King Essays - Cornish People, Holy Grail, Arthurian Legend

King Arthur 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