In Arthurian legend, the Siege Perilous (also known as The Perilous Seat) is a vacant seat at the Round Table reserved by Merlin for the knight who would one day be successful in the quest for the Holy Grail. This knight is either Percival or Sir Galahad, depending on the version of the story. The Siege Perilous is so strictly reserved that it is fatal to anyone else who sits in it.
In Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur, the newly knighted Sir Galahad takes the seat in Camelot on Whitsunday, 454 years after the death of Jesus.
Another version of this story is related in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King.
Famous quotes containing the words siege and/or perilous:
“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specialisations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)