An Arthurian Tapestry: Essays in Memory of Lewis Thorpe

by Kenneth Varty (Editor)

402 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the essays in here are very interesting and relevant, some less so. I picked it up for the essay on Loholt, which was very helpful. The font is awful though, in this edition. It looks like it was done on a typewriter, and it's pretty hard to read...

[Zac Hawkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Purchased sight unseen at one of my local second hand emporiums. Thorpe is one of those figures in folkloric and mythological scholarly circles that most will have encountered yet few will acknowledge, which remains a great disservice. Thorpe is largely responsible for vast swathes of contemporary Arthurian translations, his texts being used as the formative medium for which much of both the Penguin and Oxford libraries on the subject where derived from.
This here is a large gazette like publication in memory of his passing, and its physicality is mostly why I can't rate it higher. It appears to have been printed on a dot matrix printer and crudely glued together at the seams. That being said, it's clearly something of a small print run publication so I can't bemoan it too harshly for its somewhat unpleasant erudite qualities.
The actual contents itself is a trove of essays on the esoterica of the Arthurian canon, folkloric origins and contemporary readings, the homoerotic poetics that do so speckle the assorted tales, the power of the canons prose on historical tyrants and ethnostate monsters. Its a real find, and worth a read for anyone looking to expand their understanding of Arthuriana from a critical perspective.