Knight Rankings

[toysdream]

Taking a minute out of my post-Alternative Press Expo catchup to post something that, as usual, is strictly for my own amusement.

I think I've gotten everything I need out of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, but having read the beginning and end of the book, I'm still slogging my way through the very tedious middle section. (Nominally this revolves

Comments

[kassto]

I prefer Rosemary Sutcliff's take on the Arthur story - which places him in historical context, as a tribal chieftain who manages to unite the petty kingdoms of post Roman Britain to fight off the invading Saxons - for a while. Her book is Sword at Sunset, but the prequel, The Lantern Bearers, which is about the Romans pulling out of Britain and what got left behind, is even better.

[toysdream]

I'll have to take a look at that sometime. The notion of Arthur as a post-Roman holdout seems to be pretty popular right now, but the recent movie based on that idea was a dreary blur, and I'm not sure how much it really adds to the saga's already convoluted themes.

One of the striking things about Malory's story is that it features virtually no external antagonists - first Arthur is fighting against other British kings, then his knights fight against each other, and the only outside invasion is ironically carried out by a resurgent Roman Empire. I'm sure that's totally ahistorical, but it seems like the recent revisionist takes are all but reversing this premise. Perhaps the Arthur legend is flexible enough to encompass every imaginable variation. :-)

[greboguru]

I think I should be embarassed to admit that the bulk of my knowledge of the Arhturian legends comes from the comic book "Camelot 3000." Although my father's constant assertion that the Grail represents Consciousness, and Toysdream's own fascinating analysis of the (remarkably broad) Arhthurian mythos, have gone a long way towards supplementing the Brian Bollandry.

[toysdream]

Hookles and I just re-read Camelot 3000, and it was interesting revisiting it after all this time. Personally, I found the story a bit ludicrous in hindsight, and the heroes terribly passive. Arthur never gets around to unveiling his oft-promised plan to fight the alien invaders; instead he spends all his time fending off assassination attempts and getting married, and eventually defeats the bad guys pretty much by accident. But The Hook made some good points about the way it plays with the Arthurian mythos, and found the ending quite satisfying.

One other funny thing is that the imagery of Camelot 3000 is really heavily based on Excalibur, but the prose keeps trying to walk it back to Malory's version. We get the teamup of an evil Morgan Le Fay and a golden-armored Mordred, just like in the movie, but their backstory is straight out of Malory and so it's not clear why they'd even team up in the first place