[Ravensfort] King Arthur

David R. Hoffpauir env_drh at shsu.edu
Thu Oct 27 10:57:50 PDT 2005


http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1197.htm


I went on to the Engines website looking for information on crowns and coronets.  That turned up nothing, but I did run across this.  King Arthur.  It's something of a decent bet to say the SCA would not exist without the legends of Arthur.  Why is that?  First off because they were period mythic stories in their own right.  Secondly, because Victorian Romanticism and to a great extent, the art images of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are deeply embedded with our modern culture's beliefs concerning the Middle Ages.  They in a real sense 'created' many of our modern notions concerning the Middle Ages and defined our conception of the mythic hero that Arthur has become.  

The Middle Ages in reality were brutal and barbaric, full of death, disease, and filth, but the Victorians romanticized it all with their literature and art.  Credit them first with the idea of 'the best of the Middle Ages'.  What survives in the collective psyche today is our idea that chivalry and courtly behavior were gentle arts.  In truth, chivalry and knighthood was little more than a mechanism of sanctioned marshal law and courtly behavior was what keep your head between your ears*.

Lancelot?  Galahad?  Guinevere?  Arthur?  Nothing you see of them in any movie or book of modern time has not gone through that Victorian filter.  Arthurian legend has become our idyllic standard of the modern hero myth.  He and his knights, their quests for good against evil, their humilities, and human failings are woven indelibly into our culture and the SCA culture. Had not Arthurian legend survived** to Victorian times and been romanticized and re-revived there, its modern myth would not exist, our heroes would be of a different sort, our notions of the Middle Ages would likely be considerably different as well.  

Modern SCAers? Who knows?  Maybe we'd be singing the Oodalali war song and riding spotted cows into battle, their tails duct taped to the top of our head.

regards,
dsd

*ok, so toss some Shakespeare and Chaucer, in there, but even they are Romanticizing it all.  Niceness and civil behavior didn't really emerge until the Renaissance when the middle-class rose as a social force

**three sources:  Chretien de Troyes (Lancelot 12th C.), Sir Thomas Malory (Le Morte D'arthur, 15th C.), & Geoffrey of Monmouth (History of the Kindgs of Britain, about 1136) are our oldest surviving written sources
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