EXTRACTS: Frank Bellamy's King Arthur and his Knights: The Complete Adventure © 2008 The Book Palace (116 PAGES in Full edition)

4 FRANK BELLAMY between c.1160 and 1190: Erec et Enide, Cligés, Le chevalier de la charrette (about Lancelot), Yvain, Le Chevalier au lion and the unfinished Perceval, Le conte del graal . The latter marks the earliest appearance of the Fisher King and the quest to seek the Holy Grail; its sudden ending led other writers to pick up the story, a group of verses known as the Four Continuations. Chrétien was also responsible for introducing the story of Lancelot and his affair with Guinevere and, in passing, the first mention of Camelot. According to Chrétien, Lancelot was raised by a water fay; his early life was expanded upon by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, a lay priest who discovered the French work in the luggage of Hugh de Morville, a hostage for Richard the Lionheart when he was imprisoned in 1192-94. It is believed that Von Zatzikhoven’s work – Lanzelet – was written in 1193 or not long after. The author expands upon Lancelot’s childhood and relates how he is taken by the Lady of the Lake and raised in her magical kingdom. Perlesvaus , a continuation of Chrétien’s Perceval written some time between 1200 and 1210, establishes Lancelot as one of the knights who search for the Holy Grail. The story of Sir Tristan may have begun is a Pictish legend but was popularly retold in French in two versions by Thomas of Britain and Béroul, both under the title Tristan . These were expanded by German poets: the former by Gottfried von Strassburg ( Tristan ) and the latter by Eilhart von Oberge ( Tristrant ). The affair between Tristan (or Tristram) and Iseult (or Isolde) – almost certainly an influence on the romance between Lancelot and Guinevere – was retold in the Tristan en prose (c.1240), which was more overtly Arthurian. Tristan joins the Knights of the Round Table and embarks on his own quest for the Holy Grail, an interpolation based on the Queste del Saint Graal from the Vulgate Cycle. Earlier, French poet Robert de Boron had penned Joseph d’Arimathe (c.1200), which relates how Joseph of Armathea attracted a company of followers who take the Holy Grail to Britain. The search for the Grail forms the major part of the Vulgate Cycle, a series of anonymous linked prose stories, partly based on Robert de Boron’s verses. The first three (c.1210) mostly concerned Lancelot and the Grail ( Lancelot propre and Queste del Saint Graal ) and the death of Arthur ( Mort Artu ); the series was added to in the 1230s with Estoire del Sain Graal and Estoire de Merlin, the latter relating the story of Merlin and the early adventures of Arthur which was subsequently expanded upon in Suite de Merlin . The Vulgate Cycle brought together the various Arthurian stories and added greatly to them, introducing the sword in the stone, a test to establish Arthur’s fitness to rule, revealing how Arthur obtained Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake and how the sword was returned to the lake, and how Arthur has unwitting incest with his half-sister Morgause and sires Mordred (as his name was by then more commonly known). The most famous of all Arthurian works was another attempt to bring together a comprehensive collection of Arthurian tales. Its author, Sir Thomas Malory (c.1415-1471), was a justice of the peace, an MP elected five times, and was knighted in 1441. In 1450, he and a group of men attempted to ambush the Duke of Buckingham and over the next 18 months he was accused of extortion, theft, rape, cattle rustling, robbery and criminal damage. Over the next few years he was in and out of jail – sometimes bailed, sometimes escaping – before being pardoned. In 1468 he was again jailed, probably in the Tower of London, without formal charge for plotting against the new king, Edward IV. Although freed by the Lancastrians in 1470, he died soon after. Written whilst in jail, Malory’s manuscript was entitled The hoole booke of kyng Arthur & of his noble knyghtes of the rounde table . When it was finally printed in 1485 by William Caxton, it was erroneously given the title of the final section, Le Morte Darthur . Much of the work was based on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Brittonum and the later Vita Merlini (in which Geoffrey reveals Merlin’s later life and introduces Morgan Le Fey amongst others to the Arthurian legends) and the Vulgarian Cycle. Although Malory added little of his own, he did influence all future retellings of the story of Arthur. “Malory made his story one of the rise and fall of a great king and his kingdom,” says P. J. C. Field. 4 “The symbolic power provided by this, by the innumerable quests and adventures contained in the book, and by the half-strange, half-familiar world of chivalric romance, reinforced by a transparent colloquial style that made events seem to stand free of any controlling author, quickly made it popular … In the next two centuries different tastes meant that the few readers interested in the ‘matter of Britain’ mostly looked to Geoffrey of Monmouth; but nineteenth-century medievalism raised the status of Malory’s book to previously unimagined heights: Dante Gabriel Rossetti put it second only to the Bible. The twentieth century has seen it less admired but perhaps even more influential, affecting the media of films, cartoons, and computer games as well as established literary genres.” Down the centuries, the Arthurian legends have been revived many times. Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (1842) and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ‘King Arthur’ (1848) helped raise their profile in the nineteenth century; J. T. Knowles retold Malory’s work for boys in The Story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table (1862) and Mark Twain satirized the legend in A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur (1889).