We start this volume with a tribute to the late and much missed Derek Brewer (1923–2008). During his long career he made invaluable contributions to Arthurian scholarship on two fronts: through his own publications, especially on Malory, and through his publishing company D. S. Brewer, founded in 1972. As Boydell ‖ Brewer, it has come to play a crucial part in medieval studies; Arthurian scholars are particularly indebted to him as the ‘onlie begetter’ of the series Arthurian Studies, now up to its 74th volume, and also of this journal.

The essays in the present volume deal with subjects that range from a Latin romance based on Welsh sources to the post-Christian Arthur of modern fiction and film. The first is a reprinting of the introduction to Derek Brewer's edition of the last two tales of Malory's Morte Darthur; first published in 1968, it remains stimulating and informative. The volume continues with Jonathan Passaro's discussion of the source manuscript for Malory's first tale; in a closely argued essay he argues persusively that Malory worked with a version of Cambridge University Library MS add 7071, pointing to numerous verbal and structural parallels, and indeed that this may be the actual manuscript he used. Amanda Hopkins considers the ‘Arthuricity’ of the little-known Latin werewolf romance Arthur and Gorlagon, which deals with metamorphosis, misogyny and bestiality; and Thomas Hinton discusses images of sterility and fertility in the complex continuations of Chretien's Conte du Graal. Moving beyond the Middle Ages, Siân Echard describes some early modern responses to Geoffrey of Monmouth's account of Arthur's dealings with Rome in the writings of antiquarians such as Camden; and Norris Lacy ranges widely over the evolution of the Arthurian legend, linking texts to contexts. Finally, Ronald Hutton considers representations of both Christian and pagan religion in modern novels and cinema, again in relation to cultural context. The volume ends with a supplement on recent additions to Arthurian fiction by Norris Lacy and Raymond Thompson, further evidence, if any were needed, of the perennial popularity of the legend.

Elizabeth Archibald

Bristol, UK

David F. Johnson

Tallahassee, Florida

Although many scholars have studied Malory and his sources, exploring the way he worked and attempting to determine the extent of his knowledge of Arthurian material, no one has successfully established a link between a particular manuscript and Malory's work. This paper explores the relationship between Le Morte Darthur and Cambridge University Library MS Add. 7071, a Suite du Merlin manuscript. Malory composed Le Morte Darthur from a variety of sources; his main source for the first part of his work – corresponding to Books I–IV in Caxton and the first seventy folios of the Winchester manuscript – is the Suite du Merlin. Like many of his other sources, it is a French prose romance related to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle. The Cycle has a complex literary history, and scholarly debate on its formation remains unsettled. The Suite is a late addition to the Cycle, designed to draw elements of the romances together; Annie Combes describes it as ‘a long bridging narrative’ to ‘connect the Merlin of 1210 harmoniously to the Lancelot of approximately 1220’ by adding new material and ‘creating links between narratives and characters that are largely unconnected’.

The Suite forms the middle third of the Post-Vulgate Roman du Graal, which was composed between 1225 and 1240; it is preceded by the Estoire du Saint Graal and followed by the Queste and Mort Artu. The coherence among the constituent parts of the Post-Vulgate is due largely to the fact that it ‘was from the outset conceived as a complete work’, in contrast to the Vulgate. The Suite, therefore, plays an important unifying role for the Arthurian romances that provide much of the material for Le Morte Darthur. Throughout the Suite, references to the other parts of the Post- Vulgate abound, testament to the fact that the author of the Post-Vulgate ‘attempted to produce a more homogeneous and closely knit whole [than the Vulgate], of which Arthur and the history of his kingdom, rather than Lancelot, was the central character’. The author of the Suite sets into motion many narratives that are later resolved in other portions of the Post-Vulgate; for example, the conception of Mordred ultimately brings about the death of Arthur in the Mort Artu.

For most of his literary career, Arthur has been the Christian hero of a Christian people, and this role has taken two different forms. The first is that in which he appears in his earliest recorded personification, as the champion of the post-Roman British against heathen Anglo-Saxon invaders. It features in the earliest known source to mention him, the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, where he fights bearing the image of the Virgin Mary, and is found, on and off, into the mid twentieth century, where it is the theme of John Masefield's novel, The Badon Parchments. The second form is that of the romances which survive from the twelfth century onward, in which he presides over a conventionally pious high medieval society, in which heroic activity is transferred from Saxonslaying to individual knightly quests, above all that for the Grail. This too has a long pedigree, from the stories of Chrétien de Troyes to the novels of T. H. White and the poetry of Charles Williams in the 1930s and 1940s. Nor has either tradition died out. Since 1960, the high medieval Christian king has appeared in a wholly traditional form in the novels of Jim Hunter, Robert Nye and Kevin Crossley-Holland, and the fighter against the Anglo-Saxon heathen in those of J. T. Haar, John Emlyn Edwards and Anne McCaffrey. Other recent fictional works which deal with Arthur, such as those of Joan Wolf, Elizabeth E. Wein, Jack Whyte and Nancy Stringer, have chosen to ignore the issue of religion altogether.

On the other hand, even when all these authors are grouped together, they are greatly outnumbered by those who, over the same period, have introduced a new factor into the legend, making Arthur the ruler of a British society that is itself deeply divided between Christian and pagan. This clash or reconciliation of rival faiths is turned in these other books into a major theme of their stories, and dealing with it into an important function of Arthur's kingship, in which, according to the tale, he either fails or excels. The same element has entered cinematic depictions of the king in the same period. Some attention has been drawn to it by other scholars, notably Dan Nastali and John Marino.

Editors’ Note

In 1968 Derek Brewer's edition of the last two tales of Malory's Morte Darthur appeared in the York Medieval Texts series published by Edward Arnold. The introduction, which we reprint here (omitting only section VIII, A Note on the Text), is still remarkably fresh and relevant over forty years later. He was ahead of his time in his interest in anthropology, for instance; but he also situated his comments in a broad historical context, referring both to the fall of the Roman Empire and to the effects of the Second World War. His account of what he calls ‘the honourable society’ demonstrates not only his erudition and elegant style, but also his humanity.

We have not attempted to update the bibliography, but have expanded individual references to give fuller citations, and have silently corrected punctuation and spelling where necessary. Brewer's page references for Malory are mostly to his own edition; we have added in square brackets references to the three-volume Vinaver/Field edition of 1990, and also to Caxton's book and chapter divisions. His references to earlier sections of the Morte are taken from the first Vinaver edition of 1947; we have updated them to the page numbering of the fuller second and third editions.

Elizabeth Archibald

David F. Johnson

I

Malory's series of stories has delighted five centuries of readers, whether or not their own lives have been as exciting as his book. The Arthurian tales, that mixture of myth, adventure, love-story, enchantment, tragedy, live in his work as the essence of medieval romance, yet always with a contemporary relevance. This combination of romantic remoteness with contemporary relevance was true even in his own day. He wrote in the middle of the fifteenth century, a period of sagging confidence, and bewildering change, when England's empire had been almost entirely lost. He was looking backward to an imagined, more primitive, if glorious past. Contemplation of this past, however, was to provide, besides its intrinsic interest, an analysis of the problems of the present, and also an ideal for the future. The Morte Darthur was a part of the movement that transformed the medieval knight into the English gentleman. It expresses those potent ideals of the gentleman's private virtue and public service that despite many failings activated English society and influence up to the first half of the twentieth century.

The invitation to present a plenary lecture at the congress of the International Arthurian Society was naturally a distinct honour, but I hesitated before accepting. I feared that the conference theme that I was invited to discuss (and that constitutes the title of the present essay) might easily prove either too simple or too difficult. On the one hand, if we simply seek correspondences between specific literary artefacts and historical or cultural forces, we will undoubtedly find a great many, but that, by itself, will tell us little that was not already self-evident. Moreover, some of the connections may well be tenuous and a matter of coincidence rather than cause and effect. On the other hand, a serious effort to identify and analyse fundamental causal relationships on a large scale would be both a delicate and a huge undertaking, the subject for a very long book rather than a plenary paper or a published essay.

In addition, if we can discern, sometimes with relative ease, the influence of history on literature, influence in the opposite direction is ordinarily far more difficult to trace. In principle, we would all doubtless acknowledge that literature can influence history and social structures, but the instances of such phenomena are less easy to identify than are influences in the opposite direction: few texts, Arthurian or other, provoke a reaction such as the one unleashed, for example, by Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses – and few too are the Arthurian (or other) scholars who, I imagine, would welcome that particular reaction.

In the pages to follow, I shall do my best to deal with all three elements of my title – texts, history, and society – and to identify and discuss specific influences. However, instead of limiting myself to a particular group of texts or even a limited period, I propose to cast a much broader net. I have chosen to offer an unsystematic excursion through Arthurian chronicle and literary history extending, though with very large gaps, from the twelfth century to the present. I will begin, however, at what may seem a rather odd place: an Arthurian text by John Steinbeck.

Introduction: Steinbeck and modernized Malory

In the late 1950s Steinbeck set out to write a modernized Malory. He intended to reduce the length of the original and write in a language that was not archaic, perhaps even writing, he suggested, ‘in American’.

Chrétien de Troyes’ final, unfinished Arthurian romance, the Conte del Graal, has captured the imagination of many scholars over the years. One such enthusiast is the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who has revisited it several times through the course of his career. Lévi-Strauss used Chrétien's narrative as the exemplification of ‘Percevalian’ myths, which he viewed as being inversely symmetrical to ‘Oedipal’ myths in their treatment of the theme of communication. Oedipal myths are characterised by accelerated communication: the hero has the answer to the Sphinx's riddle, but this communicative success becomes excess in the breaking of the generational taboo of incest. The plague visited on Thebes as a consequence of this transgression can be considered a reflection of this disruption of natural cycles. In contrast to these three instances of excessive communication, Lévi-Strauss proposes interrupted communication as the defining feature of Chrétien's Perceval narrative: the hero fails to ask the question which will elicit the awaited response at the Grail Castle; in doing so, he misses the opportunity to heal the Fisher King and his barren Waste Land of a kingdom. As R. Howard Bloch argues, the interruptions of linguistic communication and natural rhythms are also in a relation of interdependence with that of genealogical continuity; like a game of mirrors, each one of these parameters refers to, and can itself be read through, the other two.

The impetus for this essay came from the observation of a different kind of interruption. In common with most critics of the Conte del Graal, Lévi-Strauss limits his analysis to the portion attributed to Chrétien de Troyes and edited apart or within collections of Chrétien's romances. Yet this text spawned a vast amount of further material – four continuations and two prologues – without which it was rarely transmitted, and it is a shame that critics working through Lévi-Strauss's problematic have not pushed their interest beyond Chrétien's part of the narrative. Only four of fifteen manuscripts contain Chrétien's work without any of the later material, and the others overwhelmingly present the Conte del Graal and its continuations as a single, unified work. It is my contention that the corpus may best be studied as a cycle, so that the unity and coherence which medieval scribes and audiences evidently found in the text might be understood.

William Butler Yeats's primary contribution to Arthuriana is his early poem “Time and theWitch Vivien” from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889). Yeats's poem explicitly references Tennyson's idyll “Merlin and Vivien” and purports to relate what happened to Vivien after she imprisoned Merlin. The work can thus fairly be said to constitute a sequel to “Merlin and Vivien.” As “Time and the Witch Vivien” opens, the narcissistic Vivien is contemplating her own beauty and her magical powers but is interrupted by a sound upon her threshold: the approach of Father Time. Vivien mistakes Father Time for an elderly peddler and lets him into her chamber. Upon realizing the identity of her visitor, Vivien attempts to obtain his hourglass, the possession of which would literally allow her to stop time. Time refuses to sell the hourglass but wagers it in a game of dice against Vivien. Time defeats Vivien first at dice and then at chess. Immediately upon her second defeat, Vivien dies, having paid the price for playing against Time.

In his quest to construct his identity as a distinctively Irish poet, Yeats from 1895 omitted this explicitly Tennysonian poem from his collected works. Perhaps as a result of this omission, the work has escaped critical attention almost entirely. However, for the original readers of his first book of poems, Yeats's revisionist sequel to Tennyson's “Merlin and Vivien” was one of his central works. Yeats carefully followed the reception of his first book and noted that in the twenty-two reviews of the volume he had read, “Time and the Witch Vivien” was, after the title poem, the work most praised. Yeats's unexpected contribution to the Arthur myth or “Matter of Britain” deserves scholarly study, both as a milestone in his development as an Irish poet and as a fascinating revision of Victorian neo-medievalism. In “Time and the Witch Vivien,” Yeats critiques the British Empire by rewriting its poet laureate. His Vivien is heroic in that she refuses to accept the limitations of mortality, but, entrapped in her own materialist, capitalist paradigm, she is doomed to fail in her quest to defeat Time and seize eternity. Yeats foils Vivien with the more successful Irish questers after eternity, Oisin and the Stolen Child, the subjects of the preceding and subsequent poems in the volume, to make his polemical point that while a materialistic English literature can only die, a spiritual Irish literature might attain eternity.

Feminist criticism of video games often focuses on their function as a sexist medium, one designed to allow teenage boys to fulfil fantasies of violent empowerment. A majority of the characters with whom the video-game player can identify are male, and when female characters do exist, their avatars are usually hyper-sexualized fantasies of the feminine physique, with a breast-to-waist ratio that would topple any human woman forced to stomp around in the stiletto-heeled boots of her digital sisters. However, now that more female players have emerged as consumers, reviewers, and even designers of video games, companies have begun to reconsider their target market, and they are consequently beginning to add female non-player characters to game plots, create extensive portrait choices and avatars for female players, and construct complex storylines complete with romantic interludes, many of which are geared toward a female audience. The intrusion of the feminine into the landscape of imagined digital masculinity is not limited to the addition of these superficial features. Changes are also occurring on the deep structural level of games, particularly video games that take place within “medieval” environments. These games have evolved markedly from linear, combat-oriented plots characteristic of games like the original versions of Warcraft, Diablo, and Dungeon Siege to the free-ranging, creative, and sprawling magical environments of Neverwinter Nights, Baldur's Gate II, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and World of Warcraft. In other words, as game designers expand their products to embrace their growing female audience, games themselves are undergoing a significant shift in genre, evolving from male-oriented epics into female-friendly romances.

The shift in game genre that accompanies the increasing financial power of female consumers echoes a similar shift in medieval literary genres – one that began over 800 years ago, as some medieval poets also abandoned epic in favor of romance. In twelfth-century France, for instance, poets were increasingly sponsored by and writing for female patrons – patrons who either indirectly (through their financial sponsorship) or overtly encouraged the development of tales told for women.

In his 1997 book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, Espen J. Aarseth argues that the pleasure in reading traditional texts is “the pleasure of the voyeur, safe but impotent.” The reader cannot affect the outcome of, say, a game in such a text, but neither does he or she run any risk from it. That is to say, the barbe of the Green Knight's sword will never threaten the reader's neck quite as literally as it does that of Sir Gawain in their famous “beheading” game.

However, video-game narratives are not traditional texts; they are cybertexts, and they demand a different role from their reader. Indeed, Aarseth argues that cybertext readers may not in fact be readers, for they must also function as co-authors and therefore are not safe. In interacting with narratives, they refashion them and may suffer personal rejection, such as the failure of a quest or even the death of an alter-ego.

Of course, cybertext readers may also enjoy great rewards and may perhaps do so on a far more vicarious level than that of traditional readers. Some of those cyberrewards are tangible within the fiction of the text, such as the gold and jewels that often await at the end of a successful quest. But many of the rewards stem from the interactive experience itself, from having some control over contexts outside of daily modern life.

And that may be particularly true for contexts perceived as being near yet far, as being contiguous enough with our own culture to be at least somewhat familiar, yet as being distant enough to seem at least somewhat exotic, as is often true for the Middle Ages. As Oliver M. Traxel demonstrates below in “Medieval and Pseudo-Medieval Elements in Computer Role-Playing Games: Use and Interactivity,” the Middle Ages, particularly as they have been treated in medieval and post-medieval literature, have enough historical associations and enough common coin in contemporary culture, yet enough ambiguity and association with fantasy, to dominate entire areas of the computer-game industry. Of course, to some degree that success has been fueled by specifically adapting these games to the demands and demographics of desired audiences, as discussed by Amy S. Kaufman in “Romancing the Game: Magic Writing, and the Feminine in Neverwinter Nights.”

When science-fiction computer games imagine the future, they often do so in medieval terms. Set after the fall of empire, many such games present players with dystopian, science-fictional worlds that invariably appropriate the tropes of the medieval romance. Cities, space stations, and planetary outposts stand as pockets of order and stability, centers of government, religion, culture, and trade that simultaneously represent the remnants of the lost empire and the hopes of the new. Yet, as in medieval romance, these technological Camelots are few and far between. Surrounded on all sides by the sprawling chaos and horror of an encroaching, often alien wilderness, they are constantly in jeopardy of being contaminated, overrun, and lost. Strapped into the cockpit of starships and weighed down by armor, shields, and weaponry, players must venture forth to joust against this wilderness, to push it back and, if possible, to recover the sovereign order lost with the collapse of empire. The player's most potent ally in such quests, however, is not the promise of exotic technologies of an alien future, but the chivalric ideals of an imagined medieval past in which the knightly hero fought to regain the glory of ancient times.

While purists differentiate science fiction from fantasy (the critical difference being that, in the former, technology is magic, while in the latter, magic is magic), the two genres are much less distinct in the popular imagination. Some of this blurring may be due to the fact that both genres are equally derived from the shared pedigree of medieval romance. Although Kathryn Hume cautions that the apparent derivation of science fiction from romance is much more complicated than it initially seems, she nevertheless admits that “there is some truth to [the] assumption” that science fiction “bear[s] a similar, if not identical, relationship to the medieval romance: run Guy of Warwick or some Charlemagne chansons through a transformer, and one ought to come up with space opera or space epic.” Of course, not all science fiction is “space opera or space epic,” but this does not necessarily invalidate Hume's point, since much of what Hume observes concerns the relatively recent emergence of space opera as the most widely recognized (and, arguably, predominant) sub-genre of science fiction today.

Coined as a pejorative play on “horse opera,” the phrase “space opera” originally referred to hack Westerns repackaged as science fiction for popular consumption.

To reconstruct the pre-modern understanding of the fundamentals of music has been a preeminent occupation of music historians at least since Martin Gerbert published a major anthology of medieval music-theory writings in the late eighteenth century. The earliest comprehensive music histories by John Hawkins and Charles Burney already featured lengthy discussions of medieval and Renaissance conceptualizations of musical space (interval, scale, harmony, counterpoint, etc.). Later generations of scholars continued and expanded the systematic study of early musical treatises, de facto establishing a new musicological discipline – the history of music theory – that until roughly the mid-twentieth century aimed primarily at reconstructing the origin and the evolution of theWestern “tonal consciousness,” i.e., of the principles governing Western harmony and rhythm, and specifically the musical language of the Classical/Romantic era from, say, J. S. Bach to Gustav Mahler. From its inception the history of music theory has been inherently comparative in nature, and in this sense it recalls rather closely the history of anthropology. We have been studying the musical conceptualization of historical Others as a way of casting light on the modern ways of systematizing and categorizing musical sound. In many ways, and predictably, Latin music theory de-familiarizes us from our musical past as much as (and often at the same time as) it mediates that past and brings us closer to it.

The basic questions that guide the work of the historian change a great deal, of course. It is possible to observe a marked shift in the research program of the history of medieval and Renaissance music theory after World War II. Since then, in line with the pursuit of authentic recreations of early music in performance – a pursuit that occupied academics and performers through the 1980s – a good portion of Latin music theory has been directed at emphasizing the vast cognitive differences that separate the “modern” ways of parsing the materials of music (that modern “tonal consciousness”) from the “pre-modern” ones. Latin music theory has bequeathed to us valuable knowledge on how the materials of music were taught, classified, and reflected upon, thus in a sense experienced in a period of European cultural history that in recent musicological parlance has been portrayed as pre-modern far more frequently than as pre-modern.