had exchanged for his own, and his superhuman prowess is now explained. The ring is a magic ring: whoever wears it cannot be killed. Perceval offers to return this ring in exchange for the one his mother gave him, but the lady tells him that a giant now has his ring. Perceval seeks out, defeats and beheads this giant, then rides to the giant's castle. The giant's servant tells Perceval that the giant had tried to woo Perceval's mother and she, recognizing the ring he wore and believing her son dead, had gone mad and run into the forest to live like a wild beast. Perceval searches for his mother in the forest. He finds her at a spring and carries her on his back to the giant's castle, where she is given an infusion that restores her to her senses. Perceval brings his mother back to his wife's castle to live. As the story reaches its conclusion, we are told that Perceval dies in the Holy Land, fighting for Christendom. As a parody Sir Perceval of Galles is written in the style of a parody. It may be that Geoffrey Chaucer chose it as the basis for his own parody of chivalric romance, Sir Thopas, for this reason; that "the poem provided an impetus as well as an object for Chaucer's satire." Sir Thopas, the hero of Chaucer's tale, is a young man uninterested in women, like the eponymous hero of Guigemar, the Breton lai by Marie de France. Guigemar is involved in a serious hunting accident in the forest and is then transported, on a bed in a mysterious boat with candles at its prow, to a place where he is healed of his wound, and to a beautiful woman with whom he falls in love. Thopas, galloping recklessly through the forest, also seems to be inviting accidental death, but no accident occurs. Instead, like the naive and boyish Perceval of Galles, Chaucer's story has Thopas intent upon fulfilling a quest that he has given himself. Sir Thopas has vowed that he will marry a Faery Queen, and so he careers through the forest looking for one. At last, he seems to enter an Otherworld, because in front of him is a giant. The giant tells Thopas that he has indeed entered a magic place: But-if thou prike out of myn haunt, Anon I slee thy stede With