Arthurian Myth Research Articles

Challenging the Arthurian Myth in Fanfiction: Rethinking Gender and Leadership

Challenging the Arthurian Myth in Fanfiction: Rethinking Gender and Leadership

From Loss to Oblivion

Abstract This explorative article conceptualizes the myth as a cultural locus where different concepts are ordered forming semantic networks and as a social narrative reflecting emotional predispositions toward the social significance of an episode in the past. The article analyzes the semantic network formed within the Arthurian myth by the concepts Britain and imperium. It identifies a persistent semilogical dynamic between both concepts but shifting emotional responses and temporalities: loss and longing among the Welsh (sixth century to eleventh century), fixing the memory in the past; joy among the English (twelfth century to fifteenth century), bringing the memory into the present; and anxiety and desire among Welsh and English (sixteenth century) projecting the memory to the future. During the seventeenth century, the semantic network left the Arthurian myth, which fell into a relative oblivion.

‘Many a story is but a crooked way to the truth’?

The myth of King Arthur has been used for many purposes. In post-disaster fiction for young adults, the Arthurian myth has been drawn upon by a number of authors to advocate unity and equality as major factors in creating a just and peaceful world. This article focuses on seven texts set after major global disaster caused by human action has devastated, or is threatening to devastate, the world of the implied present-day reader. The texts for discussion are Ron Langenus’ Merlin’s Return; Janice Elliott’s The King Awakes and The Empty Throne; and Pamela Service’s Winter of Magic’s Return, Tomorrow’s Magic, Yesterday’s Magic, and Earth’s Magic. Although King Arthur is portrayed differently by the three authors, he is presented as a figurehead of unity and peace in all of the texts, and the texts all transpose contemporary values held by the implied author and the implied reader onto what the texts present as ‘King Arthur’s time’, in order to suggest that greed, selfishness, and lust for power contributed to the destruction of King Arthur’s society, and are also threatening to destroy the world of the implied reader. Drawing upon Foucault’s concept of the regime of truth, this article demonstrates that the forms of the Arthurian myth used in the texts for discussion are, however, inherently gendered and nationalistic, and thus subvert the ideas of equality and unity that the texts seek to present.

Nationhood and the (De)Construction of Mythical England in Ben Wheatley’s Kill List

Arthurian mythology has often been employed to articulate notions of nationhood, identity, and nationalism. In the recent wave of nationalist nostalgia, myths, such as Arthur’s, have been put forth as core narratives to return to, articulating the longing for a primitivist, pastoral, pre-modern England. The post-Brexit landscape has seen a rise of neo-imperialism, more obvious in so-called ‘global Britain’ / ‘Renaissance England’, overlooking how Britain and its polarisation seem to be closer in spirit now to the Civil War than to the times of hegemonic splendour. This article analyses how Wheatley’s 2011 Kill List reappropriates Arthurian mythology by subverting its usual purpose of reaffirming a hegemonic sense of nationhood. The analysis uses three main methods: defining myth in contemporary England and its cultural products, establishing a correlation between Folk Horror and the Arthurian legend, and studying Arthurian myths and motifs present in the film and their significance. It ultimately concludes that the Arthurian myth is used to question the blinding embrace of national mythology and the darker face of England’s nationhood.

‘An Ancient Procession’: Memory, Myth and Movement in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant

Abstract The novels of Kazuo Ishiguro span a variety of literary genres but are unified by a profound interest in the workings of memory. Guided by recent scholarship in the field of cultural memory studies, this essay analyses Ishiguro’s seventh novel, The Buried Giant, in the context of the Middle English romance traditions which it echoes both formally and thematically. In doing so, it argues that the novel’s use of Arthurian myth is a technique by which to illuminate and explore the role of literature in the formation of collective memory and cultural identity.

Restorying Arthurian Legend: Space, Place and Time in Once & Future and Legendborn

Abstract In ‘Notes toward a Black fantastic’, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas argues that breaking the cycle of violence to which Black girl characters are subject in both fiction and life ‘requires rethinking our assumptions about magical child and teen characters. It requires reimaging who deserves magic in stories, and rethinking the treasure maps we’ve had for the past few centuries’. Developing from this insight, and drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s analysis of Black feminist geographies, this article considers how reimaginings of the Arthurian legend for young adult audiences engage with the history of a tradition co-opted in service of white supremacist and colonialist ideologies, remapping this territory to establish spaces for the experiences of marginalised subjects. In addressing the role of Arthurian myth as the site of an ongoing negotiation of how the past matters to the present, of whose pasts and whose narratives matter, texts such as Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn, A. R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy’s Once & Future construct new ways of understanding space, place, and time.

The Once and Future Story

This article analyses three key texts in Arthurian literature to illustrate the changes the myth has undergone from its popularisation in the twelfth century to its rediscovery in the nineteenth century. It compares Geoffrey of Monmouth’s unfounded insistence on historical accuracy with Chrétien de Troyes’ focus on interiority and male–female dynamics before making a leap in time to explore Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and its anxieties concerning gendered power dynamics and material culture. The paper draws on these comparisons to demonstrate the malleable nature of the Arthurian myth, as well as its status as both a reflection of Western values and a focus point for the authors’ priorities within their own environments and cultures. This is achieved through a focus on social commentary and the creation of a plethora of characters and symbols that will become rooted in the European psyche.

Krąg mitów arturiańskich w twórczości Johna Ronalda Reuela Tolkiena i Andrzeja Sapkowskiego

The article is devoted to the functioning of the Arthurian legends in the works by both J.R.R. Tolkien and A. Sapkowski. The universe of Andrzej Sapkowski, who inscribed his own story into the Arthurian myth, makes an impression of being rooted in a long, centuries-old tradition. Tolkien also drew from the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, using the eternal desire for the coming of the king – restorer. The most interesting issue is the different approach to the legend presented by both writers. Tolkien omitted elements „contaminated” with Christian influence, extracting the pure essence of pagan Celticism, while renouncing an inspiration from the medieval history. Sapkowski, on the contrary, openly admits to his fascination, apotheosing the Arthurian myth in both its forms – the primitive one and the one filtered through the Christian tradition.

The Enigma of Merlin in Biomedical Sciences: Image, Concept, Term

    This paper attempts to overview how a fictional character from the Arthurian myth became transferred to biomedical sciences entering complex variance relationship with other terms introduced at the same time. Applying the cognitive linguistic methodology, we first model the structures of knowledge represented by the initial concept through outlining the conceptual characteristics. Then we study the discursive features of using the term “merlin” and pinpoint those characteristics that get actualized in scientific papers. The term allows for great creativity to be unleashed exploiting those structures and transferring them to another knowledge domain. Merlin as a term is preferred in review papers and seems to serve as a marker of some yet unresolved questions of basic science.

СЕМИОТИКА ПРЕОБРАЗОВАНИЙ МИФА В XXI В. (на примере рекламного дискурса)

The article addresses the role of myth in modern society based on scrutinizing the myth about King Arthur that became exceptionally popular in advertising discourse. We aim to demonstrate which elements of myth are harnessed in advertising discourse and further transformed to meet the marketing demands. The paper considers the myth within the framework of cognitive-discursive paradigm applying the method of conceptual analysis and blending. The applied method of conceptual analysis allowed us to identify the main components of the Arthurian myth and their major conceptual characteristics. Each advertising event was further studied as a dynamic process of meaning making through forming a blended space of Input space 1 - an element taken from a myth and Input space 2 comprising the characteristics of an advertised object. The analysis showed that simple double blends prevail, yet there are cases with three Input spaces when two mythological elements are exploited. Although the key (core) characteristics are used most frequently, many peripheral ones open up the possibilities for further transformations. As a result, a semiotic model of myth’s transformations is proposed and several vectors it develops in modern society are outlined.

Le roi/The King de Donald Barthelme: les multiples facettes de la mémoire (d’un) Américain(e)

Since The King (1990) transposes the Arthurian myth into World War II, this article first aims at analyzing the posthumous novel by Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) as an allohistory staging the meeting of history and memory, two somehow antithetical notions. It also argues that despite the extensive cultural library that goes into the book’s making and the prominence of the English protagonist and setting, Barthelme fashions an American novel from the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by featuring emblematic American texts: a metafictional illustration of Pierre Nora’s argument that memory is both collective and individual.

Dla kogo pracuje dziś Król Artur? Użycia i nadużycia mitu arturiańskiego

Who does King Arthur work for today? Uses and abuses of the Arthurian myth Analyzing the phenomenon of one of the most popular European myths - the Arthurian myth - the author attempts to answer the question of the difference between using and abusing myths. An insight into the sources of Arthurian tradition proves that even the oldest and most important literary incar- nations of the myth were used by their authors as a means of speaking about contemporary political and sociological issues. However, the Arthurian films (which are the main subject of this research) reinforce the thesis about a distinctive feature of a myth itself to be immensely flexible and able to absorb various cultural content. The study examines in detail the film King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua). Its creators seem to come very close to the border between use and abuse of a myth by denying the mythical aspect of the Arthurian legends

Searching for Eden: John Steinbeck's ethical career

Ethics for Steinbeck always entailed justice. This didn't change over the course of his long career. Justice is constituted of a communal spirit, a relational situation in which individual humans care for their fellows, and a state that champions the cause of the needy and outcast. Any violation merits punishment if incurred by an individual or rebellion if incurred by the state. Upon such points as these most Steinbeck readers agree. What hasn't been done before, however, and what Searching For Eden undertakes, is a careful analysis of how these ideas fluctuated at different points during Steinbeck's literary career. Of utmost importance here are the latter years of Steinbeck's life when his deepening political involvement and immersion in Arthurian myth shaped a changing ethic altogether.

The Medieval motion picture: the politics of adaptation

Introduction: Temporalities of Adaptation Andrew James Johnston and Margitta Rouse 1. Now is the time: Shakespeare's Medieval Temporalities in Akira Kurosawa's Ran Jocelyn Keller and Wolfram R. Keller 2. Dracula's Times: Adapting the Middle Ages in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula Cordula Lemke 3. Rethinking Anachronism for Medieval Film in Richard Donner's Timeline Margitta Rouse 4. Otherness Redoubled and Refracted: Intercultural Dialogues in The Thirteenth Warrior Judith Klinger 5. Crisis Discourse and Art Theory: Richard Wagner's Legacy in Films Veith von Furstenberg and Kevin Reynolds Stefan Keppler-Tasaki 6. Adaptation as Hyperreality: The (A)historicism of Trauma in Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf Philipp Hinz and Margitta Rouse 7. Perils of Generation: Incest, Romance and the Proliferation of Narrative in Game of Thrones Martin Bleisteiner 8. Arthurian Myth and Cinematic Horror: M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense Hans Jurgen Scheuer 9. Marian Re-writes the Legend: The Temporality of Archaeological Remains in Richard Lester's Robin and Marian Andrew James Johnston Bibliography

‘I have to come somehow empty and ready’: Myth and Reception in Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur Trilogy

In his review of Arthur:The Seeing Stone (2000. London: Orion), Philip Pullman claims that Kevin Crossley-Holland's book is ‘as bright and as vivid as pictures in a Book of Hours. Deep scholarship, high imagination, and great gifts of storytelling have gone into this; I was spellbound' (The Guardian, 28 September 2000). Crossley-Holland's intimate knowledge of his subject and his confident, poetic writing make this reinvention of the Arthurian myth a deep and compelling read. In this article, I will be exploring Crossley-Holland's representation of the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table as a locus for the mediation and contestation of fictional, historical and contemporary realities. The boy protagonist is portrayed as not only a receiver of the myth, but also as a subject for the potential propagation of the cultural constructs inherent in the Arthurian heritage. This article considers the reception and negotiation of these ‘mythical truths' by the protagonist and the relevance of this kind of text to twenty-first century child readers.

The true history of Merlin: the magician

Merlin the Magician has remained an enthralling and curious individual since he was first introduced in the twelfth century though the pages of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. But although the Merlin of literature and Arthurian myth is well known, Merlin the figure and his relation to medieval magic are less familiar. In this book Anne Lawrence-Mathers explores just who he was and what he has meant to Britain. The historical Merlin was no rough magician: he was a learned figure from the cutting edge of medieval science and adept in astrology, cosmology, prophecy, and natural magic, as well as being a seer and a proto-alchemist. His powers were convincingly real-and useful, for they helped to add credibility to the long-lost history of Britain which first revealed them to a European public. Merlin's prophecies reassuringly foretold Britain's path, establishing an ancient ancestral line and linking biblical prophecy with more recent times. Merlin helped to put British history into world history. Lawrence-Mathers also explores the meaning of Merlin's magic across the centuries, arguing that he embodied ancient Christian and pagan magical traditions, recreated for a medieval court and shaped to fit a new moral framework. Linking Merlin's reality and power with the culture of the Middle Ages, this remarkable book reveals the true impact of the most famous magician of all time.

Charles Williams’s Arthuriad: Mythic Vision and the Possibilities of Belief

This essay explores Charles Williams’s use of the Arthurian myth to sustain a religious worldview in the aftermath of sustained attacks on the relevance and veracity of Christian belief in the early twentieth century. The premise to be explored is that key developments in science and philosophy made during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in a cultural and intellectual milieu in which assertions of religious faith became increasingly difficult. In literary terms this became evident in, amongst other things, the significant reduction in the production of devotional poetry. By the late 1930s the intellectual environment was such that Charles Williams, a man of profound religious belief who might otherwise have been expected to produce devotional work, turned to a much older mode, that of myth, that had taken on new relevance in the modern world. Williams’s use of this mode allowed him the possibility of expressing a singularly Christian vision to a world in which such vision was in danger of becoming anathema. This essay examines the way in which Williams’s lexis, verse structure, and narrative mode builds on his Arthurian source material to allow for an appreciation of religiously-informed ideas in the modern world.

STEPHEN O'NEILL. Staging Ireland: Representation in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama.

‘Offstaging Ireland’ would, perhaps, be a more accurate title for Stephen O'Neill's lucid and stimulating monograph. Of the eight plays he examines only one, The famous historye of the life and death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, has a scene set in Ireland. The others either contain Irish characters (The Battle of Alcazar, Henry V, Sir John Oldcastle), or characters who are reported to journey to and from Ireland (2 Henry VI, Edward II, Richard II), or relate to Ireland through their use of Arthurian myth (The Misfortunes of Arthur). The remarkable absence before 1600, the point at which O'Neill cuts off, of even a single play dedicated to Irish affairs raises a number of significant issues. If Ireland was the urgent source of popular anxiety that O'Neill describes, why did none of the dramatists rise to the challenge? Can it all have been a matter of censorship—Captain Macmorris being absent from the quarto of Henry V—or were there other forces at work? O'Neill opts for the theoretically fashionable, not to say Pavlovian, explanations of ‘containment’ and ‘occlusion’, but the detailed cogency of his arguments for subtextual allusion and ‘contextual mnemonics’ (p. 146) resist such facile responses. As he demonstrates, the subject of Ireland recurs again and again even when it appears to be ‘somewhat marginal to the general thematic concerns of the plays’ he examines (p. 61). Can it possibly be that the imaginative impact of Ireland was, like the murder of Duncan or the topography of Hell, all the more powerful for not being seen? It is well to remember that for the vast majority of the Elizabethan audience Ireland was ‘offstage’ in every sense of the term. It was glimpsed, if at all, only through the woodcuts of John Derricke's Image of Irelande (1581) or the lurid pen-portraits of pamphleteers such as Anthony Munday, Thomas Churchyard and Barnaby Rich. O'Neill is surely closer to the mark when he suggests that, presented as a strictly ‘offstage’ area, Ireland channelled some of England's darkest fears—rebellion, invasion, miscegenation, degeneration.

An Interview with David Franzoni

THE ROUND TABLE115 making an entertainment rather than a documentary. The story also ends before the whole tale is told, so I hope for a sequel to round out the whole. However, one thing above all others I believe to be true: this version of the Arthurian story will make everyone who sees it think. It will, I hope, encourage people to reconsider the Sarmatian theory, as it certainly has in my case. Whatever we may think in the end, the film cannot fail to excite and impress us with the energy with which the actors and the director were driven to produce such a powerful statement. By no means everything of the original Arthurian stories has gone. No story of Arthur would be complete without Excalibur, and having long since decided that there would be a Round Table at which the knights would meet, we were delighted to find that the Sarmatians liked to eat—and dance upon—circular tables. The great love story ofLancelot, Arthur, and Guinevere is also present, though in more low-key form than in the later medieval versions. There is little time for love in the harsh and uncompromising times in which these people lived. Yet even here, in the midst ofbattle and warfare, respect gives way to tenderer feelings, and one can see clearly enough how the story might have begun. Everywhere in the movie there are echoes of the original Arthurian legends, and it is certainly not hard to see how Dark Age reality became medieval fantasy. It is this reality, dark and brutal, that makes this new account of the legend so powerful. I remain convinced that Arthur and his knights were real people, and that something not unlike the struggle portrayed in the film really took place. Working on it, seeing it brought to birth, was an extraordinary experience. It hass changed me, and every word I write about the Arthurian story from now on will be touched by memories of my involvement in the making ofthis remarkable movie. OXFORD An Interview with David Franzoni JOHN MATTHEWS David Franzoni, a successful screenwriter, is responsible for the films Ghdiatorand Amista among others. KingArthur is his latest project and while filming he and I spent time talking about myth and the Arthurian stories. He has much to say on the subject, and his approach to the myth ofArthur is refreshingly original. When the opportunity arose recently for us to sit down and have a conversation about the background to the writing of the screenplay, 1 jumped at the chance. Here was an opportunity for the writer ofthe film to put his own case directly to the Arthurian community and to explain the thinking behind some of the decisions that went into the finished work. The following is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation. JM: Where did your association with the Arthurian legends begin? DF: When I first came to Los Angeles as a struggling screenwriter, I was living in North Ridge and used to go to the California State Library there because I couldn't Il6ARTHURIANA buy many books at the time. I came across a student's dissertation, which proposed— not necessarily for the first time—that Lucius Artorius Castus might have been the seed for the Arthurian myth. At the time I just filed this away. Then when I was in Rome working on Ghdiator, I began to do some research. Not so much going back to the original sources or reading Lucius Artorius Castus's diary [laughter] but following up on that one little hint. Ofcourse I came across From Scythia to Camelot by C. Scott Littleton and Linda Malcor, and that was the first time that I realized it wasn't just about Lucius Artorius Castus but the whole Sarmatian thing as well. That's what was most compelling to me, that this might be the foundation for the whole Arthurian legend. Ofcourse I learned that other scholars, having gotten up before I did, realized this a long time ago, but until fairly recently they hadn't been able to figure out just how they were connected. Now of course we know about Marcus Aurelius defeating the...

King Arthur in Popular Culture ed. by Elizabeth S. Sklar and Donald L. Hoffman (review)

REVIEWS107 ' . . .The one who hears, in addition to learning these things, also comprehends and is taught in it the emotions ofthe soul, and, consequently, on the basis ofthat which affects him and by which he is constrained, he also is enabled by this book to possess the imagederivingfromthewords....Andtheonewhohearsisdeeplymoved,asthough he himselfwere speaking, and is affected by the words of the songs, as ifthey were his own songs__ And the things spoken are such that he lifts them up to God as himselfacting and speakingthem from himself. . ..Thesewordsbecome like a mirror to the person singing them.' (Athanasius, Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert Gregg.) ALFRED K. SIEWERS Bucknell University Elizabeth s. sklar and donald L. hoffman, eds., KingArthur in PopuUr Culture. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Company, 2002. Pp. 266. (paperback only) isbn: o— 7864-1257-7. $32. The ubiquity of the Arthurian legend in modern popular culture is the subject of the eighteen essays here collected by Elizabeth S. Sldar and Donald L. Hoffman. The collection begins with a brief foreword by Alan Lupack acknowledging the role ofSally Slocum in fostering the serious study ofArthurian popular culture and with a short preface by Elizabeth S. Sklar. Seventeen of the essays appear here for the first time; the eighteenth (a subsequent essay by Sklar) is published in revised form; many were originally papers delivered at scholarly conferences in recent years. Sklar's essay, 'Marketing Arthur: The Commodification of Arthurian Legend,' opens the collection by distinguishing between 'promotional Arthuriana and Arthurian products' (10). Based largely on a survey of both in the greater Detroit metropolitan area, Sklar convincingly argues that 'the marketplace contributes more vitally to the survival and perpetuation of the Arthurian legend than does the academy, for it reaches an infinitely larger and generally more complicitous audience' (21). In 'Defending the Domestic: Arthurian Tropes and the American Dream,' Zia Isola discusses King Arthur Flour and Round Table Pizza, products which add the role of 'defender of all domestic boundaries' (34) to Arthur's long list of titles. In 'Tintagel: The Best ofEnglishTwinkie,' James Noble looks at the commercialization ofTintagel and the accompanying sanitizing ofthe Arthurian myth in civic attempts to capitalize on the legendary birthplace of the once and future king as a tourist mecca. Essays by Donald L. Hoffman and BarbaraTcpa Lupack then address what might arguably be considered less popular (and more high cultural) manifestations ofthe Arthurian legend. In 'Arthur, Popular Culture, and World War II,' Hoffman looks at the ways World War II fiction by Dennis Lee Anderson, Donald Bartheleme, John Erskine, and T. H. White embraces the Arthurian legend. In 'King Arthur and Vietnam,' Lupack traces the use ofArthurian motifs in Vietnam era fiction by W. R. Duncan, Owl Goingback, Megan Lindholm, Bobbie Ann Mason, Katherine Paterson, and S. P. Somtow. In what is the most insightful and thought-provoking essay in this collection, Lupack finds that 'the Arthurian legends continue to be 1?8ARTHURIANA seen as a vital story that has relevance for commenting on historical events like the Vietnam War and its effects' (72). On a lighter note in 'The Documentary Arthur: Reflections ofa Talking Head,' Norris J. Lacy comments on the flourishing business of Arthurian documentaries and recounts his own experiences as on- and off-screen talent concluding with perhaps more than a note ofresignarion that, since 'hope springs eternal,' he hopes a documentary 'will eventually get it right' (85). In 'Was That in the Vulgate? Arthurian Legend in TV Film and Series Episodes,' Bert Olton surveys Arthurian television sightings from 1961 to 1999. An especially helpful appendix provides production details on more than three dozen such sightings including some that may take readers by surprise. Arthurian materials can been found in episodes of television shows ranging from Naked City to Bonanza to Fantasy Islandto Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. In 'Knights in Space: The Arthur of Babylon $ and Dr. Who,' Kristina Hildebrand shows that Arthur 'has gained a foothold in space, and among all the Avalons where Arthur may sleep, we must now include those beyond the stars' (109). Michael N. Salda surveys 'Arthurian Animation at Century's End' and finds quantity but not quality in recent animated Arthurian offerings. Salda rightly laments that...