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Arthurian legend

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The Arthurian Legends are the legends that concern the legendary history of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Arthur is the chief subject of the Matter of Britain.

Themes and subjects

History of The Arthurian Legends

It could be said that the legendary history of Britain was created in part to form a body of patriotic myth for the island. Several agendas thus can be seen in this body of literature.

Various Celtic deities have been identified with characters from Arthurian literature: Morgan le Fay was often thought to have originally been the Irish goddess Mórrígan. Many of these identifications come from the speculative comparative religion of the late 19th century, and have been questioned in more recent years.

Early authors also drew from the early Arthurian and pseudo-historical sources of the Matter of Britain. The Scots, for instance, formulated a mythical history in the Picts and the Dál Riata royal lines. While they do eventually become factual lines, unlike those of Geoffrey, their origins are vague and often incorporate both aspects of mythical British history and mythical Irish history. The story of Gabhran especially incorporates elements of both those histories.

The Arthurian cycle

The Arthurian literary cycle is the best known part of the Matter of Britain. It has succeeded largely because it tells two interlocking stories that many later authors have been intrigued by. One concerns Camelot, usually envisioned as a doomed utopia of chivalric virtue, undone by the fatal flaws of Arthur and Sir Lancelot. The other concerns the quests of the various knights to achieve the Holy Grail; some succeed (Galahad, Percival), and others fail (Lancelot).

The medieval tale of Arthur and his knights is full of Christian themes; those themes involve the destruction of human plans for virtue by the moral failures of their characters, and the quest for an important Christian relic. Finally, the relationships between the characters invited treatment in the tradition of courtly love, such as Lancelot and Guinevere, or Tristan and Iseult. In more recent years, the trend has been to attempt to link the tales of King Arthur and his knights with Celtic mythology, usually in highly romanticized, early twentieth century reconstructed versions.

Additionally, it is possible to read the Arthurian literature in general, and that concerned with the Grail tradition in particular, as an allegory of human development and spiritual growth (a theme explored by Joseph Campbell amongst others).

Characters and subjects

Arthur and his entourage

Knights of the Round Table

Other important figures

See also

References

  • Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance: a short introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005
  • Carol Dover (ed), A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, Boydell & Brewer, 2005

External links



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Last updated on Wednesday March 05, 2008 at 11:42:12 PST (GMT -0800)
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