The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend by Alan Lupack (review)

Abstract

ALAN LUPACK, The Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-19-180287-9. $90. Alan Lupack's Guide to Arthurian Literature is a remarkably scrupulous attempt to document every surviving Arthurian textual monument from the earliest records to contemporary literary and musical compositions. He even acknowledges the contributions to the Arthurian corpus from such popular sources as pornography, painting, comic books, and Barbie dolls (see the complete list on p. 9). Even without an investigation of these intriguingly frivolous areas, the book is an impressive display of learning, compression, organization, and completeness. Lupack's Table of Contents provides the outline and guide to the organization of his book and if it appears to impose more coherence on his material than the notoriously unwieldy Arthurian corpus would seem to accommodate, it is nevertheless a necessary and functional heuristic that helps to guide the reader as well as the author through the masses of texts covered in this work. Chapter I, titled 'Early Accounts of Arthur, Chronicles and Historical Literature' is in itself a masterful achievement. In a mere 82 pages (including a Bibliography), Lupack surveys the remaining accounts (mostly enigmatic, dubious, or both) of the life and afterlife (the quondam et fitturus) of the historical Arthur and subsequent treatments of that history in verse, drama, and the novel from the Renaissance to the twentieth century. If, for most medievalists, there may be little new in the review of the ancient documents, there are bound to be revelations and surprises in at least some of the later treatments. The well-known is treated with admirable compression and efficiency, while the thoroughness of his investigation of the post-medieval treatments will undoubtedly lead most readers to texts previously unknown to them. The following section covers the traditional companion to the chronicles, the romances, and is similarly structured with a review of the medieval texts and an excursion into post-medieval materials. The strict coherence of Lupack's organizational structure breaks down at this point, however. The post-Chretien romances are subdivided into 'Lancelot and Guinevere,' 'Romances with Non-traditional Heroes, 'Lanval and Launfal,' 'Chastity Tests,' and 'Ballads.' While not quite as fanciful as Borges's description of the Chinese encyclopedia, there is a certain randomness to this division. Nevertheless, it serves the purpose of providing rubrics that allow Lupack to cover a vast array of romances and to defer the mass of material on Tristan, the Grail, etc., to fuller treatments in subsequent chapters. The following chapter, 'Malory, His Influence, and the Continuing Romance Tradition,' is the only one to concentrate on a single author (and his literary descendants). …