Magic weapons, mysterious springs, irresistible and tragic love, heroic knights, damsels both distressed and distressing: Arthurian literature has exerted an enduring fascination for audiences and readers for nearly 1500 years.
This course will sample versions of Arthurian characters and stories, both serious and comic, from the war heroes of early Welsh folktale; the ideal chivalric society of high medieval romance (where many of our modern ideas of love originated); Malory’s full Arthurian cycle (from the Sword in the Stone through Lancelot and Guinevere, the quest for the Holy Grail, the downfall of the Round Table and the otherworldly end of Arthur, the “once and future king”); and modern appropriations in works such as Mark Twain’s satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Monte Python’s “Monte Python and the Holy Grail” (and perhaps, cheesy as it may be, the “Merlin” series from the BBC).
We will compare and discuss changes in the cultural ideals represented by shared characters who reappear, to different effect, across many works for many kinds of readers. The central questions we will try to address is: Why Arthur? What is it about this legendary material that has proven so resilient, and so compelling to the countless generations of writers and readers who have appropriated it to express their own values and purposes, from the twelfth century through 2012?
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