Assorted odds and ends

I'm feeling a bit under the whether today, so here's a short summary of what's to come in the future.

After Arthur is placed on the throne the stories start to diverge more strongly, and the structure frays. Arthur had become a radiant literary and supposedly also historical character (compare that with OUR scarcity of sources), and from the latter half of eighth century on we have to always consider the possibility of revisionism. Stories and tales were passed on through word of mouth, in some circles also through books, and the resulting alterations in the telling became the basis for new stories of themselves.

Others were attempts to modernise older tales, to ground them in the supposed contemporary realism that was attributed to Arthur. Since there was no consideration for copyrights or intellectual ownership it was also common practise to rewrite stories from other regions or languages, sometimes alluding to some ominous ancient source, some book or some sage, and indirectly claim authorship. You might some of them call Fan Fiction, and that certainly explains some of the lack of restraint in what was recounted in the stories.

I want to stress again that we can in no way assume that each and everyone of those stories was considered hard facts, but the appearance of fantasy tales alongside real historical events without any hints to their fabrication in some very well documented sources suggest that people were willing to accept them, even if only to fill in the blank spots. Among them are encyclopedia and historical essays that have been considered genuine history up until the middle of the 17th century and sometimes even later then that.

The period between Arthur's coronation and his death were (and are still) fair game for any writer, and many took the freedom to plug in their own stories and local legends into his narrative. This explains a lot of the thematic variety (or rather, outright inconsistencies) we will encounter in the body of tales I will introduce, but also even inside the tales themselves, as the stories are literally an amalgam of tales from all over (continental) Europe.

In modern terms, imagine a story originally told with the Batman as the protagonist suddenly published with Spiderman in his place. Or imagine a world in 50 years, for some reason most of our movies have been destroyed, and consequently Heath Ledger's Joker is connected with his character in 10 things I hate about you and someone makes a story of that. Again, that guy is lucky, and his retelling is 50 years later still the only thing we know of Heath Ledger and the Joker, and this version will be the definite story. Future scholars will try to glean some historical significance from this bastard child of a train wreck of a story, and that's how we feel about Arthur today.  That happens all the time in all media, and that is what happened then. The only difference would be our rejection of these stories as facts, but bear in mind that at all times Arthur's tales have always been a form of entertainment, too.

This means that we will eventually talk about such diverse topics as chivalry, knight hood and especially a lot of the characters and their origins. For after a certain point in the narrative Arthur fades into the background of the narrative, giving the spotlights to his knights, and among them chiefly Sir Lancelot. And here you will really see how originally unrelated stories were merged with Arthur, prominent examples include Tristan and Isolde, but also Sir Parcival and especially the story of the Holy Grail. Essentially that all will become a grab bag of tropes, and anachronisms of a span of close to a thousand years (ca. 500 - 1500), that even today serves as a basis of DIY stories of the old King. His stories tend to reflect to some degree the status quo of historical facts, but he also frequently is the lens through which Author's fracture their on leitmotifs.

The tales of Arthur have become a literary universe, a sandbox to set stories in, and we will try to deduce how it came to be, where it's roots are and what it can tell us about the nature of writing.