Take, for instance, the bit with Sir Pelleas. Sir Gawaine is out adventuring, the way these knights will, and comes across a Dolorous Knight (Sir Pelleas). He's just wailing and carrying on, and Gawaine watches him roundly defeat a whole gaggle of other knights, and then he lets them tie him up in a most humiliating fashion and haul him away.
Why would a reasonably competent knight do such a thing? It appears that he is hopelessly in love with one Lady Ettard, who can't stand the sight of him. He fights the knights she sends against him every day, but doesn't mind being arrested by them because that's the only way he gets a glimpse of her.
So in steps Nimue, the Lady of the Lake that just finished shutting up Merlin in a rock. Nimue casts a few love spells so that Sir Pelleas gets over his infatuation with Lady Ettard, and so that Lady Ettard falls hard for Sir Pelleas. Enter the following quote.
"Sir knight Pelleas, said the Damosel of the Lake, take your horse and come forth with me out of this country, and ye shall love a lady that shall love you.Book IV, Chapter XXIII. I'm so glad that worked out well for everyone, aren't you? As for Lady Ettard, well, I guess we're not supposed to feel sorry for her because she didn't have the sense to like Pelleas when he first started liking her? And I'm not even touching the theological bit in the middle.
"I will well, said Sir Pelleas, for this Lady Ettard hath done me great despite and shame, and there he told her the beginning and ending, and how he had purposed never to have arisen till that he had been dead. And now such grace God hath sent me, that I hate her as much as ever I loved her, thanked be our Lord Jesus!
"Thank me, said the Damosel of the Lake. Anon Sir Pelleas armed him, and took his horse, and commanded his men to bring after his pavilions and his stuff where the Damosel of the Lake would assign.
"So the Lady Ettard died for sorrow, and the Damosel of the Lake rejoiced Sir Pelleas, and loved together during their life days."
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