Today’s episode concludes our three part series about King Arthur in history, legend, and popular culture. Our jumping off point for this episode is Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Le Morte D’Arthur, the work most responsible for the popular conception of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We then trace how the legend has been repeatedly reinterpreted down to the present day in literature, films, comics, and even video games.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
Today’s episode concludes our three part series about King Arthur in history, legend, and popular culture. Our jumping off point for this episode is Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Le Morte D’Arthur, the work most responsible for the popular conception of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. We then trace how the legend has been repeatedly reinterpreted down to the present day in literature, films, comics, and even video games.
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
Episode 18: King Arthur in Literature and Popular Culture: From Sir Thomas Malory to the Present
Richard: Welcome to our podcast, ‘Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction About the Middle Ages. Today’s episode concludes our series about King Arthur in history, legend, and popular culture. In the previous episode we discussed the development of the Arthurian legend in the Middle Ages. We begin today with Sir Thomas Malory’s late fifteenth-century Le Morte D’Arthur, the work most responsible for the popular conception of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Malory is our jumping off point for an examination of how the legend has been repeatedly reinterpreted in literature, films, comics, and even video games. I’m your host, Professor Richard Abels. My co-hosts are my better half and my inspiration for all things medieval, Ellen, and my good friend and long-time colleague, Dr. Jennifer Paxton of The Catholic University of America.
Jenny, we are delighted to have you back for the final episode of our series on King Arthur..
Jenny: And I’m delighted to be back.
Richard: Jenny, why don’t you start us off.
1:10 Jenny: The man who pulled everything together was Sir Thomas Malory in his Middle English prose Le Morte D’Arthur, The Death of Arthur, written around 1470, and famously published in print by William Caxton in 1485. We either know too much or too little about the author. The author tells us three things about himself: his name, that he is a knight, and that he wrote this while jailed. Scholars have identified three Thomas Malorys who were alive around 1470. Only one, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, can be identified as a knight, a soldier, and a prisoner. There are several problems, however, with this identification: he would have been in his 70s when he wrote Le Morte D’Arthur, advanced old age for that time; the language of the work suggests that the author was a Lincolnshire man; and, most troubling, Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was a horrible person.
2:20 Ellen: By horrible you mean that he spent a good deal of his life in prison for highway robbery, rape, and attempted murder. And he was imprisoned for treason for good measure.
2:30 Jenny: Not exactly the ideal spokesman for the ethos of chivalry.
2:35 Richard: Richard Barber tries to get around it by suggesting that Malory’s was imprisoned on trumped up charges for political reasons. Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel was an active participant in the Wars of the Roses and he is known to have switched sides. But iy’d really difficult to dismiss the detailed indictments against him. Sometimes bad people produce good art, music, and literature.
3:05 Ellen: And sometimes they are flat out hypocrites like Rousseau. Richard, I know you like his work, but, give me a break. The man writes a treatise on the education of the young while forcing his common-law wife to abandon all five of their children to foundling hospital, claiming that they would be better off. Humph!
3:25 Jenny: Whoever Malory was, he established the canonical idea of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. When people talk about the legend of King Arthur, they mean Malory and not Geoffrey of Monmouth or Nennius.
3:40 Richard: Malory accomplished the feat of combining the “historical” King Arthur of the chronicles with the legendary King Arthur of the romances, packaging this synthesis into a coherent whole. As with previous iterations of Arthur, the king and his knights are conceived in contemporary terms. The story is set, of course, in a legendary past, but Malory conceived of his characters as contemporaries, much like the artists who designed tapestries telling the story of Arthur, or of Alexander the Great, presented the characters in the dress of day. Malory’s Arthur is an ideal, though human, king. He rules with justice and imposes order and stability within is realm, in contrast to the disorder and political violence of his day. The Fellowship of the Round Table is Malory’s ideal of courtliness and chivalry. And it is that fellowship that Arthur prizes above all else. When that ideal comes apart because of the exposure of Guinevere’s adulterous affair with Lancelot, Arthur is made to declare that “And much am I am more sorry for the loss of my good knights than for the loss of my fair queen. For of queens I might have enough, but such a fellowship of good knights shall never be together in no company.”
Ellen: Okay
5:20 Richard: Malory is not Chretien de Troyes. He is not a spokesman for romantic love. At times it sounds like Malory was stuck with the romantic triangle of Lancelot, Guinevere, and Arthur. He much preferred to talk about the deeds of Lancelot than his unfortunate love life and focus on his chivalric deeds. The human, imperfect Lancelot rather than his spiritually perfect son Galahad is Malory’s ideal of knighthood. He says of Lancelot, “of him all knights may learn to be a knight.” At the same time, Malory prizes above all are duty, service, and loyalty. This would seem to be in conflict given Lancelot’s adulterous affair with his lord’s wife. Malory cannot completely escape the contradictions. But he minimizes it as best he can, by emphasizing not Lancelot’s carnal love of Guinevere, but his faithful service to her. He has Lancelot respond to the reproaches of a maiden whom he had rescued and whose love he rejects, by telling her that marriage and carnal pleasure is incompatible with true knighthood. Lancelot’s love for Guinevere prevents him from achieving the grail, but Malory gives him the consolation prize of allowing him to see it. T. H. White was faithful to Malory in portraying Lancelot as caught between his love and fidelity to Arthur and to Guinevere. And he serves both as well as he can. As Prof. Jane Taylor observes, “Lancelot’s constancy to Arthur and Guinevere as knight and lover far outweigh the sinfulness of his adulterous love, and so there is no contradiction between his loyalty and love.”
Ellen: Okayyyy
7:23 Richard: Malory does not idealize adultery, as some courtly poets did; but it is the exposure of that adultery because of malice and envy, rather than the act itself that brings ruin to the kingdom. The book may be entitled Le Morte D’Arthur, but it ends not with Arthur’s death but with Guinevere’s in a nunnery, having sent Lancelot away, and Lancelot’s as a hermit, wasting away.
In the sixteenth century Arthur became highly politicized. The Tudor King Henry VII, desperately in need of a legitimate claim to the throne, traced his lineage and right to the throne back to his distant ancestor, King Arthur. He reinforced this connection by naming his eldest son Arthur, who died before he could become king. Sixteenth-century Scottish historians, on the other hand, began to question the legitimacy of Arthur himself, and recast the story with Mordred as the hero! At the same time historians, beginning with the Italian Polydore Vergil, began to question whether Arthur was a historical figure at all. This provoked the Tudor antiquarian John Leland to collect documentary and physical evidence for the historicity of Arthur. He drew a distinction between the fantastic stories and the dry historical accounts, dismissed the former as regrettable, and concluded from the latter that Arthur is real. Leland’s researches didn’t persuade everyone. John Milton toyed with the idea of writing a national epic about King Arthur but abandoned it when he came to the conclusion that Arthur was a fictional character. Oddly, Arthuriana continued to flourish in Spain, as is reflected in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. And one of the things that I learned recently is that when Prince Arthur met his betrothed, Catherine of Aragon, they bonded over their love of Arthurian legends.
Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur is the apotheosis of the medieval legend of King Arthur. But it is also the last great Arthurian contribution to literature in the English language until the nineteenth century.
9:57Jenny: This seems to be the perfect segue to modern popular treatments of King Arthur. Every era seems to have fashioned a King Arthur that met its needs. In his role as Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson did this for Queen Victoria’s Britain in his wildly popular “Idylls of the King.” Tennyson cleaned up the story of Arthur for a Victorian audience. Tennyson’s Arthur is the ideal monarch: warrior and statesmen. The knights of the Round Table are what they are because, like coins, everyone of them is “stamp’d with the image of the King.”
10:36 Richard: Tennyson was the foremost nineteenth-century English popularizer of Arthur but he was far from alone. He was following rather than initiating a trend. The Gothic and Romantic medieval movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century gave rise to renewed interest in King Arthur. In 1816 and 1817 three editions of Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur were published--the first new editions since 1634—and these were followed by illustrated editions in 1860, 1892. 1912, and 1919. In 1880 Sidney Lanier adapted it for children as The Boy's King Arthur: Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth, which was my introduction to King Arthur.
The Arthurian legends became a common theme for nineteenth-century English artists, in particular the pre-Raphaelites. Perhaps the most famous of these is John William Waterhouse’s 1888 “The Lady of Shallot,” depicting the ending of Tennyson’s poem, which was also the subject of paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Holman Hunt.
12:28 A quite different poetic treatment of the King Arthur story was undertaken by J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien began writing an alliterative verse retelling of the death of Arthur around 1931. Tolkien apparently wrote alliterative verse for his own pleasure and saw no compelling reason to complete several long poems that he began in this mode. What survives is a 954 line fragment. Tolkien’s son Christopher edited and published the fragment in 2013, along with three essays that identified the poem’s sources, contextualized it among Tolkien’s other works, and traced how the poem evolved based on his father’s notes.
The poem is not one of Tolkien’s better known works. To be honest, I hadn’t read it before preparing for this episode, and probably wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t stumbled across it among our collection of medieval romances and chansons de geste. Ell, have you read it?
Ellen: No. I didn’t know we had a copy.
Richard: Someday we really need to catalogue on books.
Ellen: Yes, Richard.
Richard: We both love Lord of the Rings, but I am not that thrilled with Tolkien’s poetic efforts. I thought his modern alliterative rendering of Beowulf to be okay, but nothing special. I could do without the faux archaisms. And unlike our son, I have steeped myself in the Middle Earth corpus. So I was surprised how much I enjoyed “The Fall of Arthur.” At the beginning of the poem, Arthur is planning an expedition to the Continent. His enemy is not a Roman emperor, as in Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and all the other medieval Arthurian treatments, but against the Saxons. He is planning to bring the war to their homeland and end the Saxon scourge once and fall all. Arthur is tendentiously encouraged in his intentions by his faithless nephew Mordred:
“And with malice Mordred his mind hardened,
Saying that war was wisdom and waiting folly,
“Let their fanes be felled and their fast places
Bare and broke, burned their havens …
Fortune follows thee—fare and conquer!
And Britain the blessed, they broad kingdom,
I will hold unharmed till thy home-coming,
Faithful hast thou found me
15:08 Ellen: Sounds a lot like The Battle of Maldon. Isn’t it a little ironic that Tolkien used Old English alliteration and meter to write a poem in which a Briton is the hero and the Anglo-Saxons the villains?
Richard: More than a little ironic. Tolkien had to have appreciated this, and it is one of the things I find so interesting about the poem. Arthur departs Britain. He misses Lancelot and his kinsmen, who are are in exile in Benwick, for having rescued killed Arthur’s knights in rescuing Guinevere from being burnt at the stake.
Arthur’s greatest knight is Gawain, “whose glory waxed as times darkened, true and dauntless, among knights peerless, defence and fortress of a failing world.”.
Ellen: How does Tolkien portray Lancelot?
Richard: In outline Tolkien follows the Alliterative Morte DArthure and Malory. Lancelot rescues Guinevere, and in doing so kills Gawain’s brothers. But Tolkien’s emphasis differs from his sources. Tolkien’s Gawain is not presented as consumed with an implacable need for vengeance for the deaths of his brothers. He condemns Lancelot for his breach of faith—as does Lancelot himself. Tolkien’s Lancelot, penitent in spirit, is sickened when he realizes what he has done. He doesn’t need Arthur marching to war against him to repent his actions.
“Then the rage left him, and his wrath-sickened,
His mood faltered. He mourned too late
In ruth for the rending of the Round Table.
His pride he repented, his prowess cursing
That friends had felled, faith broken
For the love longing of his lord Arthur
He would heal yet honour with his heart’s anguish,
And the queen restore, by the king’s mercy
Her estate restablish. Strange she deemed him
By a sudden sickness from his self altered.”
Ellen: This emphasis upon duty is both very Anglo-Saxon and very Tolkien. I also find it interesting that Lancelot singles out the sin of pride rather than his passion for Guinevere.
Richard: Tolkien’s Lancelot is represented almost as a hapless victim to Guinevere’s charms and desire. “High his purpose; he long was loyal to his lord Arthur” until he fell to Guinevere’s desire for him: “Dear she loved him with love unyielding, lady ruthless, fair as fay-woman and fell-minded in the world wailing for the woes of men.”
Ellen: Hmm.
Richard: While Arthur is waging war against the forces of the East.
Ellen: Germany. I never really thought about it, but when Tolkien wrote about the evil men from the East in the Lord of the Rings, maybe he meant Germany?
Richard: Maybe. Arthur receives news from home that Mordred has made an alliance with the Saxons to take the throne and Guinevere. The poem ends with Arthur winning a naval victory against a Saxon fleet, and marshalling his forces for the decisive battle. Lancelot, who has received news of Mordred’s treachery will come too late.
Because they are both poems, it is tempting to see Tolkien’s ”The Fall of Arthur” as the twentieth-century answer to “The Idyls of the King,” but I think it is more like a late tenth-century Anglo-Saxon take on the story.
18:15 Jenny: The twentieth-century’s answer to Tennyson is Terence Hansbury ‘T.H.’ White’s composite novel, The Once and Future King. Originally published as three separate novels between 1938 and 1940, White merged them into a single book to which he added a final chapter. The first volume, The Sword in the Stone, like Tolkien’s The Hobbit, was originally a children’s book that provides a humorous take on the story of Arthur’s boyhood. It inspired an animated Disney movie of the same title. [PLACE MUSIC, ‘CAMELOT,’ UNDER JENNY’S WORDS] The final two volumes, which recount the story of Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair and the ruin it brought to the fellowship of the Round Table, became the unlikely source for a musical Camelot, which was famously a favorite of President John Kennedy and later gave a wistful name to his brief presidency, very much with the encouragement of his widow, who could see the value for his legacy of associating him with King Arthur.
Richard: I know that The Once and Future King is your very favorite novel. In fact, it is one of the things we first bonded over. Why don’t you tell our listeners what you love about it.
Ellen: Ellen: It's hard for me to talk about T.H. White’s The Once and Future King without getting emotional. I think that like other great works of fiction, the book speaks to each reader differently. So this is what it says to me. The Sword in the Stone may be a children’s book, but like Ursula Leguin’s Wizard of Earthsea, it is a children’s book that raises profound and important questions. LeGuin said that The Sword in the Stone, which she read at 13, shaped her heart and mind for the rest of her life. It did that for me also. Leguin wrote of T.H. White that he “was a man to whom animals were very important, perhaps because his human relationships were so tormented. But his sense of connection with nonhuman lives goes far beyond mere compensation; it is a passionate vision of a moral universe, a world of terrible pain and cruelty from which trust and love spring like autumn crocus, vulnerable and unconquerable.
The Sword and the Stone has a lot of comic elements, but what got to me, and what I can never forget, is the story of how Kay and his young brother Wart go hawking with Kay’s prize goshawk Cully. Kay is a terrible hawker and Cully refuses to return to him. After searching for a while, Kay loses interest and tells Wart he’s leaving. Wart protests that losing Cully would break the heart of the falconer Hob, who made Cully, sitting up with him for three nights and carrying him around all day. Kay scoffs that Hob is just a servant and the hawk belongs to him, and besides it is a rotten stupid hawk. Kay walks home, but Wart remains, knowing that if Cully is lost a part of Hob would be lost with him. In White’s words, “He did not dare to face the look of reproach which be in the falconer’s eye, after all that he had tried to teach them.” Wart’s reward for his compassion and sense of duty is to meet King Pellinore and Merlin. I’m not the only one who was touched by this story. It inspired Helen Mcdonald’s touching memoir “H is for Hawk,” in which, battling grief for the death of her father, she turns for guidance to T.H. White’s The Goshawk and loses herself in training the most challenging
Richard: I understand where you are coming from, but The Sword in the Stone, at least the version that White revised for The Once and Future King, is a political satire and critique of various types of political societies. The ants are clearly totalitarian. The hawks are a military aristocracy. The badgers are a society of university dons. And the geese are anarchists and pacifists.
Ellen: I agree that White was making a political point, especially when Wart flies with the geese and note the absence of political lines and borders below him. But I think that the heart of The Sword in the Stone is Merlin’s education of Wart, who learns about man’s place in the natural world.
Richard: You’ve often told me that no one has written with more insight about shame and guilt than T.H. White. I think that that really applies to his characterization of the “ill-made knight,” Lancelot.”
Ellen: I love the entire book.
Richard: And you aren’t disturbed by White’s portrayal of Celts in the second book as rude, primitive, and barbarous.
Ellen: I was only 12 when I read it for the first time, and what I found in the second book was a story about young boys so desperate to win the love of their beautiful, cold, and distant mother that they hunt a unicorn. And that she is unimpressed when they bring her its head.
But, yes, “The Ill-Made Knight” is what touched me most deeply. White’s Lancelot is the best knight in the world, as he is in Malory. But he is also a physically ugly man all too aware of his imperfections. He thinks of himself as cruel, which is why he trains himself to become the perfect knight. In his own eyes, he is the “ill-made knight.” Lancelot strives to overcome what he fears his true nature to be--and he does. But, like Malory’s Lancelot, he is human. For Malory Lancelot was a chivalric ideal. White saw him as a fallible human striving for perfection but, ironically, failing because of love. Lancelot is caught not in a menage a trois, but a menage a quatre. He loves and is devoted to Arthur, whom he regards as a father and ideal. He truly loves God, and aspires to be a saint. But he fails both Arthur and God because of his carnal and passionate love for Guinevere. And he cannot overcome it, even though it means that he must forfeit claim to be being the best knight in the world. I always choke up when I get to the end of the “Ill-Made Knight.” Lancelot has returned to Camelot after his failure to achieve the Holy Grail. He is not bitter about the success of his son Galahad, or that Galahad has unhorsed him in combat. He accepts his imperfection. When a mortally wounded knight rides into the court and announces that he can only be healed by the greatest knight in the world. The knights line up to try, each failing in turn. Lancelot self-conscious and unashamed, hangs at the back. Finally it is his turn. He demurs, but is commanded by Arthur to heal the knight. Lancelot knows that he will fail and that he will suffer public humiliation. He prays to God, not for his own glory but for the sake of the wounded knight, and Lancelot lays his hand upon Sir Urre’s cracked skull—and heals him. Lancelot falls to his knees in tears. The miracle, he knows, is that he was allowed to do a miracle. White ends this volume by quoting Malory: “Lancelot wept, as he had been a child who was beaten.” How can you not be touched by that? How can you not love that?
Richard: I agree, but White also wrote The Once and Future King as a political manifesto. He was horrified by the atrocities of the Nazis and the carnage of World War II. In preparing to merge the three Arthurian books he had previously published into a single volume, White revised “The Sword in the Stone” adding a section to it in which Arthur is transformed into a goose. For geese flying above the earth, boundaries are imaginary lines. When Arthur asks a sympathetic goose who is showing him how to stand sentry, whether the flock is fighting a war against a foreign flock, the goose has no idea what Arthur is talking about. Arthur explains, and the goose is shocked. Of course, they need sentries to guard against their natural predators, falcons, foxes, and humans, “but what creature could be so low as to go about in bands to murder others of its own kind?” It’s a rhetorical question, of course, and young Wart misses its point. He tells her that he likes fighting because it’s knightly. The goose responds that’s “because you are a baby.” The geese have no kings and no laws. No one owns territory, except for their nests, and any goose who finds something good to eat, regards it as his own, and peck away any other goose who tries to steal it. The geese are anarchists and pacifists living in a very benign version of John Locke’s state of nature. It is clear that White very much approves.
The final book “The Candle in the Wind,” which White wrote when he decided to gather the first three books in a single volume, is both tragic and hopeful. White follows Malory with Lancelot and Guinevere being betrayed and discovered, and Lancelot unwittingly slaying Gareth, who is unarmed, while rescuing Guinevere from the stake. Arthur, at Gawain’s insistence, reluctantly goes to war against his friend. But, as in Malory, that war is curtailed when Arthur receives news that his bastard son Mordred, with the support of disaffected Celts and knights, has usurped the throne. Arthur goes into battle against Mordred—who has introduced a fearsome new weapon to the battlefield, the cannon—knowing that he will die. He also realizes that his ideal of the Round Table was fatally flawed. Might for Right is still based on might. But White ends the book with hope. Arthur remembers how Merlin educated him as a child, transforming him into different animals so that “the single species could learn by looking at the problems of the thousands.” And he realizes the lesson he learned as a bird—that “the fantastic thing is that wars are fought about nothing—literally nothing. Frontiers are an imaginary thing.” He goes to his death with hope and ready to begin again. “There would be a day—there must be a day—that he would return to Grammarye with a new Round Table, which had no corners, just as the world had none—a table without corner, just as the world has none—a table without boundaries between the nations who would sit to feast there. … If people could be persuaded to read and write, not just to eat and make love, there was still a chance that they may come to reason.”
I cried the first time I finished reading The Once and Future King, both because of the power of White’s writing and vision, but also because I knew that I would never write anything that good.
Ellen: And I cried because I was afraid I would never read anything that good again.
28:14 Richard: It’s a bit self-indulgent spending so much time on a single book, but I’m glad we did.
Richard: American authors were also attracted to the story of King Arthur. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published in 1889 is a devastating and sometimes bitter satire about romanticized chivalry, feudalism, and the Catholic Church. In its early chapters, Twain champion’s homespun American ingenuity and democratic values, but the book darkens at the end until it becomes pitch black, as Hank uses his knowledge and mechanical skill to fashion modern weapons of war to slaughter thousands of knights, before he himself succumbs to illness. Twain’s twentieth-century heir is Thomas Berger, whose Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel, published in 1978, is a comic though sympathetic retelling of Malory that owes a great deal to T.H. White. It abounds in ironies. Arthur discovers after pulling the sword from the stone that being king means that he is trapped in responsibilities and hedged in by laws, customs, traditions, and prophecies. His Round Table, like White’s, is created for might to support right, but, as in White, ends in the slaughter of its knights in internecine warfare. As Berger puts it, 'For this was the only time that a king had set out to rule on principles of absolute virtue, and to fight evil and to champion the good, and though it was not the first time that a king fell out with his followers, it was unique in happening not by wicked design but rather by the helpless accidents of fine men who meant well and who loved one another dearly.' The wicked Sir Meligraunt abandons his evil ways and embraces chivalric goodness to become worthy of Guinevere’s love, only to suffer humiliation and finally death at the hands of Lancelot. As he is dying he muses ruefully, “This honor can be a taxing thing.”
John Steinbeck also tried his hand at retelling Malory in colloquial modern English in his The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights. He also tried to give the characters some psychological depth. It is not a fully successful work, which may be why it was published only posthumously, twenty years after he had written it.
Jenny: We see a bifurcation in approaches to Arthur in modern novels that begins around the same time as T. H. White, when writers increasingly diverged from the medieval literary sources and went back to the historical sources out of which the literary tradition developed. More and more, writers became fascinated with the “Dark Age” setting for these sources, and we see fewer knights in shining armor and more early medieval warlords. The fascinating thing for me as a historian is to see the way in which historical scholarship has been reflected in these novels.
Ellen: This brings us back to Rosemary Sutcliff, whose The Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, was my introduction to Arthur. Sutcliff sets Arthur’s story in a realistic late fifth-century Britain and eliminates most of the magical and courtly elements, including the character of Merlin. There are some prophecies and other supernatural aspects to the story, but they are presented as part of Celtic religion. This is the beginning of a trend by which modern novelists pay a lot of respect to pre-Christian beliefs (to the degree that we even know what they were) at the expense of Christianity, which had of course always been a key part of the Arthurian tradition from the beginning, so this is a very important revision to the legend.
32:30 Jenny: This focus on the Celtic past continues with Mary Stewart’s series of books that tell the story of Arthur through the eyes of a historicized Merlin figure who is made to be the illegitimate son of Aurelius Ambrosianus, brother of Uther Pendragon. Stewart dramatizes the passages from Nennius that have to do with Vortigern and Merlin’s prophecy. I read these books long before I read the real sources, so it was kind of fun to realize that she had taken them right out of Nennius and breathed fictional life into them. We also see the injection of what we could term modern concerns of equity and inclusion into Arthurian fiction.
The first real step in this direction came in 1983, with Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which puts a feminist gloss on the Arthurian story and continues the trend of valorizing pre-Christian religion. Interestingly, we have here a case of a modern author of fiction taking sides in the debate over a southern vs. a northern Arthur. Bradley locates her Arthurian story decidedly in the south because she wants to associate her characters with Glastonbury and Tintagel.
Richard: A quite different take on a Romano-British Arthur is offered by Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell, a military historical novelist, is perhaps best known for his Richard Sharpe series, about the Napoleonic Wars, and his Saxon Chronicles about the viking wars of King Alfred the Great and his son Edward the Elder and daughter Aethelflaed, the Lady of the Mercians—both of which have been made into entertaining television miniseries. In all of his novels, Cornwell tries to stay faithful to the sources. In the case of Arthur, this largely means Nennius and Gildas. Cornwell professes to believe in the historical Arthur: “Once upon a time, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened ... well, maybe. The Warlord Trilogy is my attempt to tell the story of Arthur, 'Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus', the Once and Future King, although I doubt he ever was a king. I suspect he was a great warlord of the sixth century. Nennius, who was one of the earliest historians to mention Arthur, calls him the 'dux bellorum' - leader of battles or warlord.” So, Cornwell is definitely a believer in the stripped down, Arthur as warlord model.
36:40 Jenny: If feminists can have their go at Arthur, so can the LGBTQ movement. We get LGBTQ themes emerging in the early 2000s, with Allan Massie’s Arthur the King, in which Arthur and several other main characters are gay. Massie locates his Arthur on the River Tweed, very much in line with the northern hypothesis.
36:57 Richard: King Arthur, his knights, and, especially, Merlin and Morgan le Fay, have an even larger presence in movies than novels. In 1998 the online Camelot Project identified 92 movies about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and I’ve counted thirteen more since, including the totally insane “Transformers: The Last Knight”! In addition, there have been close to two dozen Arthur-themed television series.
Jenny: Does this include movies about Tristan and Isolde?
Richard: Yes, as well as the three movie versions of Gawain and the Green Knight and, believe it or not, nine takes on “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” beginning with a silent film. The heyday of Arthurian movie making were the 1970s and 1980s. Those two decades were responsible to close to half of these films. Arthurian movies really do range from the good, to the not so bad, to the bad, to the flat out ugly. The good, at least in my highly subjective opinion, include Monty Python and the Holy Grail, John Boorman’s Excalibur, Eric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois, and Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. They are wildly different takes on the legend. I think that someone would get cinematic whiplash viewing the hilarious Monty Python and the Holy Grail back to back with the moody, apocalyptic Lancelot du Lac. But if one really wants to get a sense of the Middle Ages, you can’t beat Rohmer’s incredibly authentic Perceval le Gallois.
Jenny: We should give a quick nod to two adaptations of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Disney’s animated “Sword in the Stone,” and of course, the film version of the stage musical “Camelot.”
Ellen: Humphh and blechh to both!
Richard: I enjoy “Camelot.” Jay Lerner’s lyrics are clever and Frederick Loewe’s songs are very hummable. I know you think that it trivializes T.H. White, but in the end it captures the book’s theme. The first time I saw the show, I cried at the end.
Ellen: I can understand why for commercial reasons they may have wanted to turn White’s ugly ill-made knight into an irresistible hunk, but, please….that completely misses the point.
Richard: It doesn’t seem to have bothered White. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he attended opening night and loved the musical. I’ve read that he became close friends with Julie Andrews.
Ellen: My head just exploded.
Richard: The categories of bad and not so bad movies are covered by the three attempts to film the fourteenth-century Middle English poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Director Stephen Weeks is responsible for the two bad movies: the low budget “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” released in 1973, and the perhaps worse “Sword of the Valiant,” made eleven years later. Even Sean Connery as the Green Knight can’t save the latter.
I am grudgingly going to concede a “not so bad” rating to last year’s “The Green Knight.” Critics loved it. It has an 89% fresh rating on movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences were less enthusiastic. Only 50% liking the film. I personally disliked it. In its favor, “The Green Knight” is well filmed and well-acted, and it is more faithful to the poem in terms of its plot. But director David Lowery uses that plot to make a different point. Gawain is no longer the truly chivalric knights of the poem. He is now an undisciplined frat boy, which concerns his uncle Arthur and Queen Guinevere since he is to be heir to the throne. He in love with a prostitute but is unwilling to marry her. Gawain’s mother, Morgan le Fay is also deeply concerned by her son’s immaturity. She uses her magic to give him the opportunity to become a responsible man. The lesson comes in the form of The Green Knight—who in this film isn’t really green but looks like a walking tree. Throughout the film Lowery plays with illusions and dream-like images. At times the movie reminded me of a 1970’s stoner film. But, ultimately, I found it pretentious and more faithful in letter than spirit to the medieval poem. Who am I kidding. I found the film boring and almost unwatchable. But that’s just me.
Ellen: Just out of curiosity, what films would you place in the ugly category?
Richard: That award goes to the 2017 “King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.” To quote from the press release:
1500 years ago in Camelot, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table faced an onslaught from the sorceress Morgana Le Fay and her son Mordred. Merlin cast a spell that trapped Morgana and Mordred on Arthur’s throne, encased it in rock and then propelled it into orbit. Bangkok, the present day. Penn is a US Marine who can trace his direct line of descent back to the Knights of the Round Table. He has traveled in Thailand to take part in a martial arts tournament. However, Morgana and Mordred return to Earth. She sets out using her sorceries to kind the whereabouts of Excalibur. Penn and several of the other combatants from the tournament who can all trace their lineage back to the Knights of the Round Table come together to battle Morgana.
The movie doesn’t live up to the press release
Ellen: That bad
Richard: I watched about a half hour and it was worse. According to reviews on Rottentomatoes and IMDb, the 2015 “Arthur and Merlin” gives it a run for its money, but for sheer ridiculousness, you can’t beat “Transformers: The Last Knight.” Jenny, what are you favorite Arthur films?
Jenny: One of my favorites is John Boorman’s 1981 epic “Excalibur.” It’s based on Malory but leans heavily on Celtic mysticism, with the Welsh actor Nicol Williamson uttering spells in Welsh (I was totally captivated by this when I was 16).
Richard: And I was struck by how much Williamson’s Merlin sounds like Monty Python’s Tim the Enchanter!
[Play sound bites]
I’d like to think that this is Nicolson’s homage to John Cleese.
Jenny: Of course there are some pretty hilarious wardrobe issues in Excalibur, such as Arthur getting married to Guenevere while wearing full plate armor. Never mind that plate armor was invented in the late fourteenth century; no medieval knight would ever have worn armor to a wedding. It was not the equivalent of wearing your dress uniform.
Richard: Arthur as presented in movies is largely the Arthur of Malory. The classic example of this is MGM’s 1953 blockbuster “The Knights of the Round Table,” starring Robert Taylor as Lancelot, Ava Gardner as Guinevere, and Mel Ferrer as King Arthur. The movie conforms to the Motion Picture Production Code, making Lancelot’s and Guinevere’s love unconsummated, and transforming Mordred, called Modred in the movie, into Morgan’s lover and Arthur’s rival rather than nephew or—God forbid—bastard son. The movie Excalibur may have a Celtic gloss, but it is still a faithful rendition of Le Morte D’Arthur. There are a few films, however, that attempt to depict a “historical” Arthur By far the most ambitious, and in terms of its advertising, the most tendentious, is director Antoine Fuqua’ 2004 King Arthur The movie was promoted as the most historically accurate cinematic treatment of Arthur to date, with the tagline: “The Truth Behind the Legend!” The truth behind the movie is that it is based on two theories about the origin of King Arthur, neither of which have won acceptance among historians. As we talked about in the first episode of this series, some Arthur-hunters believe they have discovered him in a late second century Roman military officer named Lucius Artorius Castus. We know of Artorius Castus because of a resume-like inscription on his sarcophagus and a memorial plaque, both deposited in what is now Croatia. According to them, he had a long and successful military career. He rose from the rank of centurion, the equivalent of a modern NCO, to that of prefectus of the cohort, culminating in his appointment as dux, commanding officer, of an expedition in Brittany. Over a quarter century, Artorius Castus served in Syria, Armenia, Budapest, Transylvania, Thrace, the Balkans, and northern Britain. served in northern Britain either in the late second or early third century, and who may or may not have commanded a troops of Sarmatian federates who served in Britain in the middle of the second century. It is possible that as praefectus cohortis in Britain, Artorius Castus was in command of federate Sarmatians who had been transported by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius from their native homeland on the Pontic steppes north of the Black Sea to serve in Britain along Hadrian’s wall. The Sarmatians fought as cataphracts, that is heavily armored horsemen.
Ellen: Okay, I can see where this is going. Artorius is the basis for King Arthur and his Sarmatian cavalry troops, for his knights. And what do historians think about that?
Richard: Not very much. Professor Nicholas Higham, an archaeologist and historian of early Anglo-Saxon Britain, sums up the problems with this identification. Lucius Artorius Castus lived in the wrong century; he fought against the wrong enemies; and, counter-intuitively, he even has the wrong name. Just as Gaius Julius Caesar was known as Caesar. Lucius Artorius Castus would have been called Castus rather than by the name of his extended family, the Artorii. We also have no idea whether Artorius actually commanded Sarmatians.
That is the Truth Behind the Movie’s Truth Behind the Legend. Screenplay writer David Franzoni, who also wrote and produced “Gladiator,” knows some of the difficulties. To bring Lucius Artorius Castus in line with the Arthur who defeated Saxon invaders required the movie to transport him almost three centuries into the future, although the Roman soldiers serving along Hadrian’s wall look a lot more like second century legionaries than late Roman soldiers. Sarmatian horsemen historically wore scale armor. Their armor in the film has been described as “a mishmash of pseudo-Roman, Turkish, Mongol, and Hunnic designs.”
Franzoni apparently was somewhat familiar with late Roman history. I give him kudos for knowing that St. Germanus, bishop of Auxerre, visited Britain in the fifth century and discovered the Pelagian heresy flourishing there. The problem is that Germanus visited Britain in 429 and perhaps again in the late 430s. On the other hand, Germanus did not have Pelagius killed, as in the movie. The film is also set in 467, twenty years after the saint’s death. The chronological and geographical blunders in this film are legion.
Ellen: You couldn’t resist, could you?
Richard: I would say I’m sorry, but I’m not. As I said, the movie is set in 467. Arthur and his men have just received news that Rome has ordered the withdrawal of its troops from Britain That is only fifty-seven years after the Roman military actually pulled out of Britain—apparently it took time for news to reach Hadrian’s Wall.
Artorius, whose father was a Roman and his mother a Briton, is concerned that the withdrawal would leave Britain defenseless against the genocidal horde of Saxons descending upon Hadrian’s Wall from the north. These Saxons, led by Cerdic and Cynric, are killing everything in their path, much like The Game of Throne’s white walkers. This is especially odd, as Cerdic was the founder of the West Saxon royal line, and Wessex was in southwestern Britain. The only reason I can think for relocating the Anglo-Saxon menace to the north is so that Franzoni could get the Picts into the picture, although he terms them Woads, apparently to emphasize that they painted themselves blue.
The movie’s Arthur, played by Clive Owen, is the veteran commander of a troop of Sarmatian knights who bear the very un-Sammartian names of Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Tristan, Bors, and Dagonet. Although Arthur questions the wisdom of withdrawing the troops, he is eager to return to Rome and his men to return to their Sarmatian homeland. Arthur, however, is ordered by Bishop Germanus of Auxerre to undertake one last mission. He and his men are to travel beyond Hadrian’s Wall to rescue a Roman senatorial family from the Saxon menace.
Ellen: Wait a minute. What was a Roman family doing with a villa north of Hadrian’s Wall in the fifth century? I thought that the Romans had pulled back to Hadrian’s Wall by the end of the second century.
Richard: Waiting to be rescued, duh. They are there because the plot needs them to be there. Marius, the paterfamilias of the endangered family turns out to be a complete jerk. He embodies the imperialistic jerkiness of the Roman empire. Marius has been brutally exploiting and abusing the local Picts—I mean Woads--and is annoyed when Arthur calls him on it and frees an imprisoned young woman and her brother. The woman turns out to be Guinevere, a fierce Pictish warrior princess. She shows her gratitude by thwarting a plot against Arthur by killing the obnoxious Marius. Arthur returns the good son of the bad Marius to the safety of the wall. Urged by Merlin, the leader of the Woads, and Guinevere, Arthur and his six loyal Sarmatian knights lead the outnumbered Picts to a decisive victory over the Saxons at Mount Badon. Merlin, the leader of the Woads and Guinevere declare Arthur to be King of Britain, which probably would have really confused the Britons if anyone informed them of it.
I can just imagine the elevator pitch to the Touchstone movie executives: King Arthur by way of “Saving Senator Marius” and the “Magnificent Seven.”
Ellen: And Arthur just so happens to be leading six knights.
Richard: The movie might be enjoyable if one ignores the marketing campaign. A lack of knowledge about fourth century Britain helps.
I was one of the talking heads interviewed for an extra feature for the film’s release on DVD. Don’t bother to look for it. We were not shown the film before we were interviewed, and apparently what we told the interviewers was so out of line with the film, that they shelved the extra feature. The silver lining is that I actually got paid a couple of hundred dollars for my participation. When they had set up to film the interview and I realized that I was the only person in the room not getting paid, I shocked them by asking about my fee. The question confused them. None of the other talking heads had asked for money. Academic historians tend to be so flattered that anyone wants to listen to them, that they regard that as pay enough.
I have to confess that I did enjoy Keira Knightly’s portrayal of Guinevere. When Arthur and his badly outnumbered Pictish army is about to face the Saxons in battle, Lancelot points out to Guinevere that “there are a lot of lonely men out there.” Guinevere curtly responds, “Don’t worry. I will protect you from getting raped.”
I much prefer the 2005 “Tristan and Isolde” for an Arthurian movie set in sub-Roman Britain. It makes no pretense about being the Truth Behind the Legend. To go by Rottentomatoes, the other Arthurian movies set in the fifth century are equally bad or worse. This goes for the 2007 “The Last Legion,” which grafts the story of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman Emperor in the West, on to Nennius. In this movie, the child Romulus flees the Goth Odoacer and with the aid of the loyal Aurelius and his Druid teacher Ambrosinus seeks refuge with the ninth legion in Britain. He carries with him the sword of Julius Caesar. In Britain they discover that the ninth legion has disbanded and the former soldiers are now farmers. A warlord named Vortgyrn is intent on making himself ruler of all of Britain with the aid of the Goths. Aurelius revives the last Roman legion and leads them to victory. Vortgyrn is killed. Romulus lodges Caesar’s sword into a stone. At the end of the film, Ambrosinus, whose Druid name we learn is Merlin, is telling the story to a young boy. He explains that Aurelius raised Romulus as his own son, and Romulus grew up to be a great king and assumed the name Pendragon. The boy, surprise, surprise, is the young Arthur, and the movie ends with him gazing at the sword in the stone.
It’s not as good as it sounds.
Ellen: Groan.
We really are running out of time, but I feel that we should at least mention King Arthur in the comics. Pride of place goes to Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant: In the Days of King Arthur, which Edward VIII, as Duke of Windsor after his abdication, pronounced to be “the greatest contribution to English literature in the last hundred years.”
Ellen: Given Edward’s fascist sympathies, I’m not whether his endorsement would make me rush out to get the comic strip.
Richard: A lot of other people must have really liked the strip, as it has outlived its creator Hal Foster and is still going strong. It currently appears weekly in 300 newspapers. Thomas Yeates’ keeps alive the tradition of the early 20th century illustrators N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle.
The Shining Knight of D.C. comics, Sir Justin was a knight of the Round Table caught in an avalanche and buried frozen for centuries only to be revived by a museum curator in 1941. He is the once and future knight. Merlin gave him shining army that makes him invulnerable, a sword that can cut through any substance and a winged horse. Victory, who was revived along with him. He is now one of the more obscure members of the Justice League. Perhaps more familiar to readers of D.C. and Vertigo comics is Jason Blood who in the time of King Arthur was bound by the wizard Merlin to the demon Etrigan. Marvel comics has the Black Knight and Captain Britain, who was given his powers by Merlin. The comics Camelot 3000 and Mage feature reincarnations of the Round Table. Hellboy’s origin story has him descended from a daughter of Mordred, and thus King Arthur’s only living descendant. Arthur appears periodically in many other D.C. and Marvel comics.
Jenny: He is the protagonist of a series of comic books called “Once and Future,” with a nod to T. H. White. I’m going to quite from the synopsis on Wikipedia: “When a group of British nationalists perform a supernatural ritual in order to resurrect King Arthur, they discover that Arthur has his own agenda. As Arthur leaves a trail of death and destruction in his wake, octogenarian Bridgette McGuire — a retired monster hunter — and her grandson Duncan must try to stop him before other creatures from story begin emerging as well.” I think you can get a sense just from this that we have here an example of the dark and subversive post-modern sensibility—very, very different from T. H. White, who is very self-referential but also quite upbeat.
Richard: King Arthur is also well represented, oddly enough in video games.
Jenny: I counted 48 Arthurian-themed Video Games, and No, I Did Not Try Them Out
Richard: I have to confess I am not a video game player. Online scrbble is more my speed, but my son told me about a recent game that has gotten good reviews, “King Arthur: Knight’s Tale.” The game makers describe it as a role-playing tactical game hybrid. To quote from its website:
You are Sir Mordred, the nemesis of King Arthur, the former black knight of the grim tales.
Ellen: Wait a minute. Mordred is the hero of this and Arthur is the villain?
Richard: Apparently. Anyway,
You killed King Arthur, but with his dying breath, he struck you down. You both died – and yet, you both live. The Lady of the Lake, the ruler of the mystical island of Avalon brought you back to end a true nightmare. She wants you to go on a knightly quest. She wants you to finish what you have begun. Kill King Arthur – or whatever he has become after she took his dying vessel to Avalon.
In a Knight's Tale, you and your comrades will explore a land that is full of nightmares as you try to uncover a terrible force in Avalon and rebuild Camelot for those who are in dire need.
Ellen: We have come a long way from The Once and Future King, and I don’t approve.
Okay, Jenny, since you are our guest, you get the last word in our two part episode on King Arthur.
Jenny: In my head, I am persuaded that Arthur is a legendary character who was grafted onto an existing historical narrative. In my heart, though, I want to believe in him. And I’m going to give the last word (or song) to Richard Harris. This is the final scene of Camelot, where Arthur knights a young boy right before his final battle with Lancelot and tells him to go back to England so that he can preserve the memory of what Camelot had stood for.
Clop: One Brief Shining Moment
I confess that as corny as it is, I tear up every time.
End with playing the reprise to Camelot—fade out