Perceforest: The Prehistory of King Arthur's Britain

by Unknown, Nigel Bryant (Translator)

Perceforest is one of the largest and certainly the most extraordinary of the late Arthurian romances. Justly described as -an encyclopaedia of 14th-century chivalry- and -a mine of folkloric motifs-, it is the subject of rapidly increasing attention and research. The author of Perceforest draws on Alexander romances, Roman histories and medieval travel writing (not to mention oral tradition, as he gives, for example, the distinctly racy first written version of the Sleeping Beauty story), to create a remarkable prehistory of King Arthur's Britain. It begins with the arrival in Britain of Alexander the Great. His follower Perceforest, the first of Arthur's Greek ancestors, is made king of the island and finds it infested by the -evil clan- of Darnant the Enchanter. Magic plays a dominant part in the adventures which follow, as Perceforest ousts Darnant's clan despite their supernatural powers. He founds the knightly order of the -Franc Palais-, an ideal of chivalric civilisation prefiguring the Round Table of Arthur and indeed that of Edward III. But that civilisation is, the author shows, all too fragile. The vast imaginative scope of Perceforest/I> is matched by its variety of tone, ranging from tales of love and enchantment to bawdy comedy, from glamorous tournaments to unvarnished descriptions of the havoc wrought by war. And the author's surprising view of pagan gods and the coming of Christianity is as fascinating as the prominence he gives to women and his understanding of how the world of chivalry should work. Because of its enormous length - it runs to over a million words - Nigel Bryant has provided a version which gives a complete account of every episode, linking extensive passages of translation, to make a manageable and highly readable version (including the previously unpublished Books Five and Six), of this remarkable and largely unexplored work. Nigel Bryant has worked as a producer for BBC Radio 3 and as head of drama at Marlborough College. This is his fourth major translation of medieval Arthurian romance.

Genres: Arthurian, Medieval, Fiction

640 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 1345

About the author

Books can be attributed to "Unknown" when the author or editor (as applicable) is not known and cannot be discovered. If at all possible, list at least one actual author or editor for a book instead of using "Unknown".

Books whose authorship is purposefully withheld should be attributed instead to Anonymous.

Reviews

[Bryn Greenwood]

So this book ... this collection ... this doorstopper ... it reminds me of the DeBruce grain elevator in Wichita, Kansas. Small grain elevators are frequently painted white, which is lovely and picturesque. Once you start painting a grain elevator like DeBruce (which is over half a mile long), however, you're looking at having to hire a full time painting crew that just circles elevator year after year, because by the time you finish one circuit, it needs to be painted again. So DeBruce is just bare cement.

Similarly, Perceforest is the kind of book that when you get to the end, you might as well flip to the front of the book and start reading. It's massive, it's complicated, it's full of so many characters and stories and layers, and it's all in really tiny typeface.

I still recommend it if you're into medieval romance, but I'm just warning you.

[Ihsan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Put away your Tolkien and other faux-medievalia--this is the real thing! Perceforest is a massive, incredible work, written in the early 1330s, that purports to be a history of pre-Arthurian Brtitain. It's also one of most overlooked books of world literature. And boy is it wild! This is an Arthurian legend avant Arthur, with lengthy guest appearances by Alexander the Great (who hands over England to King Perceforest) and Julius Caesar (who jousts with knights on horseback!). Did I mention it also has the first written version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a Fairy Queen, a homicidal one-year-old born with a crossbow in his hand, a four-legged hairy fish with the head of an ox, a fallen angel who enjoys pranking his human friends, and more enchantments than you can shake a magic wand at? This monster of a book delivers a heady and vast mix of chivalry, folklore, adventure, and romance.

If you're familiar with the French Arthurian romances, you can see how they inspired the author of Perceforest--there are many echoes of the Prose Tristan and the Grail sagas (including an appearance by the Questing Beast!), but they never feel derivative. And whereas the Grail romances can be emotionally austere and psychotically anti-sex, the anonymous author of Perceforest is a good-humored, sometimes bawdy fellow with an encyclopedic mind and an endless talent for remixing his sources in startling ways. He leads you through the history of several generations of kings, knights, and damsels (the great-great-great-great grandparents of King Arthur, Lancelot, Merlin, and so forth) and shows the kingdom of Perceforest weathering its share of cataclysms and trials, before he finally bridges his book with the History of the Holy Grail from the Lancelot Vulgate. The author runs out of steam toward the end, but his book is never tiresome--I wouldn't have minded if it was twice as long, and I was surprised at how well-structured and calibrated Perceforest is, given its incredible length.

The original version of Perceforest was written in Old French and spread across six volumes, the smallest being longer than Moby Dick! This English translation by Nigel Bryant weighs in at 780 pages, but don't be scared--it's a brisk read. Arthurian fans everywhere owe Bryant thanks for pulling off a remarkable feat--instead of doing the expected thing (translating a series of extracts connected with bare-bone summary), he recounts every worthwhile incident and interesting line of dialogue while summarizing the less essential connective passages and repetitive bits. No characters or events have been left out, and you never feel like you've missed a thing. (Actually, it sometimes hard to keep track of the hundreds of knights and their progeny.)

This is the first version of Perceforest in English, and it's the most important translation of an Arthurian romance since the editions of the Lancelot-Grail released in the late 1990s. It's also the last original Arthurian saga created in medieval times (Malory's work is a compilation). Though this edition is costly, you can't afford to miss it if you love magical adventures with chivalrous knights on marvelous quests. Here is your passport to the world of medieval adventure--take it!

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This epic work was written in French around 1340, but not published until 1528. It's basically a prequel to the King Arthur legends, and when I say it's a prequel, it begins over a millennium before Arthur's birth, building on the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The stories of Arthur contain a lot of anachronisms, transplanting the then-modern idea of chivalry and courtly behavior to the sixth century, and this brings it back even further. The translation is not a full one, as it's a very long work. That's probably a good thing overall, as the descriptions of tournaments felt overdone even in the abridgement, but there is a part of me that feels guilty for not reading an entire thing. Both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar are characters in Perceforest, the former arriving in Britain when he's blown way off course on his way to India, and finding it in a state of disrepair. He appoints as king a righteous man named Betis, who is renamed Perceforest, essentially meaning "piercer of the forest," due to his killing of the evil enchanter Darnant who lives in the forest and has given birth to a bunch of children via rape. Perceforest's brother Gadifer is declared King of Scotland. These new kings introduce monotheism and an order of knights similar to the Round Table, called the Franc Palais. The story of the order's establishment involves a guy named Verminex from the Isle of Vermin, an excessively proud knight who sits at the table without permission, and is suddenly killed by a hand holding a sword. Perceforest's son falls in love with a Roman woman who turns out to be a spy, and leads to Caesar's invasion of Britain. The son's descendant, a hairy, bear-like man, becomes a Roman Senator and masterminds Caesar's assassination, giving the other conspirators writing styluses made from pieces of the spear Caesar used to kill Perceforest to use in retribution. And since Caesar wasn't born until over 200 years after Alexander's death, that's a really long lifespan. It's interesting to see how fiction portrays historical figures, and this writer seems to love the ancient Greeks and hate the Romans. There's also a fairy queen, a trickster demon who plays pranks but is ultimately helpful, a fight against fish-knights, and the first known version of the Sleeping Beauty story. It ends around the time of Jesus' resurrection, and a lot of characters seem to already know about him even before he's born. Perceforest's descendants lose the throne and go into hiding, but King Arthur is a descendant of theirs. Many other Arthurian characters are descendants of people introduced in this story as well. It's basically a way to set everything up for Arthur, but it creates plenty of its own mythology.

[joan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It feels like a good selection of episodes from the whole saga. Each is briefly introduced so you get a sense of the multi generational whole, which seems like it would be closely worked and highly finished, and not any sort of hotchpotch of stories. Looks like there’s quite a bit more sex than is in Chretien or Malory, and some more Celtic/Mabinogion elements, but otherwise very much in genre.

Long enough to be good value on its own, and not too long to be a good advert for the full version.

[Lulu]

between 1330 and 1345, although the most complete version of the four extant texts, Manuscript C, written by David Aubert around 1459–1460, is generally accepted as a revision made for Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy. However, a 2013 analysis by Christine Ferlampin-Acher proposes an alternative hypothesis that Manuscript C is, in fact, the original

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[Graham Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A prequel of sorts to the French version of the Matter of Britain, Perceforest is the story of the ancestors of Arthur, Merlin and Lancelot du Lac.

[Nadine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read the original summer 2022.
Read the selected stories in the above dates