On the Enchantress Nimue

She's hugely overpowered, and she basically doesn't make sense as a character. But that is why we will always love her

A detail from Edward Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin, 1874. I cropped out Merlin. Serves him right.

Niniane, Nimiane, Vivian, Nineve, Nymenche, Nyneve, Nenyve, Nimue—her name, like everything else about her, is hard to pin down. She enters the Matter of Britain in the early 12th century as a kind of water-fairy who kidnaps the baby Lancelot, as you do. At this point she doesn’t have any name at all yet. But it’s definitely her.

She isn’t officially named until (I think) the Vulgate Cycle, in the early 13th century, which also gives her a new role: she’s still Lancelot’s fairy-nanny, but now she’s Merlin’s apprentice too. Merlin falls in love with her, and although later versions have Nimue rejecting his advances, in the Vulgate she actually loves him too. Sort of. She loves him so much that she uses magic to imprison him in an invisible tower, forever, so she can have him whenever she wants.

So even then she was already a bit morally grey.

She didn’t become Nimue—the name I tend to use—until relatively late in the day. Nimue appears for the first time in Caxton’s edition of the Morte d’Arthur. BUT it’s worth noting that in the Winchester Manuscript of the Morte—which is probably the closest one to Malory’s original text (though still not in his hand)—she appears not as Nimue but as Nynyve. She only becomes Nimue in the printed edition, which suggests to me that the change was probably a printer’s error. All those N’s and M’s and Y’s and U’s and V’s. It was bound to happen.

(I had planned to call her Vivian in The Bright Sword, because it seemed like a more authentic and non-printer’s-error-related choice. But Vivian has a weirdly modern ring to it; also I couldn’t get the Nerf Herder song out of my head; so I wound up switching to the less authentic but more fantasy-sounding Nimue. I’m often asked how to pronounce it, but I don’t think there’s a correct answer. I arbitrarily emphasize the first syllable, and give it roughly the same vowel sounds as s’il vous plaît: NIM-oo-ay. But your Nimues may vary.)

An illustration by Howard Pyle from The Story of King Arthur and his Knights

There’s something appalling about the idea that Nimue might be a typo, but in a way it’s oddly appropriate too. Nimue’s whole character feels a bit like another one of those accidental slips and continuity errors that the Matter of Britain is full of. There are lot of rather confusing doubles and doppelgangers, and they sometimes get mixed up—all those Elaines and Isolds. Even Malory mixes up Arthur’s two famous swords. In the case of Nimue, I thought somebody must surely have intended Merlin’s apprentice and the Lady of the Lake to be two different people, because how could one person do both jobs? But then they were accidentally given the same name, so they ended up getting fused into one character.

Whether or not the incoherence is intentional, it creates an intriguing effect—not so much of a flawed character, but more of somebody operating behind the scenes on a level that nobody else understands. It’s not really that she’s incoherent, it’s that the coherence is happening on a level that she knows about, and we don’t. And we never will.

Even Nimue’s Lady-of-the-Lake aspect has two sub-aspects that don’t really connect: Nimue is probably better known now as the bestower of Excalibur upon Arthur (and repossessor of it upon Arthur’s death), but she was also, originally, Lancelot’s fairy-nanny—the “du Lac” of Lancelot du Lac refer to his early years when he lived with the Lady of the Lake in some kind of fairy-cum-Bond-villain underwater realm, and she trained him as a knight. All I can conclude from this is that Nimue must be a hell of a sword-master, since Lancelot ends up being the best knight in the world. (I figure fairies must have their own highly effective swordfighting discipline, which is why in The Bright Sword, whenever somebody breaks out fairy-style sword moves, you know they mean business.)

A card from the Grand Archive TCG.

There’s much to say about Nimue’s role as Merlin’s apprentice, too, but I’ve said most of it already in The Bright Sword and in my earlier piece about Merlin’s not-so-secret life as a sex pest. I’ll just add that Nimue is clearly one of those omni-competent multi-classed people, because she not only teaches Sir Lancelot to use a sword, she then beats Merlin at magic.

But as powerful as she is, Nimue is rarely the hero of the story. Tennyson makes her a villain. T.H. White, who is great on just about everything but women, gives her a walk-on role as “a handsome minx with an olive complexion and plucked eyebrows.” The Mists of Avalon splits her into three characters: Nimue (Lancelot’s daughter; kills herself), Niniane (Lady of the Lake; killed by Mordred), and Viviane (high priestess: killed by Sir Balin). Probably my all-time favorite Nimue is the extremely punk-rock Nimue of Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles. Sometimes she’s given a minor love story, in which she marries Sir Pelleas, who everybody agrees is a Good Egg. It’s not a hugely interesting sub-plot, except for—as Wikipedia notes—the intriguing parallel with Thetis, who was also a water-entity, and who also brought up a peerless warrior (Achilles), and who also married a mortal … whose name was Peleus. Draw your own conclusions.

Oh, and she also cured Lancelot after he went mad

The funny thing about Nimue is that it’s precisely because she’s handled so loosely and carelessly that she ends up feeling more like a real person than most of the Arthurian pantheon. Like a real person, she’s made to take on a half-dozen roles that aren’t fully compatible with each other: she’s a mother, a sword-mistress, a wife, a human, a water-sprite, a friend, a foe, a student of magic and ultimately its master. Nimue’s final appearance in Arthur’s story puts her in the literal same boat with Morgan le Fay—they’re both there in the magic barge that bears him away to Avalon—and the funny thing about that scene is that Nimue only just got done catching Excalibur after Bedivere chucked it in the water—she must’ve had to do a quick costume change, getting out of her samite Lady of the Lake garments, toweling off, putting on her more stately court-sorcerer garb and then getting in the magic barge.

If you’ve ever had to, say, fix the washing machine while at the same time making your kid’s birthday cake while also phoning in to a business meeting on Zoom, you’ll know what that feels like.¹

1. p.s. I apologise for taking such a long time between posts. Chalk it up to my many incompatible life roles, plus a little bitta this stuff