The Musical Incongruities of Time Travel in Arthurian Film

Abstract

In the modern creation of an historical space called “The Middle Ages,” music has played an indispensable role—and nowhere more so than in cinema. Film’s verisimilitude invites time travel, a prominent theme in movies on Arthurian lore. This chapter explores how music highlights this theme by often being incongruous: stressing dramatic points while playfully revealing the fiction that is the Middle Ages. In the category of non-source or non-diegetic music, there is the case of the heavenly choir, a musical topos present in films ranging from the animated Sword in the Stone (1963) to the contemporary fantasy Arthur and the Invisibles (2006); or the case of music cueing a positive or tragic outcome, as in the ironic “Guinevere” number in Camelot (1967). In the category of source or diegetic music, three standard moments stand out: banquet music, whether orientalist as in Excalibur (1981) or jazzed up as in the 1949 paraphrase of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee; the joust trumpet, strikingly substituted for a bagpipe in Lancelot du lac (1974); and the singing minstrel, whether narrating as in Perceval le gallois (1978) or parodied as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Fusing diegetic and non-diegetic categories are the cases of the bell, heard both ways in First Knight (1995), and the horn, whose solo screen appearance at one point in Knights of the Round Table (1953) slowly merges with the off-screen orchestra. Such musical incongruities, typical of films on the Middle Ages, regularly remind viewers of the beauty, as well as the fiction of cinematic travel into the past, and speak to the enduring modern nostalgia for a Golden Medieval Age.