stick. Place Link in front of a wall. Now move him up the wall toward the ceiling.

Although he never changes in size and your eye stays in the same place as your arm

moves him upward, that motion upward translates as “forward” in The Legend of Zelda.

If he travels far enough, the game’s camera shifts to a new rectangular plane (imagine

76 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding media: the extensions of man. 2nd revised reprint. Routledge Classics,

2001. Print.

77 See appendix for game footage.

47

the wall in the room upstairs) where Link can again move left and right, “forward” and

“backward.”

Although this way of showing the third dimension sounds counterintuitive, it

represented a watershed moment in gaming. No longer was the player fastened to that

left-right-up-down set of movements that had defined most78 gameplay prior to The

Legend of Zelda. The simple notion of including forwards and backwards in gameplay

despite lacking the dimensionality to do so opened hundreds of possibilities for game

designers, the most significant of which was the concept of non-linear gameplay. Left-to-

right no longer had to be the rule of law, and The Legend of Zelda broke with that

tradition, too. At the beginning of the game, the player knows his goal, but is given no

direction toward accomplishing it. He may discover and complete the eight dungeons in

any order he wishes, choose to pick up or not pick up certain items, get lost, experience

discovery, face enemies too strong for him, or stick with safe and familiar spaces. It is

possible to reach the game’s final boss79 without ever picking up the sword that most

players use as a primary weapon for the entire game. The infinite possibilities non-linear

gameplay allows for demonstrate the potential of the video game medium; The Legend of

Zelda was the first game to successfully incorporate a narrative into this open-ended

structure.

78 Text-based adventures exist outside of our main considerations of console and graphical gaming, though

they certainly afforded their players opportunities to move forward and back in an imagined three-

dimensional space.

79 A “boss” is the strongest enemy in an area. As an example in literary terms, the “final boss” of The Knight

of the Cart would be Meleagant. In the Super Mario Bros. series, Bowser is the final boss.

48

While affecting the progression of the plot, this open structure simultaneously

changes the meaning of the player’s input. The question a player asks himself in The

Legend of Zelda is not, “What should I do here?” but “What should I do next?” In linear

games, the player has no opportunity to choose how to progress; there is no way to turn

back in Super Mario Bros. that does not also kill you. The Legend of Zelda allows its player

to decide if and when he is ready for a specific challenge.

But what does all this mean for our princess? Like any stolen princess narrative,

the endpoints are set from the beginning of The Legend of Zelda. The princess must be

stolen (A) and then, after having faced much opposition, rescued by the knight (B). The

journey, the interstice between A and B, is created by the player in relation to all of the

possibilities the developers put in place. What is possible and what is done are mutually

exclusive; not every player can or will play the game in every configuration. And that is

the point. Just as Gawain and Lancelot take two different paths to come to Meleagant’s

castle in The Knight of the Cart, the player must decide his most likely route to success

and play as he deems best. The meaning of that experience is created within the mind of

the player. The player moves Link forward in the same way that Lancelot moves himself

forward, directing all thought and energy to the creation of the path and the elimination

of the distance between A and B, not his own well being. The player knows the

conclusion and directs Link toward it. It is an act of creation, of carving out a single path

from myriad possible paths. As readers, we explore vicariously by following the knight

on his path, learning how he reacts to different obstacles, seeing what he sees through

the narration. As players, we explore directly by creating the knight’s path, thereby

eliminating some narrative possibilities in the same moment we create others. The linear

nature of Aarne’s outline structure is of little use in the context of the game narrative; the

49

force driving our exploration is the end goal, regardless of the danger presented by the

obstacles we face. The Legend of Zelda presents a narrative of personal growth both for

the hero and the player. Link’s increased ability and strength reflect and reward the

player’s investment, yet the challenge must grow with the investment. The narrative of

Link’s physical development in the game is mirrored by the narrative of the player’s

mental and tactical development through play.

From here, we must regrettably pass over twelve great games in the Zelda series

that appeared on eleven different Nintendo consoles to get to The Legend of Zelda:

Skyward Sword (2011). A lot has changed between 1986 and 2011, twenty-five years of

developing gameplay and technology, as Skyward Sword is quick to point out by

including the 25th anniversary logo on its packaging and in a cutscene80 within the game

itself.

But for all that has happened to modernize the franchise—bringing the game into

three dimensions, improving gameplay and storytelling, balancing the enemies,

expanding the game length, changing the number and kind of items, tweaking the

puzzles, and building more and more grandiose environments—the story remains all

but identical in structure to its origins in The Legend of Zelda, and, at one remove, the

traditional stolen princess narrative.

The following are the major breaking points with Skyward Sword’s plot from the

original Legend of Zelda. None buck the traditional stolen princess formula, nor alter the

80 A “cutscene” a break in gameplay where the player loses control of his character (but may gain control of

the camera in some games) to watch events in the plot unfold. Generally includes dialogue and borrows

from traditions in film. “Cutscene” and “cinematic” are synonyms in video game journalism. A “quick-time

event” is a cutscene that requires player input at certain points, such as the knife fights in Resident Evil 4.

50

player’s part in the story. At the beginning of Skyward Sword, Zelda does not yet know

that she is a princess; she only discovers her “chosen” status by the goddess after she has

been captured by Ghirahim. This aligns with the narrative of personal discovery that

overshadows the whole Legend of Zelda series. The experience imparted to both the

player and Link is also happening to Zelda simultaneously and largely off-screen. In

Skyward Sword, she and Link foil one another, though Zelda’s development happens

largely off-screen.

As another point of division with the original, Link is not a knight at the

beginning, but a knight in training at the knight school. Again, this emphasizes the

narrative of development and environmental mastery, this time by priming the notion of

learning to be skilled with the idea of Link attending a school for knights. But the

metaphor extends beyond the game. In order for Link to become skilled, the player must,

too. Skyward Sword’s controls contribute to the equating of player skill with Link’s skill

in a more meaningful way than traditional controllers allow. Standard game controls are

based on button input. Press A to jump, hold B to run, etc. This establishes a metaphoric

connection between the movement of the thumb to press the button and the action

mapped to that button in the game—Link runs because the player’s thumb presses. But

moving the thumb is not a good physical analogue for an action of the whole body; it is

merely one of the concessions to technology gameplay has traditionally made. But

modern game controls focus increasingly on dissolving the barrier between player

action and game action. The Wiimote,81 which directs the majority of the controls in

81 The controller for the Wii console. As its name implies, it resembles a television remote in size and

operation.

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Skyward Sword, allows the player to swing the sword with their hand, the controller

acting as the hilt of the sword it represents. If the player moves his hand up, Link’s

moves at the same time. This replacement of the shorthand of a button press with the

action itself increases the haptic connection between the player and the game. The more

meaningful our input to affect the game state is, the greater our identification with our

in-game avatar. So it goes with Link: as he learns to fight enemies, the player does not

just learn to press buttons with good timing, but to swing a sword out of an enemy’s line

of defense without telegraphing intent. The player learns an approximation of

swordplay. These kinds of digital experiences can be used to train up real-world skills,

as evidenced by the US army’s $60 million investment in video game technology to

produce a full-body simulator to train soldiers.

The meaning of the actions the player makes in the game contribute to the

overall narrative those actions create. As the player learns to play better, a narrative of

personal growth and improvement emerges, a narrative of courage and perseverance. In

video games, the mantra is not “try and try” but “die and die” again. Players fail, but

they learn from those failures, and return with a renewed strength, experiencing the

same kinds of opposition and the same sense of a self that is less important than the goal

felt by Lancelot and other knights in traditional courtly romance. A player of Skyward

Sword loses an encounter with an enemy because his swordplay was bad, so he analyzes

his mistakes and tries again. As with the two plot points introduced earlier, the new

control scheme described above is a point of departure between Skyward Sword and the

original Legend of Zelda, but while the experience of play changed between 1986 and 2011,

the narrative justification of that play has remained the same.

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Like the myths of Andromeda and early versions of the stolen princess narrative

seen in the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere tradition, The Legend of Zelda series has

followed the tradition of the type. They both depend on and present an obvious conflict,

clear motivations, and do not conflate good and evil. First, the conflict in every game is

that the princess vanishes; though it often is, the fate of the universe need not be at risk

for this to present a problem. Separating a pair of lovers that ought to be is enough to

catalyze our hero. Second, the motivations on the hero’s are wordlessly expressed

through Link’s solemn nod of determination, the player’s resounding “Yes!” when

asked “Continue?” It is a blind determination, one that rejects any notion of self-sacrifice

in the pursuit of the princess. Third, Zelda paints a black-and-white picture of evil and

good. The player is in the right, the enemy in the wrong. Despair, the none-too-subtly

named final boss in Skyward Sword, describes himself as the “root of all evil.” In the Zelda

universe, it is from his death that all evil comes, contrasted with Link who literally rids

the world of Evil through the efforts of the player. These games create a fixed and

dependable reward structure based on the amount of playtime the player puts in to the

game. Ultimately, following the rules and succeeding at the puzzles will result in a

positive ending, the same way that reading a stolen princess narrative, or watching a

Disney princess film will end well if the reader or viewer puts in the time necessary to

complete it.

Consciously or unconsciously, the triumph of good over evil is the expectation

almost every reader begins a stolen princess narrative with, and for good reason: Nearly

all stolen princess narratives in games, literature, and film end “Happily ever after.”

This experience of play is essentially positive, allowing for retries and rewarding players

for successes. As we noted above, part of what has made the stolen princess narrative so

53

enduring in its popularity is the series of challenges it presents with the unspoken

assurance that eventually good will prevail. But what happens when a story takes our

assumptions about what is essentially right and good under more careful consideration

and subverts them? Clearly such a rigid expectation of good to triumph, for the player to

be in the right, hangs only by the thread of tradition. Braid (2008) cuts that thread.

Jonathan Blow’s Braid presents itself as a retelling of the stolen princess narrative,

a story often used as a love letter to video games in the world of indie gaming, but one

that is also used as a shorthand for player motivation. LIMBO (2010), Super Meat Boy

(2010), Cave Story (2004), Castle Crashers (2008), and VVVVVVV (2011) all make use of the

stolen princess narrative, but primarily as means of framing their gameplay. Like the

courtly love tradition, it is all but codified—if a player is in a two-dimensional

environment alone, he must be looking for a missing girl. Braid takes on this trope, both

from a historic vantage point and with a closer eye to the history of games, in order to

subvert it.

Braid succeeds as a reinterpretation of the stolen princess narrative because it

sells itself as a retelling from the beginning. At the conclusion of the first world, a

dinosaur greets the victorious player, echoing Princess Peach’s servant, Toad, when he

says, “I’m sorry, but your princess is in another castle.” This phrase, loaded with the

weight of every game in the Mario series, primes an expectation from the player. There is

a tacit agreement that this sentence seems to make—if the player plays, he will be

rewarded for his work with a satisfying and neatly wrapped narrative conclusion in

which the conquering knight (“you”) rescues the princess from the monster holding her

captive. But it is not all so simple.

54

Braid includes some of the comforting familiarities of the stolen princess

narrative, but destabilizes them with the game’s overworld.82 While it is just as easy for a

player to feel secure playing within the familiar conceptual constraint of a level as it is

for a knight to feel at home in the castle or another mastered environment, the

relationship between the overworld and the world of the level creates cognitive

dissonance. For example, the first world one plays is titled “World 2.” All other

platforming games quite sensibly start the player in World 1, the beginning of the

journey for both the player and his avatar. But Braid unsettles its player by suggesting

that there was something that he (and the ambiguity here between the player and Tim,

the character, is deliberate) had already done in World 1 that he does not remember and

cannot know he has done. This discomfort is counter-balanced by the first text the player

sees, which reads: “Tim is off on a search to rescue the Princess. She has been snatched

by a horrible and evil monster. This happened because Tim made a mistake.” The first

two sentences of this introduction cue all of a reader’s basic assumptions and memories

about the stolen princess narrative, the male lead Tim, the operative verb “rescue,” the

monster. But, unlike most stolen princess narratives in literature and games, “This

happened because Tim made a mistake.” The fault does not usually fall on the hero—in

order for Lancelot to succeed in The Knight of the Cart, Kay first had to fail. But the player

of Braid arrives in medias res, with Tim having already failed, and the player in the

position to fix Tim’s mistake.

82 An “overworld” can be thought of as a gateway between levels. In Braid’s case, the overworld is a four-

story house, and each door within a room leads to a series of levels outside of the house.

55

Like the faulted hero, platforming traditions are again subverted by the books

Tim encounters as he moves from room to room in the overworld. Unlike the traditional

cutscene or dialogue tree that tells a player what has happened and why he must act as

he does, the books in Braid’s overworld can be skipped if the player chooses to do so.

This serves two purposes. On the one hand, it privileges gameplay by allowing the

player to start playing as soon as possible, avoiding the story entirely if they choose. But

allowing the player avoid thinking about the story at all also serves a narrative end. The

books narrate Tim’s struggles to rescue the princess, what he has forgotten and failed to

do in the process, how he failed her, and how he will attempt to reconcile the mistakes

of his past by undoing them, rewinding time to make his wrongs right. The books

motivate Braid’s play. By getting the option to ignore the entries telling Tim what he is

doing and why he is doing it, the player is also making a choice to actively forget, a

choice Tim made long after he made that original mistake, the repercussions of which

become more evident as the player approaches Braid’s conclusion.

While Braid seems to begin as a relatively clear-cut stolen princess narrative, that

illusion falls away as Tim picks up the pieces of his memory, represented as puzzle

pieces hidden in the levels. The puzzles that Tim must solve require the same mental

work from the player that Tim must invest to think through all that has happened; the

more difficult the puzzle, the harder the player has to think to solve it, and, likewise, the

harder that memory is for Tim to access. Architecturally, the puzzles force Tim to

modify the flow of time in order to navigate the obstacles. This is both an act of

forgetting and learning from the past, a theme suggested by one of the first books Tim

encounters, which reads:

56

“Our world, with its rules of causality, has trained us to be

miserly with forgiveness. By forgiving too readily, we can be

badly hurt. But if we’ve learned from a mistake and become better

for it, shouldn’t we be rewarded for the learning, rather than

punished for the mistake?”

Appealing to “forgiveness” suggests that being able to undo what he has done is Tim’s

deepest desire—that he is looking through his memories in order to find the places

where he made his worst mistakes to learn from them. Solving the puzzles and

reassembling the pieces in a given world reveals an image from his past, six paintings in

total that suggest what the mistakes he made were.

Through these paintings and the books that accompany the levels, the player

learns about Tim’s relation to the princess, who appears throughout the books in

different forms and is mentioned at the end of nearly every level. But as play continues,

the image of the princess destabilizes; the word keeps its specific referent, though it

becomes clear that referent is not human. But, at first, the princess appears to be a

woman:

“What if our world worked differently? Suppose we could tell

[the princess]: ‘I didn’t mean what I just said,’ and she would say:

‘It’s okay, I understand,’ and she would not turn away, and life

would really proceed as though we had never said that thing?”

That act of turning away gives the game its title—“her braid lashes at [Tim] with

contempt” in one of the opening books, again assuring us of her human characteristics

by showing her hair and referring to her with a gendered pronoun. While the pronoun

sustains her, we lose certainty that she is real and that Tim actually knows her in World

4:

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“This improvement, day by day, takes him ever-closer to finding

the Princess. If she exists—she must!—she will transform him, and

everyone.”

The “improvement” referred to above is Tim’s transition away from childhood and the

constricting world of the family, finding independence in his work. Based on the text

above, it would seem that the Princess, who we now recognize as a concept rather than a

person, will affect not only Tim, but those around him.

Though it remains unspecific at this point in Braid, we know that Tim’s “Princess”

is an idea. This hearkens back to the stolen princess narratives we looked at earlier,

wherein the hero loses thought of himself in the quest for the idea of the princess, not

necessarily the Andromeda, the Guinevere, or the Zelda of that moment, but the hero’s

memories of and beliefs about her and what she represents. Thinking of the princess,

Lancelot and Perseus utterly forget themselves, putting their bodies in danger because

of their wandering minds. Like the knight-figures that preceded him, Tim also becomes

mentally consumed by his quest, digging through his memories to pinpoint and

possibly undo his mistake. Fighting for the princess, we see Tim sharing in an

experience common to all knight-figures in all stolen princess narratives, the

prioritization of the quest over the self.

But we cannot limit our comparison solely to the experiences of the characters—

we must reach out to the level of the reader or the player to understand how the same

narrative structure can create two completely different experiences as a result of its

medium. A reader understands this process of abandoning the self in the interest of a

quest vicariously; by reading about Lancelot’s state of mind, we compare it to our own

experiences and approximate an understanding of what it is like to forget about the self

58

in the interest of a higher cause. By contrast, a player must abandon the self in order to

make decisions on his character’s behalf in a game. A serious player, investing himself in

the work of play in the same way that a serious reader reads, makes those decisions to

align with their character’s beliefs and operate within the constraints of the game. To do

this, a player must temporarily suspend his disbelief by identifying with his avatar;

without this basic conceit, the gamespace dissolves. Therefore, by allowing his own

identity to be temporarily subsumed by that of his avatar, the player experiences that

same sense of abandoning the self in the interest of a quest through the act of play, a

direct form of experience as opposed to the vicarious and referential form of experience

reading provides. This cannot be approximated by any other medium; the experience of

self-abandonment is implemented in Braid, exposed through and naturally occurring in

gameplay. Thoughts of the self must be pushed from the mind in order to play. Yes,

Braid incorporates many familiar elements of our experience—gravity, movement,

passage of time—but it builds them into play according to its own rules, rules without

real world analogues. For example, unlike Tim we cannot rewind our actions. In order to

play and progress, you must accept the world of the game and abandon thoughts of the

self, unlike readers, who create meaning within a text from their external experience.

The player experiences an extinguishment of the self so complete that it may not even

recognized by the player until its merits are called into question by the game’s

conclusion.

While one might counter that reading affords the same possibility of

extinguishing the self, the act of reading does not require it in the same way a game does.

A reader does not need to alter the state of the text, modify his strategy, nor think about

how to progress from cover to cover in order to read. A reader reads what is written and

59

interprets its meaning. By contrast, no progress can be made in a game unless it is

played, and, in line with the scientific logic of Braid’s puzzles, no progress can be made

until it is played correctly. Unlike a text that dependably drops line after line in front of

the reader’s eye, a player’s path is not always clear. The player must then submit to and

think in terms of the rules of the game in order to play, making connections intrinsic to

the world of game rather than connections extrinsic to their own experience, the

essential conceit of reading. For example, Braid’s primary intrinsic parallel is the

connection between Tim’s obsessive search for the Princess and the player’s equally

obsessive search for the puzzle pieces and stars that populate Tim’s mind. To play Braid,

you have to adopt the same mindset its protagonist experiences in the game’s narrative.

Reading does not work in the same way. Any author’s work follows a certain logic, but a

reader can choose not to accept that logic while still continuing to read. A player cannot.

As has already been suggested, the player’s mental and haptic work in relation to the

game creates meaning therein, extinguishing thoughts of the player’s own self as the

player adapts to and inhabits the world of the game. Braid calls into question the value

of this longstanding topos of gaming in its final chapter.

Braid’s eponymous final segment subverts the stolen princess narrative by

taking our basic assumptions about why we play games and upending them. Every

world in Braid is characterized by one specific new change in our understanding of time.

In the first world, you are able to rewind time to undo your mistakes. In this last world,

you are still able to rewind time, but time is already flowing backwards—things fall up,

cannons fire back into themselves, yet you still run forward, seeming to resist the new

flow of time. Now, in the final room, imagine two parallel platforms, one high and one

low. On the top one is the princess, who we finally see for the first time in this scene.

60

You are on the bottom. An evil knight descends on a rope above the high platform,

clutching the princess in his arms and shouting “I’ve got you!” in red text. The princess

escapes his grasp, and, adopting a praying stance, calls out, “Help!” in blue before she

begins to flee in terror. A wall of flame surges from the left, chasing you both down.

Then you begin the old familiar left-to-right, following her along the bottom. She must

flip switches and moves obstacles out of your path in order for you to pass through the

level. You pass a number of obstacles, finally approaching the Princess’s bedroom where

you will undoubtedly rescue her from the evil knight. It is not your standard castle, but

rather a modern apartment with track lighting, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, and a

glass-walled bedroom reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright. Like Romeo, you climb the

trellis outside of her window, alighting on her balcony. But as soon as you land, there is

a flash of white light and, where the princess had just a moment ago been waiting

helplessly for you to save her, she lies asleep in her bed, you staring in at her from her

window, longing to help. She wakes to find you looking in, and, assuming the same

stance she had held a moment before when she had looked fearfully at the evil knight,

she looks right at you. And she runs. Though it had been running in reverse for the

entire level, time now begins to flow forward. You give chase, and suddenly those

obstacles that she had moved out of your way before to allow you to save her you

realize were intended to stop you, some to kill you. Time reverses all intentions. When

the princess reaches the knight at the end of the room, she again calls out, “Help!” in

faint blue text. The now-gallant knight shouts, “I’ve got you!” in green this time, and

they escape on the vine above the princess’s platform. You suddenly realize that all of

your well-intentioned actions as the player amounted to an evil. Although Tim thought

he was trying to save the princess, he was always the monster the princess was running

61

from. You were too focused on solving the puzzles in his memory to know that what he

was doing was wrong; you were blinded by the construct of the game.

But to what end? Braid’s conclusion reveals two things about the use of the stolen

princess narrative in games. First, it shows that we labor under a few basic assumptions

when playing a stolen princess narrative: that our knight is on the right path, that the

princess wants to be saved, and that the work we are doing is both good and right.

Cueing these kinds of positive assumptions in players’ minds means that the players

expect a specific reward and familiar structure. If we assume that our work is just, we

should be justly rewarded for it. But Braid approaches this assumption from another

perspective. Using the stolen princess narrative as a vehicle to discuss these basic tenets

of gameplay, it subverts our expectations of narrative motivation for our actions. Unlike

The Legend of Zelda series, which never questions the value or morality of the player’s

work, Braid tricks you into thinking that you are in the right, and then shows you that

you were the monster you thought you were fighting, not the knight you imagined

yourself as. The result of that subversion is the second thing Braid’s conclusion teaches

us about the stolen princess in games: that the same assumptions that guide both you

and Tim are delusional. As we have explored here, the stolen princess narrative is one of

the longest standing narrative types in global literature. And yet the basic concessions

we as readers and players make in order to be entertained by these stories are delusional.

Not all knights are dashing and morally upright; not all princesses are beautiful and in

need of saving. Braid forces you to enact that delusion, to play through an entire game

believing that you are on the path of righteousness and will be rewarded for your work,

only to play a trick on you by turning your main weapon—control over time—against

you. No matter how you alter time in order to put Tim’s memories in good order, in

62

order to make Tim look more like that aspirational knight-figure to himself, everything

that went wrong with the princess happened before the game ever began. The time has

passed. To arrive on that balcony having fought for hours to save the princess and to

have that dream explode in front of you is to be complicit in Tim’s delusion, to have

participated in, and, in some senses, created that delusion. Braid’s final sequence

completely deconstructs the stolen princess narrative, questioning the value of and our

assumptions about the type.

Conclusion

We have traced the literary history of one vein within the larger body of the

stolen princess narrative, beginning with the Greco-Roman myth of Andromeda, and

then following the Lancelot-Meleagant-Guinevere story through the age of courtly love,

concluding in the fifteenth century. From there, the stolen princess narrative ramifies

extensively outward, appearing in many different traditions, contexts, and guises over

the next several hundred years. The narrative need for the “princess” and the “knight”

changes with popular tastes; she may be a maid in one story, he may be a woodsman in

the next, but the narrative movements of their story still align with the conventions of

the type suggested by Aarne and Thompson in The Types of the Folk-Tale. The narrative

has remained a cultural touchstone from its inception to the present day, where our

history picks up again with The Legend of Zelda series of video games, a direct extension

of the centuries-old tradition, but in the new digital medium of the game. In Zelda we

find that although the games’ narratives still align with the conventions of the stolen

princess, the narrative is complicated by the relationship between the player and the

game. Braid explores the relationship between player and game more critically than any

63

game before it, using the ubiquitous trope of the stolen princess to bring into question

fundamental assumptions players make about what they do when they play games and

why they do it.

In the context of the history of the stolen princess narrative, Braid represents the

ludic83 equivalent of the literary transition seen in Chrétien’s Knight of the Cart. Chrétien

used the stolen princess formula to write a narrative that engaged with the type while

simultaneously undercutting its tradition of unimpeachable morality by celebrating the

adulterous affair between Lancelot and Guinevere. This marks two waypoints for the

literary history of the type. First that, at the time of Chrétien’s writing, The Knight of the

Cart lived within an established structure tagged with generic and cultural expectations.

Chrétien’s conscious effort to write a romance is evident in the both the narrative

structure of The Knight of the Cart and directly stated in its introduction. But it is the

second point that motivates our inquiry into the stolen princess narrative at all. The

Knight of the Cart teaches us the most about ourselves and our culture not in the places

where it aligns with our expectations, but in the moments where it breaks completely

from those expectations, implicitly and explicitly questioning the value and meaning of

our assumptions.

Braid does for the stolen princess narrative in video games what The Knight of the

Cart did for the stolen princess narrative in literature. That is, it presents itself as one of

the cadre of stolen princess narratives, cueing memories for its player of similar games

83 Ludology refers to the study of games; “ludic” is the adjectival form. cf. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Pat

Harrigan. First Person: new media as story, performance, and game. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Print. Especially section II, “Ludology.”

64

played and a set of assumptions that had been safe to apply to all similar games

previously. Braid holds closely to the stolen princess structure in order to amplify the

experience of its subversion in the final chapter. When Tim realizes what he has done,

that he has mangled time and sequence so badly in his mind that he thinks he is the

knight when he is really the monster, the player also feels that guilt, but for different

reasons. Tim’s character feels guilty for deluding himself into believing that his mistakes

could be undone, that he could save the princess. Tim’s player feels guilty because you

did everything you were supposed to do in a game, everything that you had always

done. You solved the puzzles, arranged their pieces, beat the bosses. Assumptions about

games with stolen princesses guide players to play Braid as they do, but a player finishes

Braid not with the confirmation of those assumptions that every iteration of Zelda or

Mario brings, but a profound appreciation for the relationship between what we do in

games and why we do it. Braid demands that its player rethink the act and meaning of

play; it is a metatextual game in the purest sense of the word.

As was alluded to in the introduction, “the play’s the thing” has become

something of a mantra in game studies, and with good reason. Play is where we have

and will continue to find the deepest meanings games offer. It is what separates them

from all previous media, what elevates them, and what enables them to reach beyond

the narrative possibilities of their predecessors. Games ask things of their players that no

text could ever ask of its reader; they enable their players by providing them with an

immediacy of experience no text could offer. There is much work left to be done in order

to systematize the way we talk about games, and thereby access deeper understandings

of what their play can mean. What has been suggested above is that video games are

both a continuation and evolution of literature, theater, film, and their other antecedents

65

in narrative media. We should look to games like Braid to question and reassess the

meaning of play in light of the literary and ludic traditions with which it engages. We

should look to games like Braid to change the critical and cultural perception of games as

toys, as old fairytales repackaged to appeal to a distracted generation. We should look to

games like Braid as proof that video games have been, are, and will continue to be art.

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