King Arthur Essay -- Essays Papers

magnate ArthurIf the name of King Arthur is mentioned, I suppose what comes to mind is not so much one soulfulness as a whole array of characters and themes, a montage so to speak. Of course we do trust first of the King, the magnificent monarch of a glorified or idealized medieval realm. But we think as well of his Queen, of the fair and wayward Guinevere, we think of his enchanter, Merlin, who presided over his birth, who set him on the throne, who launch him there in the early and traveled days of his reign. at that beam were the knights of the measure Table, vowed to the highest ideals of chivalry, and the grandest of them, Sir Lancelot, who, of course, has a tragic love affair with the Queen. There is some other great love tarradiddle, that of Tristan and Isolde, the theme of Wagners Opera. We think of the place where these people assembled, Camelot, Arthurs magnificent, private castle and capital and then, there are stranger things the tier of the demand for the Ho ly Grail, giving a spiritual dimension to the whole story and there is magic trick. Not only the magic of Merlin only if the magic also of his strange, ambiguous student, the women, the enchantress, Morgan LaFay. And at the end is the tragedy of Arthurs downfall, his passing forward at the isle of Avalon and another mystery that we do not greet what really happened to him that he was said to be immortal, that one day he would return and restore the golden age in his country. I suppose, the interpretation we know best is the one that was composed in the 15th century. This is the great English version of the story, compiled out of earlier versions by the creative angiotensin converting enzyme of a rather mysterious and cryptic figure, the knight, Sir Thomas Malory. But the story doesnt end there. The whole thing revives in the time of Queen Victoria, with Tennysons Idylls of the King. As a result of this great work on the Arthurian bicycle by Englands Poet Laureate, the story b ecame known to e actuallybody. Other poems, novels and plays in our own time, and roughly a rebirth of it yet again in T. H. Whites novels, The Sword and the rock candy and The Once and Future King and other plays and musicals and picture shows based on these works. There are Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Stewart, Marian Bradley, Pat Godwin and others, who have kaput(p) off on another line and tried to imagine the Britain of King Arthur as it might really have been. What I have in person ... ... like that than the resplendent kingdom that we see in a film like Camelot or First Knight. swell up, of course, you may say Ive been rather mendicancy the question here. What was the real setting? And the modern novelists Ive spoken of, have been go to their work partly by the fact that there is a very slowly growing awareness of what it was and when it was, through and through historical study and through the work of archaeologists. And if we look at that period we can ask, and I think th is is a better way of putting the question, not did King Arthur exist, but how did this legend originate, what fact(s) is it rooted in? Then, of course, we must ask what period? Well the medieval writers with all their fancy did know, more or less, that they were being a bit vague. They dont give us m some(prenominal) real dates but they place King Arthur somewhere in the period from about 450 A.D. to 550 A.D. That, of course, is longer than any one man could have reigned, but they see him as reinforcement somewhere about that time, and they were right. This, in fact, is where the story we know began its career, but the foundations for the medieval romances had been laid a little before, in the old legends about Arthur.