King Arthur Essay -- Essays Papers

top executive ArthurIf the name of King Arthur is mentioned, I suppose what comes to mind is not so much one person as a complete array of characters and themes, a montage so to speak. Of course we do think first of the King, the magnificent monarch of a glorified or idealized medieval historicalm. But we think also of his Queen, of the fair and wayward Guinevere, we think of his enchanter, Merlin, who presided over his birth, who set him on the throne, who established him there in the early and traveled years of his reign. There were the knights of the Round Table, vowed to the highest ideals of chivalry, and the greatest of them, Sir Lancelot, who, of course, has a tragic love affair with the Queen. There is another great love invoice, that of Tristan and Isolde, the theme of Wagners Opera. We think of the place where these citizenry assembled, Camelot, Arthurs magnificent, personal castle and capital and then, there are stranger things the story of the quest for the Holy Gra il, giving a spiritual dimension to the whole story and there is magic. Not only the magic of Merlin but the magic also of his strange, ambiguous student, the women, the enchantress, Morgan LaFay. And at the end is the tragedy of Arthurs downfall, his passing away at the isle of Avalon and another mystery that we do not know what really happened to him that he was said to be immortal, that one day he would return and reestablish the golden age in his country. I suppose, the version we know best is the one that was composed in the 15th century. This is the great English version of the story, compiled bulge of earlier versions by the creative genius of a rather mysterious and cryptic figure, the knight, Sir Thomas Malory. But the story doesnt end there. The whole thing revives in the time of Queen Victoria, with Tennysons Idylls of the King. As a result of this great work on the Arthurian Cycle by Englands Poet Laureate, the story became known to everybody. Other poems, novels and p lays in our own time, and almost a rebirth of it yet again in T. H. Whites novels, The Sword and the Stone and The Once and Future King and other plays and musicals and films based on these works. There are Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Stewart, Marian Bradley, Pat Godwin and others, who have gone off on another line and tried to imagine the Britain of King Arthur as it might really have been. What I have personally ... ... handle that than the resplendent kingdom that we see in a film like Camelot or First Knight. Well, of course, you may say Ive been rather begging the question here. What was the real setting? And the modern novelists Ive spoken of, have been moved to their work partly by the fact that there is a very slowly growing awareness of what it was and when it was, through historical study and through the work of archaeologists. And if we look at that period we can ask, and I think this is a better way of putting the question, not did King Arthur exist, but how did this lege nd originate, what fact(s) is it rooted in? Then, of course, we must(prenominal) ask what period? Well the medieval writers with all their fancy did know, more or less, that they were being a bit vague. They dont give us many real dates but they place King Arthur somewhere in the period from about 450 A.D. to 550 A.D. That, of course, is longer than any one man could have reigned, but they see him as living somewhere about that time, and they were right. This, in fact, is where the story we know began its career, but the foundations for the medieval romances had been laid a little before, in the old legends about Arthur.