I am currently reading Mike Ashley’s excellent A Brief History King Arthur (aka The Mammoth Book of King Arthur, 2005). Ashley does a great job of summarizing the historical evidence that may have inspired the King Arthur stories. I won’t try to summarize the summary. That would be pointless. Besides we all know who King Arthur is, even if we haven’t actually read any books about him. I suppose that’s the movies as usual. Though there haven’t been a whole lot of those either. The most recent 2017’s Guy Ritchie film King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, though The Green Knight (2021) is in that pantheon. Others that come to mind are BBC’s Merlin, Clive Owen in Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 King Arthur, John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) and of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975).
In fiction, “The Matter of Britain” as the whole shebang is known, pops up every so often. Recent authors include Stephen R. Lawhead, Jack Whyte, and earlier ones: Marion Zimmer Bradley, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Stewart, and the always wonderful, T. H. White. The biggest thing for me when approaching an Arthurian series, is how much is magic present in the books. There have always been two camp on this. Those who revel in the fairy light and dark magic, and those who prefer to sideline all that and focus on the people, a more historical approach. Even back in Medieval times this happened. The famous Thomas Malory did his darn best to remove as much of the giants and dragons from the series as possible. I don’t think it is hard to guess which side I am on in this question.
My mother and I shared very few similar interests. Where I liked monsters, she preferred romance. Mary Stewart was one of the few opportunities we had to find common ground. Sadly, when I found Stewart had gone down the Malory Road I realized that we would not share any opinions here either. She loved Stewart’s romance and lack of dragons. (Sometimes I wonder how my parents ever produced me. My father thought fiction a waste of time and preferred DIY manuals. Thank goodness for Edgar Rice Burroughs!)
I envy children who grew up at the turn of the century (until I remember they didn’t have comic books). The Golden Age of Illustration produced several wonderful books for Arthurian fans. Along with The Arabian Nights, the Matter of Britain was the holy grail (see what I did there?) for book illustrators. Artists like Arthur Rackham produced books like Stories of King Arthur, but the real champion of the knights was Howard Pyle who wrote as well as produced the black and white illustrations and borders that are classic.
Howard Pyle
The Story of King Arthur and His Knights (1904)
The Story of the Champions of the Round Table (1905)
The Story of Sir Launcelot and his Companions (1907)
The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur (1910)
Otto of the Silver Hand (1914)
Arthur Rackham
The Story of King Arthur (1910) by A. L. Haydon
The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1920) by Thomas Malory
Other Books
The Legends of King Arthur (1895) by James Knowles
Legends of King Arthur and His Court (1901) by Frances Nimmo Greene
Tales of the Round Table (1908) by Andrew Lang
The Mabinogion (1913) by Lady Charlotte Guest
We talk often of Tolkien and “The Northern Thing” inspiring much of modern Fantasy but the Arthurian branch (and to a lesser degree the Mabinogion of Wales) is also important here. Tolkien himself would have said Malory was a newfangled thing compared to the Anglo-Saxon materials he studied, but Tolkien did work on popularizing Gawain and the Green Knight, so he wasn’t completely against such modernities. The world of knights and quests nicely blends into Tolkienian fantasy after 1977. Anthologies like Parke Godwin’s An Invitation to Camelot (1988) or stories like Roger Zelazny’s “The Last Defender of Camelot” (Isaac Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine, Summer 1979) show the post LOTR era had not forgotten King Arthur.
The Matter of Britain was a key part of story telling in the Middle Ages, grafting older legends and bits of history into a wonderful world of knights and quests that never really existed outside of a troubadour’s imagination. Like the scalds and scops of the Anglo-Saxon period, these traveling entertainers knew how to weave a fresh tale from a vast amount of material, changing it as need required. This makes things difficult for scholars like Ashley but the punters never complained.
