17th April 2024: The Passing of Arthur

This month, Morgan Lee will be leading our meeting and we will be reading and discussing two different tellings of the death of King Arthur. Both texts – Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’ (1885) and Sir Thomas Malory’s telling of the same taken from the end of ‘Sir Mordred’ (1485) – are introduced by Morgan below. The meeting will be held in Rm 2.46 of the John Percival Building from 1-3pm on 17th April.

Tennyson’s imagination was captured by Arthurian myth, and particularly the figure of King Arthur. According to Hallam Tennyson, his father considered Arthur the ‘greatest of all poetical subjects’.[1] Through much of the nineteenth century, Tennyson published several poems based on the legend, including ‘Morte d’Arthur’, ‘Sir Galahad’, and ‘The Lady of Shalott’, before publishing the twelve-volume collection the Idylls of the King. The proliferation of Tennyson’s Arthurian poems in Victorian culture and literary imagination has led him to be dubbed by David Staines as the ‘father of the Arthurian renaissance’.[2] The Idylls is a collection of blank verse poems which were published in various sets between 1859 and 1885, retelling the myth of Arthur’s birth unto his death. The collection was very popular with Victorians, particularly Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert who received a dedication within the collection following his death in 1861.

Tennyson’s primary source for his Arthurian subjects was Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1485). Tennyson stated that ‘The vision of an ideal Arthur as I have drawn him […] had come upon me when, little more than a boy, I first lighted upon Malory’.[3] Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur was finished in either 1469 or 1470 and first printed in 1485 by William Caxton. The seventh print edition of Malory came in 1816, and this was the edition that Tennyson owned in several copies. Tennyson made the Idylls in twelve individual poems to replicate the twelve books in Malory’s corpus and scholars including Christopher Ricks, have extensively noted the linguistic allusions and echoes throughout the Idylls. However, Tennyson’s and Malory’s portrayals of King Arthur are distinct from one another, not least in their different mediums and language.

The Arthurian legend is one that has repeatedly returned since the sixth century and still haunts British literature and culture. Different versions of King Arthur have been created in various mediums for centuries and each version of the narrative can be considered spectral as the ‘story returns over and over, […] in different registers, each reflecting another perspective entangled in a skein of cultural interests’.[4] My research examines Tennyson’s portrayal of his Arthur as the ‘phantom king’ and how he re-models Malory’s version to reflect Victorian cultural interests. Tennyson sought to make ‘the old legends his own, [restore] the idealism, and [infuse] into them a spirit of modern thought and an ethical significance, setting his characters in a rich and varied landscape’.[5] The Idylls is haunted by its intertextual connections to Malory, but also is occupied with reproducing the myth for a Victorian audience. Given my interest in spectrality and return, the MEMORI session will focus on how Malory and Tennyson portray the death of their respective King Arthurs, in Malory’s ‘Sir Mordred’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Passing of Arthur’.

The texts follow overall a similar structure in which Arthur’s Round Table has fallen into disarray in the wake of Guinevere and Lancelot’s revealed affair. Knights have turned from Arthur to follow Mordred, and the King and the last of his loyal knights are preparing to go to battle. King Arthur has a dream of his late nephew, Gawain/Gawayne, who warns him of his impending death in battle. Despite the warning, Arthur goes to fight and whilst in combat with Mordred, Arthur kills him, but is also receives a mortal blow. The half-dead Arthur is carried from the battlefield by Sir Bedivere/Bedewere (and his brother Sir Lucan in the Malory) to a nearby chapel.

Once away from the battle, the dying Arthur commands Bedivere/Bedewere to take his sword, Excalibur, and throw it into a nearby body of water. The last knight of the Round Table leaves, but he cannot face throwing the sword, so he hides it and returns to Arthur. When Arthur asks for a description of how the sword sank below the water, Bedivere lies that the sword simply sank. The wounded King accuses Bedivere of betrayal and sends him out, three times in total, until Bedivere eventually obeys his King and Excalibur is caught by a hand from the water. Bedivere returns to Arthur, who knowing he is dying, asks the knight to carry him to the waterside. A barge or ship appears bearing three Queens and Arthur is taken aboard, and the boat sails away.

Whilst the two texts follow this same plot, there are significant differences between Tennyson’s King Arthur and Malory’s. What my research and the seminar will consider is how Tennyson re-models Arthur and his death differently to Malory. In particular, the presence of ghosts within the two texts, and how the cultural expectations surrounding masculinity and war affects the presentation of Arthur as a king and knight.

Areas for discussion:

• What are the main similarities between Malory’s and Tennyson’s portrayal of King Arthur’s final battle and death?
• What are the differences?
• How is King Arthur portrayed as a king in Malory and Tennyson’s accounts?
• How do the two describe their battle scenes?
• What is the significance of the appearance of Gawain/Gawayne’s ghost?

Written by Morgan Lee.

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[1] Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir Volume 1, Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 125.

[2] David Staines, ‘Tennyson’ in The Arthurian Encyclopaedia, ed. Norris J. Lacy (New York: The Boydell Press, 1986), p. 543.

[3] Christopher Ricks, The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes. Vol. 3, ed. Christopher Ricks, Longman Annotated English Poets (Harlow: Longman, 1987), p. 259.

[4] Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 4.

[5] Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir Volume 2, Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 122.

21st February 2024: The Awntyrs off Arthure

This month, Margaret Finlay will be leading our meeting and we will be reading the Gawain romance, Awntyrs off Arthure, introduced by Margaret below. The meeting will be held in Rm 2.46 of the John Percival Building from 1-3pm on 21st February.

The Awntyrs off Arthure is a late fourteenth century or early fifteenth century romance set near the border of England and Scotland. The romance, which survives in four manuscripts, centres on the tensions of geopolitics and the morality of chivalrous and courtly life. Variously described as two separate romances roughly sewn together or else a finely crafted diptych, the Awntyrs poses many questions to the reader through its structure. What place does the supernatural have in the real and violent world of medieval life? Who owns land and by what authority?

The Awntyrs has many classic tropes of medieval romance, and especially Arthurian romance: there is a supernatural occurrence in a body of water in a forest, a knight comes to challenge Arthur’s court when they have sat down to feast. Both these tropes, however, are troubled. Despite Tarn Wathleyne already having enough supernatural connotations by being a lake in the middle of a forest, the ghost of Gaynor’s mother appears in fire and water, and warns Gaynor of the coming ruin of the Round Table. Where is Arthur to receive this message, and why is it heralded in such a disturbance? Further, Galeron’s appearance in this text breaks the romance barrier between literature and fiction: in his claim to the Scottish lands Gawain claims as his own, he troubles the romance trope with the real political troubles on the Anglo-Scottish border of the period. How does the author contend with bringing in the geopolitics of 1380-1415 to Arthur’s (fictional) England?

In my own research, I focus on Gawain as protagonist in this text as a representation of the socio-political moment. In the first adventure of the Awntyrs, when Gawain and Gaynor are separated from King Arthur’s hunting party in Inglewood Forest, the knight is present at a private and vulnerable meeting between Gaynor and her revenant mother who warns her daughter, and Gawain, of earthly greed and excess. His chivalry here is shown both in his bravery in confronting the ghostly corpse face-to-face and in his care for both his Queen and her mother. In the second adventure, Gawain takes up a quest offered by the stranger knight Galeron. When this Scotsman enters the hall to demand a battle with one of Arthur’s knights over rights to lands he claims as his own, Gawain is the first and only of Arthur’s knights to offer to engage. When he wins the gruesome battle, he generously relinquishes the contested lands to Galeron after Gawain receives the dukedom of two counties of south-west Wales, lordship of two cities in Ireland, and a number of impressive castles (664-72).^[1] Possibly in response to rising taxes to cover costs of waging war or even the excesses of Richard II’s court, in the first part of the Awntyrs Gawain listens to and is chastened by the warning and prophecy of the revenant against greed and excess, demonstrating his idealised character. Indeed, the moral and spiritual lessons given by the revenant speak to the late 1300s gathering storm of religious upheaval. It is impossible to tell whether the author of this text was speaking for or against the protestant Lollard religious rebellion of this period, but the text appears concerned with earthly excesses and the greed of the nobility. Later, in the second part of the Awntyrs, this concern over earthly greed reappears more subtly: Gawain’s immediate decision to grant his northern lands to Galeron goes against the assumed desire for power and status through the accumulation of lands and lordships – instead, Gawain seems content with his new duchies of Glamorganshire and Carmarthenshire, and is at liberty to cede his previous holdings of Galloway and other contested Northern English and Scottish land. It is the contest between Galeron and Gawain in the second part of the Awntyrs that demonstrates the immediate concerns of the Anglo-Scottish tension in the second half of the fourteenth century. The violence and persistence of Galeron, the Scottish knight, and Gawain, the English knight, as they fight each other to claim lordship over borderlands mirrors the on-going skirmishes and violent incursions from both the English and Scottish military into enemy territory for the right to these contested lands. It is in this charged moment of religious upheaval and violence on the Anglo-Scottish border that this text places Gawain as a focal point in the ‘awntyrs’ of this border romance.

Areas for discussion:

• What place does the supernatural have in the real and violent world of medieval life?
• Who owns land and by what authority?
• How does the author contend with bringing in the geopolitics of 1380-1415 to Arthur’s (fictional) England?
• Why is Gawain’s foregrounded in a text ostensibly about the adventures of Arthur?
• What is the purpose of the diptych structure, if any? Do the two halves seem connected at all?

Written by Margaret Finlay.

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[1] For a discussion of the more oblique names of places in the grant that Gawain is given, see Andrew Breeze, ‘“The Awntyrs off Arthure”, Caerphilly, Oysterlow, and Wexford’, Arthuriana, 9.4 (1999), 63-68 and Rosamund Allen, ‘Place-Names in The Awntyrs Off Arthure: Corruption, Conjecture, Coincidence’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, Arthurian Studies LVII (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004) pp. 181-98.