The Lady of the Lake is the great water-enchantress of Arthurian legend, a figure of the Otherworld who moves through the story of King Arthur at its most fateful moments. Known by many names across the medieval romances — Nimue, Viviane, Niniane — she is the one who, in the best-loved version, gives Arthur his sword Excalibur, an arm 'clothed in white samite' rising from the middle of a lake to offer the blade, and to whom the dying king commands Sir Bedivere to return it, the hand reaching up from the water to catch it and draw it under.
The story
Her role runs far beyond the sword. She fosters the young Lancelot after his father's death, raising him beneath the waters of her lake — so that he is called Lancelot du Lac — and she is the enchantress who learns Merlin's magic and then uses it to bind the old wizard forever, sealing him in a cave, a tree, or a tower of air, depending on the telling. In her oldest layers she seems to descend from the Welsh lake-maidens, the Gwragedd Annwn, fairy women of the pools who could pass between worlds.
Though no single lake owns her, several British waters claim the Lady, and in Welsh tradition the high mountain lake of Llyn Llydaw, cradled beneath Snowdon, is named among the places where Excalibur was received and returned — a fittingly remote and mirror-still water for the home of the sword-giving enchantress. Her gift and her reclaiming of Excalibur frame the whole reign of Arthur, opening it in glory and closing it in loss.