SEL1004

Introduction to Literary Studies 2

Week 4, lecture 1: Overview of the Arthurian Legend  

This lecture outlines the development of the Arthurian legend, and the following one looks at the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the context of that development.

1 General observations about the Arthurian legend

  • Its great age
  • Its current healthy state: literature, media, tourism

2. Historical development

2.1 Historical context c.450 c.550 AD

The Arthurian legend has an historical basis in the circumstances of post-Roman Britain between about 450 and 550 AD.

  • The Celts in Britain (map)
  • The Romans in Britain (map)
  • Britain after the Roman withdrawal (map)
  • The enemies of the British: Picts, Scots, and Germans (map)
  • The British defence and its result (map1)(map2)
  • Arthur's place in all this: Arthur cannot be shown to have been a historical person.

2.2 The earliest form of the legend c.500 - c.1000 AD

The legend of Arthur was assimilated to Celtic kingship mythology during the early medieval centuries c.500 - c.1000.

2.2.1 What is mythology?

2.2.2 What is Celtic kingship mythology?

  • Its purpose: to legitimize a social structure

  • Its features

-- King, goddess, and fertility

-- Subversion of the natural order: adultery and the wasteland

-- Restitution of the natural order: journey to the Otherworld to recover divine favour

-- Example: The Voyage of Art mac Cuinn

2.2.3 Celtic kingship mythology and the Arthurian legend

  • Arthur is the ideal king who mates with the goddess Guinevere and brings prosperity to the kingdom
  • Lancelot the usurper has intercourse with Guinevere and creates a wasteland
  • Arthur's companions travel to the Otherworld, find the Grail, and restore fertility to Arthur and his kingdom
  • Example: The Lai de Lanval

2.2.4 This Celtic phase of the legend's development became its core, and that core survives to the present day, though its significance has been obscured.

2.3 The Medieval Arthurian legend c.1000 - c.1500 AD

The Arthur of Celtic myth was assimilated to the ideology of the European aristocracy in the Middle Ages c.1000 - c.1500.

2.3.1 What is ideology?

2.3.2 The ideology of the medieval European aristocracy: chivalry

  • Warfare
  • Christianity
  • Courtly love
  • Good manners

2.3.3 The effect of chivalry on the Arthurian legend

  • Arthur and his court became the epitome of chivalry.
  • The medieval Arthur is the one most people today are familiar with.

2.4 The Arthurian legend c.1500 - c.1800 AD

The Arthurian legend waned in popularity between c.1500 and c.1800

2.4.1 Historical developments: The Renaissance, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation

2.4.2 Lack of interest in, and hostility to, all things medieval, including the Arthurian legend.

2.4 The Romantic and post-Romantic Arthurian legend c.1800 - 1922

The Romantics and post-Romantics saw the medieval world order as an solution to the problems of an increasingly industrialized Europe, and used the medieval version of the Arthurian legend as a vehicle to articulate that view c.1800 - c.1922

  • Industrialization and its attendant problems
  • Proposed solutions: Marx and medievalism

  • Arthur and his court were represented as champions of middle class Victorian values
  • In 1922 T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, one of the most important poems of the twentieth century. It used the Arthurian wasteland and grail quest as a metaphor for the spiritual exhaustion of Europe after the First World War and the need for regeneration.

2.6 The modern Arthurian legend c.1920 - present

From c.1920 to the present day the Arthurian legend has been used as a thematic mine for a rapidly developing entertainment industry. This phase in the development is characterized by its lack of ideological interpretation.

  • Novels
  • Films
  • Children's literature
  • Computer games
  • Web

Reading

A convenient place to find out more about the Arthurian legend is my module The Arthurian Legend, which is online at http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/hermann.moisl/SEL3042/index.htm. It contains a set of 18 lectures covering the development of the Arthurian legend described above in detail, and at the end of each lecture there is a list of relevant readings; these readings are gathered together and grouped by category on the Bibliography: http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/hermann.moisl/SEL3042/bibliography.htm.

The following links are a good first step to supplement what has been said in this lecture.