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English 245 with Dr. G @ SUNY TC3 |
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Course
Lessons 2. Beowulf 1 3. Beowulf 2 4. Middle Ages 5. Romance 6. Sir Gawain 7. Malory 9. Wife of Bath 11. Biblical Drama 12. Play of Mankind 14. Thomas More 15. Philip Sidney 16. Print Culture 17. Walter Raleigh 18. Twelfth Night 1 19. Twelfth Night 2 20. Civil War 22. Aphra Behn 23. Reading Papers 24. Gulliver 25. Rape of the Lock 27. New God 28. Revolution |
*** 5. ROMANCE *** |
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The Norman Birth of Arthur READINGS FOR THIS LESSON
Vol. 1A, pages 12-20, 163-200 in
Longman 3rd ed. |
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ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS LESSON The lesson includes both a quiz and a journal writing assignment to be submitted on the interactive course site at SUNY Learning Network. Journal Write for an hour (or more if you have time). Summarize the readings or parts of them that interest you. If there is time after summarizing, try one of the following questions:
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See General instructions on Journaling for this course. For a sample journal, see Dr. G's 2007 Brit Lit 1 Journal. | |
NOTES AND
COMMENTARY
Do you believe in Arthur ?You have heard of Arthur? Gawain? Morgan le Fay? Selections in Volume 1A of our Longman anthology illustrate the emergence of Arthurian literature and development of Arthurian legend in its golden age from 1136 to 1485 AD.
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Left: ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, the largest cathedral in Britain before it was destroyed by Henry VIII in 1539. Is this where Glaston was buried--or Arthur?
Arthur may be a Norman invention designed to justify Norman conquests in Britain and Ireland. The Tudors return to the Arthurian myth while brutally subduing Ireland in the 16th century (see Edmund Spenser's The Faeries Queene.) Imperialist Victorians follow suit in the 19th century. Why Celtic peoples feel such affinity for Arthur after all of this propaganda is one of great unresolved mysteries of British literature
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Geoffrey of Monmouth,
History of the Kings of England Much as Bede and other monastics used stories of saints and miracles to cultivate the church, Norman and Angevin rulers in Britain after 1066 used pseudo-history to support their rights or pretensions to political legitimacy in Britain. They retained scholars and bards in their courts to do the "research" or spinning. Geoffrey wrote History of the Kings of England for Robert Duke of Gloucester who was the half brother and principal champion of Henry I's daughter the Empress Matilda, and he was uncle and tutor to Matilda's son, the future Henry II (the powerful king of "Lion in Winter" fame). The ambitious Matilda and her father and son were decendents of William the Conqueror, but they posed as full blooded Brits not only to naturalize their rule in England but also to win British support for their wars against their rivals in France. It was just here in the twelfth century that the British Empire was first imagined. Geoffrey's Arthur is descended from both ancient British kings and a Roman imperial family derived from Constantine the Great. This Arthur is the founder of the future Norman kingdoms as he expands his British empire to the continent, and settles his retainers there in Anjou (Sir Kay) and Normandy (Sir Bedivere). After hearing this backstory, you come to see the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 as a reunification of Arthur's glorious old empire. You realize that when William the Conqueror took lands from the English nobles and gave them to his supporters, he was restoring the better social order that used to exist long ago! For this trick of historiography, Geoffrey follows his literary master, the Roman poet Virgil, whose Trojan hero Aeneas’ travels to Latium in Italy and takes it over from the natives. But by speaking with ghosts, Aeneas learns that Latium is not a foreign place at all--no, it is the place from which the founders of Troy had originated in the very distant past. Therefore, the Latins are not the rightful, ancestral owners that they appear to be. The Trojans are the real natives, and so Aeneas is entitled to the Latin princess. Anyone who resists is a Rutulian and can be killed. You see the argument? This is like proposing that Columbus' ancestors had lived for many generations in the New World long long ago during the golden age, before any of the so-called "Native American" Indians arrived, and therefore the European re-conquest of the New World after Columbus was simply the restoration of ancient homelands to their proper owners! Before the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, manuscript technology made it easy to forge any source documents necessary to support revisions of history. "Scholars" like Geoffrey of Monmouth were free to create any past that the present desired. Geoffrey says his story of Arthur and the other old kings is based on a "very ancient book written in the British language," by which he may have meant early Welsh or some other Brythonic language, but no such source book has ever been found. If indeed it existed, it would show the degree to which Geoffrey reshaped its content to fit the concerns of his audience. Geoffrey's repeated emphasis on political infidelity and division fits the context of "the anarchy" or civil war between Matilda and usurper Stephen after 1135.
Geoffrey's narrative does contain some elements that are
plausibly British, however. For instance,
Gerald of Wales
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Geoffrey's Arthur seems modeled in part on Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor crowned at York who (with the help of British soldiers) fought Germanic tribes on the continent and captured Rome (312 AD).
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Edward I (1239-1307) The Scots’ reply to Edward of course critiqued the Trojan myth and told Edward the story of how the female founder of Scotland, Scota, came there from Ireland and not Troy. One pseudo-history is answered easily by another. Marie de France, Prologue to the
Lais Marie de France's view of Arthur's world is nothing like the view of Geoffrey of Monmouth, even though her lais appear to have been dedicated to the same Henry II who backed the dig for Arthur at Glastonbury, and who in his youth was taught Geoffrey of Monmouth's history. In her preface, Marie says that she has personal purposes in writing, to keep vice at a distance and free herself from sorrow (prologue l. 23-27). She also says that she is not the inventor of her stories. These apologies may have given her a cover of deniability in case her writings came under attack, but they do not obscure her view that Arthur's world was far from heroic.
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Left: King Edward I and his queen Eleanor on Lincoln Cathedral.
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Lanval Such protection as there is at court derives from laws which protect the knights from the arbitrary judgments of the king and queen. Legal procedure in this tale is consistent with legal practices in the reign of Henry II, a period that produced Glanvill's famous Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England (ed. C. D. G. Hall, [1965]), the earliest known comprehensive statement of British Common Law. There is a formal accusation; Arthur consults with a baronial court; Lanval is free pending trial in exchange for pledges; witnesses are demanded in court, and the peers will decide sentencing. (Note that Arthur wants Lanval killed, but the peers will order only banishment, if they find Lanval guilty, and they are reluctant to find guilt. Arthur is both vengeful and constrained by the better judgment of his knights.) The fairy mistress, when she does arrive, is at once an irrefutable witness and a sort of mounted champion in trial by battle, an alternative to court procedure. With its magical resolution, the lai suggests the possibility that the fairy world is an interior state. The lady and her attendants appear as if in a dream. She promises to be with him "when you want," and apparently anywhere—perhaps in his imagination?--as long as he does not disclose her existence to others. Mainstream versions of the Arthurian story in the Middle Ages emphasized strong kingship, powerful knights, territorial battle and the maintenance of aristocratic order. In Geoffrey of Monmouth, women and romance play a very small role, and even marvels and prophecy tend to be linked with national destiny. By contrast, the famous Gawain and Yvain are not central to Marie's tale. Lanval is passive. He has no specific ambition or quest to fulfill. His goal is simply the pursuit of happiness, which desire cannot be fulfilled at Arthur's court..
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Left: Marie de France goes at it with both hands in a medieval manuscript illumination. |
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OTHER RESOURCES & AMUSEMENTS Normans EU, The Normans, A European People Domesday Book (William the Conqueror's survey of England cir 1085) from the UK National Archive. William the Conqueror's Statutes from Yale Law School Arthur The Camelot Project from University of Rochester Glastonbury Abbey has a web site. See Gerald of Wales, Discovery of the Tomb of King Arthur from the Fordham Medieval Sourcebook, also Two accounts of the exhumation of Arthur's body from Britannia.com. And for current travel plans see the University of Idaho site, Arthurian Sites in England. Geoffrey of Monmouth's history appears in translation by Sebantian Evans at http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/gem/index.htm Thomas Green's Arthurian Resources. Britannia History: King Arthur Celtic Literature Collective: Welsh Texts And of course King Arthur the movie But in the end I found the real Prince Arthur, and his story is more interesting than the legend. Marie de France
Marie de France Lais |
Students are not examined on these "other resources and amusements." However, if you know of an excellent website that would wonderfully complement this lesson, please send it to Dr. G. |
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Copyright 2008-2012 by Gary Homer Gutchess. |
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