What follows is either a deep archetypal insight, or more likely just my headcanon, concerning some subjects I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking-about.
While I love the Big Picture; I have always had some reservations about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - perhaps because of their deployment by the Plantagenet and Tudor aristocracy in a self-justifying, self-aggrandizing, sort of way.
I mean, when all is said and done, Arthur is a king, and they're all knights!
And the stories are often (at least superficially) about fighting on horseback, ransoms, castles, hunting, courtly love, points of honour - and other such nasty or ridiculous (and typically Norman) stuff.
To complement this as any kind of myth for England and the English; it is necessary to give primacy to Robin Hood and his Merry Men.
These represent to me something like the Yeomanry and Craftsmen of the English and "Welsh" (Saxons and Celts). Certainly there was, for many generations, a kind of obsession - an insatiable hunger - among ordinary English people for songs and tales of Robin Hood.
This archetype is, however, rather poisoned by the gentrification of making Robin an Earl, and having the story rotate around his supposed loyalty and obedience to his feudal monarch King Richard I ("Lionheart") - who was a a pretty typical absentee Francophile militaristic Norman oppressor.
I see Robin and Co.'s "outlawry" as - negatively - a protest against the Norman Yoke and especially the vile Forest Laws imposed on the Anglo Saxons; but positively as a kind of restoration of the freedom and animism of a hunter-gatherer life.
The other great archetypal character is Merlin the wizard - whose greatest resonance is as a kind of shaman-priest, and a link between the pagan and Christian.
I suppose Merlin to have spent most of his time in the forest, nearby the Merry Men - In my mind replacing Friar Tuck in the role of spiritual teacher, advisor, seer, and magician.
But, linking the worlds of Arthur and Robin; Merlin might reasonably have been supposed to spend some time in the court; including the crucial task of arranging the birth of Arthur from suitable hereditary stock - on the basis that, since we apparently must have a King and Knights, these might as well be Good ones.
Dr Charlton, what are your favourite fictional depictions of Arthur?
ReplyDelete@K - I used to be very keen on TH White's Once and Future King which I first read aged about 14, but nowadays I don't find I want to re-read it. However, it did give me a grounding in the Malory basics. Malory himself I find unreadable. I've read the ancient Welsh/ English Arthur accounts, but only various (albeit detailed) summaries of Chretien de Troyes and Eschenbach's Parzival. Tolkien's poem was impressive but didn't grab me.
ReplyDeleteThe movie Excalibur I like, but mostly for Merlin.
In a nutshell, although I have read loads about Arthur, it has mostly been non-fictional mythical-magical interpretations that I found most interesting, rather than fictions.
And it has always been Merlin that I responded to more than Arthur and the Knights - Geoffrey of Monmouth's poem is fascinating. Merlin in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength is superb.
Indeed, I read (and indeed re-read) almost anything sincerely written about Merlin (e.g. Nikolai Tolstoy, Geoffrey Ashe, Tim Clarkson). He is The archetypal wizard - and his best fictional representatives include Gandalf, Dumbledore, and (of course) Getafix the druid.