In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Arthurian Literature

  • Introduction
  • Anthologies
  • Data Sources
  • Journals
  • Medieval Period
  • Historicism

British and Irish Literature Arthurian Literature
by
Stephen Knight
  • LAST REVIEWED: 20 September 2012
  • LAST MODIFIED: 20 September 2012
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0002

Introduction

The myth of King Arthur has attracted writers and commentators for at least a thousand years. Starting in pre-conquest Britain, the story of a warrior leader who claimed his rightful throne, ruled in glory, and ended in tragic mystery claimed the interest of Europe and eventually the world. The myth’s double power not only celebrates royal rule and civilized grandeur, but also asserts their inherent fragility. Each period has reinterpreted Arthurian splendor and danger in its own terms. The high medieval French monarch gloriously leads but cannot control great knights who represent the barons of France; Tennyson’s Arthur sets male morality against a tide of sensually driven disloyalty; Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Arthur faces modern-seeming forces of politics, religion, and gender. The central texts of the emerging myth were Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthur saga, from strange conception to mysterious disappearance, part of his Latin History of the Kings of Britain c. 1136; the late-12th-century single-hero romances of Chrétien de Troyes; and the massive early-13th-century French prose Vulgate Cycle, which fits many chivalric adventures, including the Holy Grail, into the overarching Arthurian story. In both epic and romance form, the Arthur myth spread rapidly across Europe, and into English by 1200, but the real development in England was later and mostly popular, with two masterpieces, the late-14th-century romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory’s prose epic of c. 1470, printed by Caxton in 1485 as Le Morte Darthur. The renaissance spirit severely limited interest in the medieval monarch, and in Britain he had the added disadvantage of being inherently Catholic: Jonson, Milton, Dryden, and Pope all turned away from thoughts of an Arthurian epic, and the late-18th-century rise of medievalism did not awaken Arthur in any major way. It was Tennyson’s poetically potent refashioning of the king’s authority as essentially moral that reestablished Arthurian writing in Britain and America. This inspired 20th-century reworkings of the story in both personal and social terms, notably in historical fiction, with an increasing interest in the women characters, and also in the possibly historical Arthur.

General Overviews

The quantity of Arthurian material, even in English, makes it challenging for anthologists, scholars, and critics to cover in a single volume, and most studies have been restricted to a period or a genre. Attempts at greater coverage include either encyclopedia-style general studies or theme-focused literary selections across the tradition. Lacy 1996, Lacy and Ashe 1988, and Nastali and Boardman 2004 provide reliable access to information and in areas that go beyond the limits of literary studies into history, context, and wider cultural areas.

  • Fulton, Helen, ed. A Companion to Arthurian Literature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

    DOI: 10.1002/9781444305821

    This collection of essays offers an extensive introduction to the tradition; Parts 4 to 6 deal with English-language material and Part 7 with film.

  • Lacy, Norris J., ed. The New Arthurian Encyclopaedia. New York: Garland, 1996.

    A very useful resource with entries on authors, texts, and other phenomena.

  • Lacy, Norris J., and Geoffrey Ashe, eds. The Arthurian Handbook. New York: Garland, 1988.

    A useful introduction to the whole myth with an innovative chapter on “Arthur in the Arts” and a full bibliography.

  • Nastali, Daniel P., and Philip C. Boardman. The Arthurian Annals from 1250 to 2000. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

    A full bibliography, primary and secondary, of the whole tradition and commentary on it.

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