Chapter

Sacrificing Fiction and the Quest for the Real King Arthur

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

Part of the pre-release publicity blitz accompanying the 2004 film King Arthur1 was The Quest for King Arthur2, an independently produced documentary aired by the History Channel in the weeks preceding the release of the Hollywood film. This version of the documentary (unlike the original version, available for purchase on the History Channel website) includes supplemental narration provided by Ioan Gruffudd, the actor who plays Lancelot in the film. The documentary, in turn, was promoted by a supplement included in The New York Times. This composite text—the film (and its promotional trailers), the documentary, and the ad for the documentary—reflects a shared vision of the truth: Arthur the (historical and real) Man must be rediscovered, to replace Arthur the (fictional and unreal) Myth. This tension is revealed as the two inner pages of the four-page newspaper insert present a series of short blurbs to describe the legends of King Arthur and their transformations over the centuries. The ad notes that “[e]ach generation of Britons, from the fall of Rome onward[,] had need for an Arthur. And each generation, for several centuries, got the Arthur it needed.”3 The ad further explains that the versions of the story written by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and Sir Thomas Malory in the fifteenth had the greatest impact on their respective generations and those to come, seen for instance in Victorian England’s regular adoption of Arthurian tropes for its literature and in the Kennedy administration being referred to as the new Camelot in the White House.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Book
Although most modern scholars doubt the historicity of King Arthur, parts of the legend were accepted as fact throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval accounts of the historical Arthur, however, present a very different king from the romances that are widely studied today. Richard Moll examines a wide variety of historical texts including Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica and John Hardyng’s Chronicle to explore the relationship between the Arthurian chronicles and the romances. He demonstrates how competing and conflicting traditions interacted with one another, and how writers and readers of Arthurian texts negotiated a complex textual tradition. Moll asserts that the enormous variety and number of existing chronicles demonstrates the immense popularity of the historical Arthur in medieval England. Since these chronicles were the dominant source of Arthurian information for the late medieval reader, they provide an invaluable, and neglected, interpretive context for modern readers of Malory and other later medieval romances. The first monograph to look at the impact of these historical texts on Arthurian literature, Before Malory is also the first to show how canonical vernacular romances interacted with chronicle texts that have since dropped out of the canon.
Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing
  • Monika Otter
  • M Otter
Literature against Fiction: Postmodernist History
  • Hayden White
  • H White
The Historical Narrative
  • Peter Munz
  • P Munz
The Experience of Realism in Audiovisual Representation,” Realism and “Reality” in Film and Media
  • T Grodal