Self-Gratifying Adventure and Self-Conscious Narrative in Lanceloet en het Hert met de Witte Voet

This essay argues that Lanceloet en het Hert met de Witte Voet expresses its literary self-consciousness—and therefore its debt to earlier Arthurian romances rather than to folklore—by altering the motif of the hunt for a white stag to a hunt for a white-footed stag and by aligning Lanceloet with other episodes of stag-hunting in Arthurian romances that devolve into the self-gratification of the male participants' desire for adventure.