nobles who sentence Guinevere to be burned at the stake, and Arthur tells Agravain to pick knights to serve as a guard during the burning. Agravain agrees, but insists that Arthur order Gaheris to accompany him as one of the party. When Lancelot and his party attack, Lancelot, riding ahead of the others, charges deliberately at Agravain, whom he recognises, and strikes him though his body with his lance. When King Arthur finds Agravain dead, he falls to the ground in a faint, and says (in Norris J. Lacy's modern English version of the Lancelot-Grail): "Oh, fair nephew, how he hated you who stuck you so! Everyone must know that he who deprived my kinsmen of such a knight as you are has inflicted terrible grief on me." Agravain's body is then buried in a very rich tomb in the church at Camelot. Modern adaptations By and large, modern works based on Arthurian legend continue to villainize Agravain. Agravaine, not Gaheris, as in Malory, is the Orkney brother responsible for the murder of his mother in what may be the most widely read 20th-century adaptation of the Arthurian legend: T. H. White's The Once and Future King series of books, first released in 1938. White portrays Agravaine as a drunken, bloodthirsty coward, the brutal "bully" of his family, but also intelligent and not altogether unsympathetic. The pre-Raphaelite poem "The Defence of Guenevere" (1858) by William Morris also identifies Agravaine as his mother's murderer. In the short-story "Sir Agravaine", from P.G. Wodehouse's The Man Upstairs and Other Stories (1914), the character Sir Agravaine the Dolorous is presented as an unattractive man of little distinction as a knight, characterised by self-doubt and a defeatist attitude, but intelligent and finally successful. He appears in the British TV series Merlin (2008–2012) in Series 4 as Arthur's contemptuous uncle Agravaine de Bois; while purporting to help guide the prince after his father is incapacitated, Agravaine secretly works with Morgana to overthrow the Pendragons and return her to the throne, presumably acting out of revenge for the deaths of his siblings ("Tristan" and "Ygraine") at hands of King Uther. He is finally killed by Merlin in the Season 4 finale after he helps Morgana attack Camelot. Conversely, the 1995 movie First Knight presents Agravain (portrayed by Liam Cunningham) as heroic, an atypical treatment which can be traced to a curious anomaly in Malory; though consistently depicted