Guest Post by Samantha Knepper
The legend of King Arthur is one that has
captured the attention of the public throughout centuries. Each interpretation
and reimaging of the legend reflects the time the author lived in. By tracing
the Arthurian myth throughout centuries, the myths that emerge from the
different time periods are not just about King Arthur but also the time in
which they were created. As much as I would love to go into detail about each
reinterpretation, I am using broad strokes and just touching on the major
changes with a little bit about each one to give big picture view.
There are mentions of figures before The History of the Kings of Britain that
could have been Arthur or were named Arthur, however the legend we are familiar
with today really takes off in the twelfth century. In the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth
wrote The History of the Kings of Britain,
which was finished in 1136. Monmouth
more than likely had a version of Historia
Brittonum, ‘History of the Britons’, written by a Welsh historian called
Nennius. Nennius drew from numerous chronicles to create a history of the
British people, a list of the 28 towns in Britain, and genealogies. The salient
point for the Arthurian story is that Nennius mentioned twelve battles that a
King Arthur fought. This is more than likely where Monmouth took the idea of
King Arthur. I say more than likely as we have none of the sources today that Monmouth
possessed.
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The
Archbishop presents the sword to Arthur before the people. The inscription on
the stone is: 'Whoever pulls this sword out will be king of the land.' c.
1316 France, N. (Saint-Omer or Tournai) From http://www.bl.uk.
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Monmouth gives us several key ideas that
have stayed with the Arthurian tale: Arthur was conceived due to Merlin’s
interference, conception at Tintagel, and Arthur’s mortal wounding but leaving
for Avalon instead of dying. Monmouth details the heroic feats of Arthur,
making him one of the most outstanding British heroes. Monmouth’s History had numerous copies made,
demonstrating its immediate popularity, and inspired other writers. French
romance writers picked up the story, most famously Chrétien de Troyes, a French medieval poet, who wrote a serious of
Arthurian romances – such as Lancelot
and Perceval. German writers were
also picking up the story and Wolfram Von Eschenback wrote Parzival. There were a series of prose adaptations that were
written called Le Roman de Laurin,
the Arthurian Prose Vulgate. The use of Arthurian stories continued, but they were
changed in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.
These new interpretations of the Arthur
legend had the basic outline of Monmouth’s version of events: Arthur was a king
of Britain who was a hero and a warrior. Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte d’Arthur (‘The Death of King
Arthur’) in 1465, which signaled a change in the story and a change in society.
Aside from being one of the first books printed in England, it was about the
golden age of knighthood dying. Changing the images and narrative surrounding
Arthur once again. Henry VIII, who took the throne in 1509, took the image of
King Arthur and the idealized age of knighthood to heart and even had the
Winchester round table of Edward III painted over so that he was on top,
imaging himself as the new Arthur. Times were changing and the story was being
reinterpreted.
Richard Blackmore wrote two King Arthur
epics, Prince Arthur in 1695 and King Arthur in 1697, but the story was
being used during this time as an allegory for the political struggles during
this period. Tom Thumb was also used in this way, Henry Fielding’s plays, for
example, had an Arthurian setting but Arthur was comedic rather than the
romance character that had emerged in the late Middle Ages. In the early
nineteenth century, a renewed interest the Arthurian legend took place.
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La mort d'Arthur, James Archer
(1823–1904), Manchester. From
https://artuk.org.
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The renewed interest was due to the romanticism, Gothic Revival, and medievalism that had developed. Chivalry, an
ideal code of conduct that was a large part of the medieval romances, was also
a part of the medieval Arthurian romances. In the early part of the nineteenth century
Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur was
reprinted. Alfred Tennyson rewrote the King Arthur story for the Victorian era
in Idylls of the King. In this work
Arthur was the ideal of manhood but failed due to the weakness of being human.
The ideal of manhood was the Victorian ideal, changing the Arthurian story to
fit a new time. This generated even more interest in the Arthurian tale and there
were further editions and other writers who wrote their own Arthurian tales. The
popularity of King Arthur continued into the twentieth century.
There was a comic strip featuring Arthur that
started in 1937, Prince Valiant, along
with numerous novels such as Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, in 1953 and T. H.
White’s The Once and Future King in
1958. Marrion Zimmer Bradley wrote The
Mists of Avalon in 1982, which reimagined the story from a feminist
perspective. Other tales have included values like equality and democracy,
values that would have been foreign to the writers in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. In addition to the novels, as technology developed, the
Arthurian legend was brought into new media.
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Illustration
from page 306 of The Boy's King Arthur: the death of Arthur and Mordred – 'Then the king ... ran towards Sir Mordred, crying, "Traitor, now is thy
death day come."' From https://commons.wikimedia.org.
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Disney adapted one of the stories from the
first half of the twentieth century, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone into their movie of the same name. In 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail came
out, in the 1990s there was a miniseries that aired on television called Merlin, and in 2004 there was another
movie called King Arthur, demonstrating
the enduring popularity of Arthurian legends. This year, another movi
e, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, has been released. This movie, like all the others, reflects the values of our times rather than the medieval values that Arthur had first been endowed with. There is still something that captivates people about Arthur and allows for a reinterpretation to reflect society today, whatever it is, it connects our past with our present, allowing us to feel good about where we came from.
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King
Arthur’s statue at Tintagel. From http://www.independent.co.uk.
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Further Reading
For further reading I highly recommend any
of the literature I discussed along with watching the movies, and TV shows
mentioned. My specialty is medieval warrior culture in twelfth to fourteenth
century France and England, so I can only speak for that era in terms of
history. For those interested in the medieval Arthur and his values I
recommended the following books (along with medieval literature) that deal with
society and violence: R. W. Barber’s The
Reign of Chivalry, John France’s Western
Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, Richard W. Kaeuper’s Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe,
and Maurice Keen’s Chivalry.
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Samantha Knepper lives in San Diego and can
be reached at SamanthaLKnepper@gmail.com, http://medievalknightsandmore.com, and on Twitter @Slknepper. She
received her MA in History from Norwich University and her capstone looked at
the idolization of heroes from the past in twelfth to fourteenth-century France
and England. She loves discussing all things medieval and hopes to learn how to
joust this year.
