Everyone, especially Arthuriana scholars, feel free to correct me at every point. I only skimmed Le Mort D'Arthur. Was there a chess game that ended with someone being defenestrated in Malory's? I forget.
So, yeah. I can argue with pretty much every point you laid out. (Warning: this post is rather epic. I've tried to format to make it more readable, really.) Yes, the chess match is Malory.
First, there is an awful lot of Arthuriana before Malory. Volumes and volumes of it.
Second, there are a lot of ways in which it is much easier to describe Arthuriana using fanfic terminology, so I'm going to do that.
Malory, put in this context, was writing fanfic having only seen a few episodes of the original show, and mostly making it up from what he gained from other people's fan fic, bits of fan art, and a bunch of metafandom discussion he was mostly drunk for. And frankly, I consider him very much less interesting than a bunch of other sources. Unfortunately, he's the one who sticks in most people's heads.
(This idea is not original to me: I first came across it in a discussion on the blog Making Light that
points out that the Grail legends make a lot more sense as Eucharist fanfic.)
Third, it's also important to put the literature in the context of its time. One of the books we used in class is one that I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to get a solid grounding in the pre-modern Arthurian (it includes Malory, but nothing later.)
The title is
The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation, edited by James J. Wilhelm. It looks like there's an updated edition (with Norris J. Lacey taking over as primary editor) in 2013 which has done a lot to include more diverse voices (particularly more works from women) though it's still rather pricy and the 1994 version you can get for $7 used. Anyway, highly recommended if you have any interest in the field, since they include both translated texts and brief and suprisingly readable academic essays putting them in context.
Any one of these piece could produce a dozen dissertations, so I'm going to try and do the very summary version of it. (Which will, of necessity, leave things out. I also note that while this *is* solidly where I did my undergrad degree, including a full semester classes in Arthurian Legends that included reading at least some of all the pre-modern sources available in English at the time, and several other classes that included other bits, that was 15 years ago, and I'm not highly up on the current scholarship.)
The earliest sources and smaller referencesWe get a few mentions in historical sources of something that might or might not be Arthur, or related to the Arthur of legend, or - well. Anything. Historical sources, often ambiguous and fragmentary.
These include:
- A monk named Gildas in 547 who talks about an Ambrosius Aurelianus who united the fragmentary Britons against the Saxons. (Ambrosius is also mentioned by two other authors around that time). This is probably the earliest seed of "great military leader connected with both Rome and Christianity unites downtrodden people."
(The parallels to some of the historical language about Jesus and the prophecy of a returning Messiah are left as an exercise to the reader. I am not tackling Arthuriana *and* early Christian church theology in the same post, even in summary.)
- The Venerable Bede, writing in 731, mentions Ambrosius again, and more usefully gives us some dates, putting the battle of Badon at 493 (though he's clearly relying fairly heavily on Gildas.
- Nennius, a Welsh chronicler writing in about 800 is the first Latin chronicle to mention the name 'Arthur' in his
Historia Brittonum - he mentions the Twelve Battles of Arthur, and a lot of scholars think he was basing that bit on some older Welsh sources. (You see a lot of Welsh stuff showing up with Arthur, in part because Wales is where the Britons got pushed to by the Saxons.) Later in Nennius, it becomes fairly clear that the legend of Arthur is already a fairly common and widely spread myth.
- There are a bunch more sources that mention bits and pieces here - names for specific battles, and in William of Malmesbury's
Deeds of the English Kings (written around 1125) he talks about the legends of the heroic Arthur (and makes that Messiah context a bit more explicit.) Also we get the king and the land being tied together here, the precursor to the name Gawain.
- There's also a writer, Giraldus, who when writing in about 1190, gives a description of Arthur's grave at Glastonbury, mentions Queen Guinivere (who is noted as being his *second* wife), and also mentions Morgan le Fay as "the noble matron and lady-ruler of those parts" and as being closely related to Arthur.
Early Welsh sourcesBasically, there are tons of references prior to the 12th century. John K. Ballard notes (all my references are in
The Romance of Arthur unless I say otherwise), the focus of the surviving texts and stories we have is very much on war, loss, and grief. He also notes that Welsh verse is not narrative, but rather more about allusion than information.
There are lots of references to stories we think we know, but because they're not explicit in the verse (instead, they're references, like "Oh, remember that Apple Superbowl ad?" or "That book about the vampires?" when everyone knows you mean Twilight) it can be hard to work out, nearly 1000 years later, the exact form of the stories being referenced.
Anyway, what we do seem to have a clue about is there are a couple of suriviving references where people are compared to Arthur, as a sort of general standard for heroism and skill in fighting. We also start to see references to names that are clearly later the various knights, once you adjust for Welsh->English naming - Gawain, Bedivere, Kay. Also a reference to Arthur as emperor, and in a poem called
The Triads of the Isle of Britain, a bunch of references to sort of common lore of the time about Arthur.
A pause for summaryAt this point, we can see there's a lot of war/battle/death references (but that is, well, pretty much what the suriviving sources talk about at all.) We also have references to well-known and powerful women (note how Morgan's referred to as lady-ruler).
And we can see that a lot of the core bits of story go back a fair bit.
Culhwch and OlwenOur surviving manuscripts here are 14th century, but the actual form of the work is 11th century or so. Basically, young noble Culhwch wants to marry Olwen, her father opposes it (largely because he will die when she marries) and sets impossible tasks, Culhwch goes to his cousin Arthur and gets some Really Excellent Help, and you have a story. (Also a very long list of genealogical naming relationships, but some people find that sort of thing soothing in a narrative.)
At this point, I sort of have to recommend the entire chapter on this in TRoA, because it's just sort of epically descriptive and awesome. (What else can you say about an essay that includes the line "Ethical subtlety cannot be ascribed to a tale in which King Arthur whacks a witch into two tubs of blood."?) But this story in the Mabinogi also refers to Mabon, son of Modron, a lot of cultural baggage hung about with skulls and other bones, a bunch of Welsh Otherworld description and analysis, and a bunch of small references to other parts of the Arthurian mythos.
Geoffrey of MonmouthHis
History of the Kings of Britain (written about 1138) has a lot of stuff in it. The trick is, that a lot of what he talks about doesn't appear in other sources. Which is sort of a problem.
He's also writing Trojan fanfic: he ascribes the foundation of the Britons as a nation to Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, yes, that one from Troy, that then culminates in the might and majesty of Arthur, and claims that he's translating a book that no one ever mentions anywhere else into Latin. If you stop thinking of Geoffrey as a historian, and start thinking of him as a fanfic writer writing an alternate universe with the missing gaps of the canon filled in, but actually, he's not all that bad at research when there's research to be used, you'll be in about the right place.
What's in Geoffrey? The birth of Merlin. Red and white dragons fighting each other. Arthur as a destined figure, the child of Uther and Igerna (Igraine) with the latter being fooled into thinking Uther is her husband. The introduction of the idea of noble love or courtly love that shapes a lot of the later medieval pieces.
Some other sources This is the point at which I suspect many people are about to be going "Wait, there's all this stuff, and we never hear about these names?" Some people are Big Name Fans, and some people aren't, and often the ones who aren't, their stories drop out of the general cultural gestalt. Which is unfortunate.
- Wace, in
Roman De Brut has a much more dramatic narrative and humourous and less warlike take - he also includes a bunch of stuff about Merlin. He's also the first person to mention the Round Table. He is vastly more interested in the people than in the fighting. (I'd also argue that while Culwch and Olwen has a lot of brutal violence in it, it also has a bunch of very interesting characterisation, mind you.)
- Layamon's
Brut, is the first full account of the Arthur tale in English - it's a 32K line poem that uses Wace and Bede as its primary sources (but since Wace used a lot of Geoffrey, there's a bunch of Geoffrey by inference.)
The French insert a Mary SueAt about this point, we get a flowering of French Arthurian stuff, notably including Chrétian de Troyes, a bit of Marie de France, and various other sources. As Darkhawk has noted before, and want to give her credit for, this is where Lancelot shows up, pretty much as a heroic Mary Sue self-insert.
(Mary Sue, for people not familiar with the fanfic term, is basically the character who can do everything, whom everyone loves (and often falls madly and passionately for), whose mere presence in the story forces all the gravity to reform around her, rather than the main characters.
More at Wikipedia.)
However, where everyone up to this point claimed (and was more or less believed) to be writing history (yes, even with the dragons), Chrétian de Troyes is very clearly writing Story not History.
It's important to remember, though, that the literary conventions of the time are still more about allusion and symbolism and so on rather than pure narrative, so you get a lot of scenes that are alluding to other scenes, or specific cultural references, or making a particular moral point, not just advancing the plot or the development of the characters. (Basically, do not apply 20th century literary analysis to medieval story: it will not end well.)
I also note that Marie de France is pretty much tidy proof that stories centering on women (and complicated women) not only existed but flourished in this time and place.
Tristan and IseultWe now enter a rather odd spin-off work of the Arthurian myth, which involves the same sort of love-denied thing that turns up with Lancelot and Gwenevere, only with somewhat more reason (a love potion) driving it, and a lot more complexity of implication in some ways. (I admit bias here: I prefer Tristan and Iseult to most Arthur stuff, partly because I particularly adore Béroul's telling and partly because you get more 'what's going on between them' than you do in a lot of Arthur and Gwenevere stuff.)
What's interesting in this spin-off and its related fanfic, is that you get glimpses of Arthur's court, and of the general courtly structure of the fictional world that we're now talking about (because really, nothing quite like what's in the stories probably ever existed). There's several takes on the story - Béroul (who is less courtly) and Thomas of Britain (who is more so) being two of the main ones.
Some more other sources I'm skimming through here, because space. But basically, you then get some more stuff about Merlin, which gets much more explicitly Christian Allegorical (the Prose Merlin, by Robert de Boron, and the Suite du Merlin whose authorship is a bit more complicated), some more stuff about Gawain, and so on
Gawain and the Green KnightThis is one of the classics - it's still often taught in translation in high school English classes, because it's reasonably accessible. It's written in a dialect of Middle English around the time of Chaucer, but it's a dialect that didn't survive, and that basically, people can't read without extensive training. (Unlike Chaucer, where speakers of modern English can sort of muddle through with a good glossary).
It was written by someone known as the Pearl Poet, for the author's other major work. (I note that Tolkien translated both of these, and they're very readable translations.)
Anyway, it features magic (the Green Knight's head gets chopped off, he is not dead), the green girdle, the magical lady of his castle, and a bunch of complicated allergory. It's a really complicated sort of story: you can read it as allegory, as fantasy, or as realistic narrative of relationships, and all three work (once you allow for the fantasy elements, anyway.) And the lady in question is every bit as full a character as her husband (or, for that matter, Gawain).
Gawain, entirely puzzled for most of it, which really isn't that surprising. There are other stories of this kind out there: Gawain seems a particularly popular figure for additional fanfic.
This is also the point at which you get a lot of the German Grail-quest stories starting to show up, and they're their own weird little eddy of the fanfic universe, picking up on this crossover story between this Arthurian stuff and that Jesus of Nazareth story from a long while back.
Malory's Morte D'ArthurThe first thing to understand about Malory is that he's relying heavily on the French sources, with all their self-insertion. The second is that - as best we can tell -
the Thomas Malory who wrote the thing was by no means upholding the standards of chivalary in pretty much any dimension. What it is interesting for is that you get an entire cycle of stories in one place, and that - because this is the telling most accessible to people who read modern English, a lot of other stuff got based on it. (Notably, T.H. White's
The Once And Future King, but also many many many others.)
The eight parts are:
1. "From the Marriage of King Uther unto King Arthur that Reigned After Him and Did Many Battles"
2. "The Noble Tale Between King Arthur and Lucius the Emperor of Rome" (Arthur against the Romans)
3. "The Tale of Sir Launcelot du Lac"
4. "The Tale of Sir Gareth" (who has been Sir Not Appearing In This Summary. There are lots of those.)
5. "The Book of Sir Tristrams de Lyons" (Tristran and Isolde)
6. “The Noble Tale of the Sangreal” (the Grail quest - and I think this is the first time you see much in English about this, though don't hold me to that)
7. "Sir Launcelot and Queen Gwynevere" (what it says on the tin)
8. "Le Morte D'Arthur" (Arthur's death, and the breaking of the table.
I quote these to point something out - that when we're talking about Arthuriana, there are this *vast* number of only barely-related narratives that interlock and contradict and go different places at different times that have all turned into this conglomeration. Most later authors (as well as the earlier ones) just focus on their favourite season or trilogy, as it were, and often entirely ignore other parts of the plot continuity entirely, or do things that would make later parts of the narrative Just Not Work.
A few concluding notes: I am not going to get into the post-Malory bits, because this is already entirely long enough, but a few other general points of interest.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail is, as I mentioned, actually is remarkably accurate to the pre-Malory Arthurian stories. (And Pythonite
Terry Jones is actually also an author of a number of books on medieval history and related topics.)
- Any Arthurian movie with Sean Connery in it has problematic stuff on the Arthurian side. I have *no* idea how that works. (I generally like Connery as an actor, just - *every Arthurian movie he did* just sort of sucks.)
- Post-Malory stuff is, well, heavily influenced by Malory. How quickly people forget their roots.