A Companion to Arthurian Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Companion to Arthurian Literature Jane H. M. Taylor Helen Fulton , ed., A Companion to Arthurian Literature. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture 58. Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Pp. xiv, 571. ISBN: 978-1-4051-5789-6. $209.95. This handsome, nicely illustrated book joins a number of other encyclopaedic surveys of Arthurian literature: the 'Arthur of ...' series, published under the auspices of the Vinaver Trust; the Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, edited by Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter (reviewed by Keith Busby in this volume of Arthuriana); the Garland Encyclopaedias. All of them serve a useful purpose: it is rare, nowadays, to find scholars who can master the range of languages and cultures that the Arthurian legend encompasses, and research students in particular, and the general public also, need steering away from the more absurd theories and towards reliable surveys and bibliographies. Each compendium, naturally, has its own perspective—and the perspective here is very much Anglocentric (or perhaps more accurately, 'centred on the British Isles': thus there is also serious, and welcome, attention paid to Wales, Ireland, and Scotland); it is probably symptomatic that more words are [End Page 116] devoted to Sir Launfal than to Chrétien's masterpiece Erec et Enide. Of the nearly 600 pages, only about 70 deal with non-Anglophone sources outside the British Isles: brisk, competent surveys of the Tristan material in Europe, of Chrétien de Troyes and courtly fiction, of Arthurian and Grail prose material, of Arthur in Germany and Scandinavia; only a little, in other words, on those medieval Arthurian traditions (in, say, Spain or Italy) which have no particular resonance for an Anglophone audience. That said, within the Anglophone world, this volume is unusually wide-ranging: not just literary, written sources, but also the chronicle tradition, and, ultimately, iconography, popular culture, the Arthur of Mark Twain, the Arthur of fantasy, the Arthur of Hollywood, and even the digital Arthur. The entries are of two kinds, signalled by the titles given to the different parts of the volume as a whole: as well as 'Continental Traditions,' we have 'The Arthur of History'; 'Celtic Origins'; 'Arthur in Medieval English Literature'; 'From Medievalism to Modernism'; 'Arthur in the Modern Age'; and 'Arthur on Film.' On the one hand, this gives rise to chapters addressing individual Arthurian works, especially the medieval romances, in their literary or socio-cultural settings; thus for instance a chapter on Sir Tristrem and Malory's Book V are seen as indices of changed attitudes to chivalric heroism, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is seen as a critique of English chivalry, and, in a more modern section, we find a political T.H. White and a Republican Mark Twain. This wider perspective—where the authors of the chapters have clearly been given freedom to explore their topics on their own terms—ensures, usefully, an approach which is more challenging, and perhaps more interesting, than is the normal pattern (plot-summary + brief comment) characteristic of most compendia. Elsewhere, however, the editor has clearly assigned survey topics: sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Arthurian legend, for instance, or scholarship and popular culture in the nineteenth century, cannot but be treated with rapid dashes through individual writers and their publishing history—though even here, nicely, the scholars concerned ensure that each section has an argument and a direction, and is not simply a list. It is, moreover, pleasingly the case that the authors of the survey chapters have been encouraged to devote time to lesser-known manifestations—so the chapter on 'Arthur in Victorian Poetry' addresses, as it must, Tennyson's Idylls, but it invites us to take a closer look at Bulwer-Lytton, or Henry Alford, or Matthew Arnold. Once we move on to the modern, or 'modernist' Arthur, we turn to what will, for many readers, be unfamiliar and therefore welcome territory. It is good to see extensive sections devoted, say, to Conan Doyle and Alfred Duggan, David Jones and T. Gwynn Jones, Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece—in the context of the present-day popular wish for an historical Arthur; or to Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon in the context of feminism and...