Arthur, Rex
In addition to The Iliad, The Odyssey, and the Bible, it seems to me that all Western cultural tradition hinges upon the Arthurian myths. The world of letters and of popular entertainment are largely built upon Arthurian references, assumptions, retellings, adaptations, revisions, and unconscious imitation.
King Arthur might thus be considered the hub. A sort of centrally located Round Table, if you will. This can be considered a temporal hub as well. The stories of Arthur fit within a narrative continuum, each referring back to prior mythic cycles. I mentioned Homer’s poems. Go ahead and throw in the rest of Greek mythology. Then add Roman. The Arthurian cycle picks up from there, growing with mainland European accretions. Then Carolingian legends spin off. Later the chansons de geste build on all the preceding, creating a tottering narrative that grows ever more fantastic and precarious until Cervantes brings the whole creaky edifice crashing to ruins like Don Quixote landing a lucky lance strike on a dilapidated windmill.
But Cervantes couldn’t keep Arthur down for long. Whether or not there was a historical basis for King Arthur, a single Artorius or Ambrosius, or a portmanteau figure combining Riothamus, Cerdic, Urien of Rheged, et. al., is a question for others to answer. For the Western world’s collective imagination, Arthur exists, the same as Robin Hood, whether he actually lived or not. Mark Twain sent his Connecticut Yankee back in time to meet the old king. Mary Stewart, Gillian Bradshaw, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Bernard Cornwell, Stephen R. Lawhead, T.H. White, and even John Steinbeck have all found Arthur irresistible. Numerous filmmakers and television producers heard the same call of the Questing Beast, with varying results.
Why do we care? Why are we interested? Here’s my uneducated stab in the dark. Arthur fights on despite a preordained doom. He is taken to Avalon and there awaits a rebirth. His legend impacts us in that part of our psyche that we tend to shy away from: our mortality. Arthur’s story is the recognition of the inevitability of death and the simultaneous unwillingness to accept it. And in that manner he is each of us.
But, what do I know? I write stuff like Under Strange Suns and the Semi-Autos and Sorcery series. Buy them, read them, ignore the finite nature of existence for a while.
