So
as Dr. MB said, I have been working on a paper that involves Merlin, Logres,
and Arthur. As I have been coming through various versions of the legends, I
realized how much of it was new to me. I didn’t know that is how Mordred died, I
didn’t know that was how Gawayne died, and I didn’t know that was how Arthur
was born. Most of the specific adventures are still unknown to me and most of
the ones I know now I have read for college. I attribute my interest in the
Middle Ages to Lord of the Rings not Arthur. Yet somehow I knew the basic story
quiet well. I have been trying to figure out where I got it from and have found
that I have had surprisingly little exposure to it. And the things I did see I somehow
knew to be wrong or only part of the story. I saw the Sword in the Stone once
and I barely remember it. The only thing I really do remember is that I hated
it because I felt it was getting the story wrong; it was far too silly to bear
the weight of the legend. The only other thing I remember from childhood is
that once my family spent a couple of days in Vegas and we went and toured the Excalibur
Hotel. We didn’t see a joust or anything, but we did stop in the gift shop
where we got some wooden swords with the sword in the stone inscription and mislabeled
Excalibur. Still, I remember thinking that the hotel did not have it right, and
that it was not fair that my brother found a 50 dollar bill on the floor. Molly
brought up the medieval fair Arthur episode, which I remember watching in high school
with my little sister. The only piece of Arthurian legend that I remember I felt
good about was the Grail legend from Indiana Jones. That is all the direct
Arthurian exposure I can remember getting before college.
The
best I can guess is that at least part of my idea about what the King Arthur legend
should be came from the sense I got from hearing my parents and others talk
about it. I know my parents never told me stories about Arthur; they say that
now. But from them I must have gotten the sense that it was in fact a legend,
and was important for being so somehow. My dad had to explain the mock middle English
inscription of my wooden sword, and from that got that it must be fairly important
thing to be king of England for someone to put it so official sounding on a
sword. To wrap up this ramble then. It seems to me that much of what I and perhaps
others got of Arthur was more roomer than content. By running into a lot of references
to something one gets the idea that those little bits represent a much larger
and important story. So maybe Arthur continues as a legend because that is
sometime the first sense someone has of it. It is an important but ancient part
of culture because that is how we grow up understanding it.
