Il supplizio del Signore delle Paludi L"espulsione' dell'usurpatore nel Perlesvaus.

Within the corpus of Old French chivalric literature, both epic poems and prose chivalric romances, the Perlesvaus undisputedly surpasses all other texts in one respect: the quantity and intensity of violent scenes. These episodes are often narrated resorting to such levels of smug descriptive insistence as to lead great Arthurian-literature expert Roger Sherman Loomis to suspect a pathological inclination towards sadism in the anonymous author of the text. Due to its goriness and its display of slaughterous fantasies, the torment of the Lord of the Fens is surely one of the most disconcerting scenes in the work. By means of an in-depth analysis of the anthropological elements found in this episode, the paper identifies a coherent substrate of a ceremonial nature. This substrate is on the one hand reminiscent of primeval sacrificial practices, and on the other hand linked to dethronement procedures that have been documented in various traditional cultures. Far from being the expression of a morbid attraction to the gory and bloody, the atrocious agonies inflicted upon the Lord of the Fens by Perlesvaus seem instead to be modelled after primeval ritual frameworks, which foreground the connection between violence, power and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]