King Arthur Essay Research Paper If the

King Arthur Essay, Research Paper

If the name of King Arthur is mentioned, I suppose what comes to mind is not so

much one person as a whole array of characters and themes, a montage so to

speak. Of course we do think first of the King, the magnificent monarch of a

glorified or idealized medieval realm. But we think also of his Queen, of the

fair and wayward Guinevere, we think of his enchanter, Merlin, who presided over

his birth, who set him on the throne, who established him there in the early and

travelled days of his reign. There were the knights of the Round Table, vowed to

the highest ideals of chivalry, and the greatest of them, Sir Lancelot, who, of

course, has a tragic love affair with the Queen. There is another great love

story, that of Tristan and Isolde, the theme of Wagner’s Opera. We think of the

place where these people assembled, Camelot, Arthur’s magnificent, personal

castle and capital and then, there are stranger things; the story of the quest

for the Holy Grail, giving a spiritual dimension to the whole story and there is

magic. Not only the magic of Merlin but the magic also of his strange, ambiguous

student, the women, the enchantress, Morgan LaFay. And at the end is the tragedy

of Arthur’s downfall, his passing away at the isle of Avalon and another mystery

that we do not know what really happened to him that he was said to be immortal,

that one day he would return and restore the golden age in his country. Now, of

course, this is all a realm of the imagination conceived by great authors in the

middle ages and put in medieval garb. But perhaps few people realize what a very

great realm of the imagination it is, how vast a literature this has been. In

the middle ages this was the great theme of creative writing in poetry and

prose. Not only in England, but preeminently in France and in Germany there were

romances of Arthur. In fact, in every language of Christendom at that time. I

suppose, the version we know best is the one that was composed in the 15th

century. This is the great English version of the story, compiled out of earlier

versions by the creative genius of a rather mysterious and cryptic figure, the

knight, Sir Thomas Malory. But the story doesn’t end there. The whole thing

revives in the time of Queen Victoria, with Tennyson’s "Idylls of the

King." As a result of this great work on the Arthurian Cycle by England’s

Poet Laureate, the story became known to everybody. Other poems, novels and

plays in our own time, and almost a rebirth of it yet again in T. H. White’s

novels, "The Sword and the Stone" and "The Once and Future

King" and other plays and musicals and films based on these works. There

are Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Stewart, Marian Bradley, Pat Godwin and others, who

have gone off on another line and tried to imagine the Britain of King Arthur as

it might really have been. What I have personally been most concerned with is

the background of all this, and the question, "where did it come from

originally." It’s a very obvious thing to ask the straight question,

"did King Arthur exist." And in fact you cannot give a straight answer

to that question; yes and no are both wrong. There were other great historical

figures who became the heros of medieval legends, such as Alexander the Great

and Charlemagne. We know that they existed and if somebody asks whether they

did, we can say "yes" directly because we have reliable, historical

records of them. But with Arthur, it is rather more difficult because the

emphasis really is all on the legend, the romance. If we say "yes,"

that would imply that this magnificent medieval monarch existed and reigned, at

some time or other, in his glorified medieval court as described as by Malory,

Tennyson and the romances. Of course, he didn’t. There is no such person as King

Arthur, in that sense; it’s quite an impossible idea. So we cannot say

"yes," directly, but to say "no" is also misleading because

that implies that he is completely fictitious, that he was all made up in the

middle ages when these stories were first told, and that there is no sort of

background or original person behind the stories, at all. That, too, is

misleading. This is a puzzle, a very difficult question. The main reason is that

writers of fiction in the middle ages, when they were dealing with something

handed down to them from a distant past, didn’t approach it as a modern

historical novelist does. Historical novelists, nowadays, will aim at

authenticity. They will try to get things right and will do research to discover

how people dressed in the time they are writing of, what houses they lived in,

what food they took, what interests they had, what kind of business or work they

engaged in. . .they will try to get the period right. Medieval authors did no

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