Malory, in his prose version of the "Morte d'Arthur," has drawn principally from the poems treating of Lancelot, whose early life was somewhat extraordinary, too.
Some accounts relate that Lancelot was the son of King Ban and Helen.

When he was but a babe, his parents were obliged to flee from their besieged castle in Brittany.

Before they had gone far, the aged Ban, seeing his home in flames, sank dying to the ground.

Helen, eager to minister to her husband, laid her baby boy down on the grass near a lake, and when she again turned around, she saw him in the arms of Vivian, the Lady of the Lake, who plunged with him into the waters.
"In the wife's woe, the mother was forgot.
At last (for I was all earth held of him Who had been all to her, and now was not) She rose, and looked with tearless eyes, but dim, In the babe's face the father still to see; And lo! the babe was on another's knee! "Another's lips had kissed it into sleep, And o'er the sleep another watchful smiled; The Fairy sate beside the lake's still deep, And hush'd with chaunted charms the orphan child! Scared at the mother's cry, as fleets a dream, Both Child and Fairy melt into the stream." BULWER LYTTON, _King Arthur_.
The bereaved wife and mother now sorrowfully withdrew into a convent, while Lancelot was brought up in the palace of the Lady of the Lake, with his two cousins, Lyonel and Bohort.

Here he remained until he was eighteen, when the fairy herself brought him to court and presented him to the king.
Arthur then and there made him his friend and confidant, and gave him an honored place at the Round Table.