Sagramore

Sagramore, also known as Sagramor or Sagremor and many other variations of this name,^{[note 1]} is a ubiquitous knight of the Round Table in the Arthurian legend. He appears in nearly all^[4] of the Arthurian standalone and cyclical chivalric romances, including some in which he is the titular protagonist. Sagramore's characterisation varies from story to story, but generally he features as a virtuous but hot-tempered knight who fights fiercely and ragefully.

Sagramore
Matter of Britain character
Attributed arms of "Sagrenior le Desiré"
First appearance	Erec and Enide
Based on	Possibly Hir Atrwm
In-universe information
Title	Prince, Sir
Occupation	Knight of the Round Table
Spouse	Sebile
Relatives	Elyan the White, Mordred
Religion	Christian
Origin	Kingdom of Hungary, Byzantine Empire

Legend

The earliest appearances of Sagramor, as Sagremor le Desreé (the Unruly, the Fiery, the Impetous^[4]) is found in the 12th-century poems by Chrétien de Troyes (first in Erec et Enide).^[4] There, he is one of King Arthur's four greatest knights, as he typically remains is in many later verse works.^[4] Nevertheless, he is usually (ever since Erec) either defeated and captured upon rushing into combat first, requiring a rescue by the hero of the story, or else the hero defeats him a joust.^[4] Sometimes, he is also a victim of a "phantom adventure", being in need of a rescue (be it from a spell or from captivity) that is not actually narrated.^[4] In many verse romances, since Chrétien's Perceval, he is more or less associated with Kay.^[4] Besides his notorious rashness, other recurring motifs involve his quarrelsome nature and frequent hunger (the latter possibly connecting him to the Culhwch and Olwen character of the ever hungry and thirsty Atrwm the Tall as Sagramor's origin^[5]), all of which get him into troubles.^[4] In Parzival, he even has to be physically restrained as to stop him from attacking knights randomly.^[6]

In the verse romances, he has his own extended adventures only in the Third Continuation (Manessier's) of Perceval, the Marvelles de Rigomer, and Claris and Laris.^[4] According to the Marvelles, Sagremor would be killed by his own son from his rape of a strange princess named Orainglaie (or Qrainglaie^[6]).^[4] He is notably the subject of a fragmentary Middle High German romance, Segremors, the surviving portions of which describe his journey to an island ruled by a fay and his undesired combat with his friend Gawain.^[7] This story was probably originally French;^[4] Matthias Meyer calls it a "free translation" of Meraugis de Portlesguez.^[8]

According to the Lancelot-Grail (Vulgate) prose cycle, the father of Sagremor the Unruly (li Desreez) or Sagremor of Constantinople^[9] (de Constantinoble^[10]) was the King of Hungary (perhaps as a pun on Sagremor's hunger^[5]) named Vlask and his mother was a daughter of an Eastern Roman ("Greek") Emperor Hadrian (or Adrian^[10]). Sagremor was actually an heir to the throne of Constantinople, but his father died while he was still young, and his mother accepted the proposal of King Brandegorre (or Brangoire^[10]) of Estrangort.^[11] When he is fifteen, Sagremor travels to Britain to join his father. Upon arrival, he engages the invading Saxon forces in a battle at Camelot with aid from Arthur's similarly young nephew Gawain and his brothers, and subsequently they are all knighted by Arthur. After the Saxons are defeated, and having personally slain some of their kings (Brandague and Margan of Ireland^[12]), he later participates in Arthur's other early wars such as these against Claudas and Galahaut.^[6] The Lancelot-Grail describes him as a good knight, but quick to anger. When fighting, he would go into a frenzy; when he came down, he would feel ill and hungry. He thus gains his epithet 'the Unruly', given to him by Queen Guinevere, but Kay calls him Sagremor-Starvation.^[12] Kay also gives him another nickname, Mort Jeune ('Dead Youth' or 'Young Corpse').^[5][13] His half-sister, Brandegorre's beautiful daughter Claire (also named as Sagremor's sister in Le Bel Inconnu^[14]), falls in love with Bors and sleeps with him; their child is Elyan the White, who too joins the Round Table before returning to take the throne of Constantinople.

In the Livre d'Artus version of the Vulgate Merlin, Merlin expains Sagremor's strange behavior as his early childhood experiences from when his mother fled from Constantinople to escape her incestous father Adrien.^[4] Sagremor becomes a champion of the pagan queen Sebile, whom he marries after she converts to Christianity for his sake (he and her, as Sébille, also have an affair in Meliador^[13]).^[6] He has an illigitimate daughter with a rescued maiden named Senehaut, who is raised by Guinevere.^[6]

In the Post-Vulgate Cycle, his father is renamed as Nabur the Unruly (Nabur le Desreé / li Derr[e]és^[15]), here a duke of an unidentfied foreign land. In the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin, the infant Sagremor becomes foster-brother to the rescued and also newborn Mordred (he also figures as a brother of Mordred, named Segures, in Renaud de Beaujeu's version of the story of Le Bel Inconnu^[13]).^[16] In both the Vulgate and the Post-Vulgate versions, Sagremor dies by Mordred's hand as one of Arthur's last remaining men at the final battle.^[17]

In the Prose Tristan, Sagremor (Sagramor in Italian versions^[18]) is portrayed as a close friend to the protagonist Tristan and the one who alerts the rest of the Round Table to his death.^[13] In the Arthurian compilation Le Morte d'Arthur, the prowess of Sagramore le Desirous (Sagramo[u]re [le] Desyr[o]us^[19][20]) varies from situation to situation; he usually serves to lose jousts to better knights, but at times he is a valiant fighter.

In Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcelos' 16th-century Portuguese romance Triunfos de Sagramor (pt) (Triumphs of Sagramor) or Memorial das Proezas da Segunda Távola Redonda (Memorial of the Deeds of the Second Round Table), Sagramor and legendary British king Constantine III are fused into a single character, Sagramor Constantino, portrayed as the heir to Arthur who forms a new Round Table to fight the Saxons and keep the glory of Arthurian Britain.^[21][22] It tells of the eponymous new generation of knights led by King Sagramor, Arthur's immediate successor as the ruler of "England and France".^[23][24] He marries Arthur's daughter, Seleucia.^[25]

Modern Arthuriana

• In Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Merlin and Vivien", one of the Idylls of the King, he stumbles into bed with a maiden, thinking he is in his own room; to save their reputation the two strangers wed, but their purity and goodness make their marriage a happy one.^[13]
• Mark Twain characterised Sagramo[u]r le Desirous (first name Clarence), or 'Saggie', as an angry, backwards knight in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, who challenges the Yankee to a duel to the death and is defeated by the Yankee's modern weaponry despite the supposed magical "veil of invisibility" protection by Merlin; his armour, later displayed in a museum featuring a gunshot hole inflicted by the Yankee, serves as a setpiece to the start of the story. His figure arguably symbolises "English journalism's solemnity".^[26] A non-villainous Sagramor is portrayed by William Bendix in the 1949 musical film version. He was also played by Robert Addie in another adaptation, A Knight in Camelot.
• Sagramor is featured, along with his daughter Bragwaine, in "Professor Baffin's Adventures", a humorous short story by Max Adeler (Charles Heber Clark) that might have inspired Mark Twain's novel.^[27]
• He appears in the musical Camelot and was portrayed by Peter Bromilow in the film version.
• In Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles, Sagramor is a fierce Numidian veteran of the old Roman army who serves as Arthur's trusted chief cavalry officer, having traveled to Britain after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. His uniqueness in the setting as a black person makes him particularly feared by Arthur's enemies, the invading Saxons, believing him to be a demon summoned by Merlin.^[28]
• R. H. Stewart's "The Perfect Stranger" (in The Chronicles of the Round Table, ed. Mike Ashley) has Sagramor as a son of Palomides who leaves Africa to become one of King Athur's commanders. He befriends Queen Morgan, becomes a foe of Queen Guinevere after she fails to seduce him Lanval-style, and eventually marries a cured loathly lady.^[29][30]

Sagremor de Pommiers

The 14th-century figure of Sagremor de Pommiers, named after the character, was a friend of Petrarch; in his letters, Petrarch calls him sacer amor, or "sacred love". He served for a while as a messenger of the Emperor, sometimes traveling with the poet; after a while, he became a monk and retired in a monastery. Petrarch dedicated his Psalmi Poenitentiales to him.^[31][32]

Notes

1. Including Sacremor, Sacremors, Sagramour, Sagramoure, Sagremoir, Sagremore, Sagremoret, Sagrenoir, Saigremor, Saigremors, Saigremort, Segramor, Segramore, Segramors, Segramort, Seigramor, Seigramore, Sigamor, Sogremor, Segures, and Sygramors.^[1][2][3]