Arthurian Canon?

Ok, I debated how to ask this question without being laughed at for a while, because I know that the Arthurian Mythos has been rewritten for hundreds and hundreds of years, and certainly anything that would now be considered "canon" would deviate heavily from the earliest myths. But, at the same time, I want to get a general feel of the Arthurian legends, and what they're like without modern embellishments.

So, here's the best question I can come up with: Which classic Arthurian romances are the primary sources for modern-day retellings?

I should probably mention that the only classic Arthurian tale I've currently read was Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and I really enjoyed it.

Le Morte D'Arthur is pretty much the one that everyone defers to. At least, to my knowledge. For me, it was definitely the most comprehensive Arthurian text I've read, and covers pretty much all the classic elements of the legend.

Occasionally somebody (like Mary Stewart) goes back to Geoffrey of Monmouth (Historia Regum Brittanorum) and then selectively adds elements from later retellings.

You could also try to dig up the Welsh Triads. If you are interested in "canon", you should also know that two of the most prominent supporting characters, Lancelot and Merlin, were not originally part of the story but came later, Lancelot first appearing in French versions of the story. There is also the French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles, which were the sources Malory used to write Le Morte d'Arthur.

There's also the French romances which were highly influential. The biggest and earliest was that of Chrétien de Troyes who introduced the Holy Grail, Arthur's Fisher King status to the land, and the affair between Guinevere and Lancelot. There'salso the work of the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach who wrote Parzival.. And there's also the Mabinogion which features the first literary appearance of Arthur, though he's far more rustic and more like a somewhat well-off chieftain than anything else.

There's also crossover works which form a Shared Universe of sorts with the most notable being the Matters of Rome, France, and England which retcon many native legends and tales into the Arthur universe and spinning material from whole cloth in the case of Rome, usually in an attempt to connect the Trojan Cycle's heroes with Arthur.

Gawaine and the Green Knight, Tristan and Isolde, Orlando in Love, and many others are more popular connected stories which are minor epics in their own rite.

The Welsh triads came after both Merlin and Lancelot. Lancelot and Merlin made their debut in the 12th ad. While the welsh triads are from the 13th century ad to the modern era.

While the main legends that make up Arthurian legend are Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittanaie, Wace’s Brut, Chrétien de Troyes’ romances, and Robert de Boron’s trilogy. Everything else are retellings of earlier works that later authors had elaborated and embellished upon.

The French prose cycles, for example, is just a loose and rather unfaithful retelling of all the works I previously mentioned. Galahad didn’t exist in their sources, nor did the majority of the characters of the French prose cycles. Lancelot also wasn’t seen as Arthur’s best knight either, that was Gawain. The characterization of the English heroes is also radically different in the French prose cycles, nothing at all like their earlier depiction. The English heroes, in the French prose cycles, were demonized and made into villains in favor of the French heroes, particularly in the Post vulgate cycle.

The Arthurian canon does not really exist as such, as it always involves a selection process of what is and is not canon. The legend of King Arthur is a story retold many, many times over. You could fill a very nice little library with all the works that could be considered for canon.

Asking what Arthurian canon is is a bit like asking what the canon for, say, Cinderella is. There certainly is a core of story to it, but the details are ever changing as the story is retold and reshaped for new times and audiences.

A better question would be "where do I start?"

Wow this is an old thread, but... I picked up King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green to learn about Arthurian myth. It's a children's novel so it's not too dense, yet it seems very thorough in its coverage.

Here's a Google Books preview

I have Terence White's Arthur, but I haven't gotten around to reading it.

Also, there is no such thing as too old for a thread about a work, especially classics like this one. And now we are using it again, it suddenly isn't dead anymore. Funny how that works, right?

The "old" thing was more about answering OP's question.

It's an interesting question regardless, I think.

If you want the building blocks, the works that the more modern works use as their foundations, than I'd suggest the works of Chretienne de Troyes (who introduced Lancelot) and Malory's Morte D'Arthur.

Finished reading King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table. I kind of want to make a page for it... but I'm probably going to have to read at least some of the source texts^note chiefly Le Morte D Arthur, but there's like twenty different sources cited to be able to properly trope it as an adaptation.

You can always start a stub, index it, and see if it attracts attention on its own.

Started a page.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with tropes that are also present in the source texts. Feels redundant to list them when it's just retelling the story/events of the original... on the other hand, adaptations aren't guaranteed to be faithful, so relisting these tropes at least shows how closely it sticks to the source texts.

Also I have no idea whether I should be spoiler-tagging anything there. I wouldn't think so, but Tristan and Iseult's page makes use of spoiler tags. That might just mean that page is doing it wrong, though.

Edited by Twiddler on Apr 27th 2020 at 8:16:54 AM

You can definitely add those, that happens all the time.

Lots of adaptation pages start their trope lists with “In addition to tropes inherited from the source material, [work] contains examples of the following:”, but generally that’s when there is one source work that the reader can go read the page for. In a case like this where there are multiple sources, listing tropes found in one source or another and the adaptation is no problem.

The difficulty with Arthurian canon, like most old folklore...it's so contradictory by its very nature and so subject to being added to snd changed. I agree with anything who says Chretien de Troyes is a good place to start...where Lancelot is kind of his self insert. Mallory's L'Morte d'Arthur is absolutely a place to pick up and kind of alters a lot for a more contemporary audience

I often observe Arthurian Canon is basically the predecessor of the superhero comic book genre: cultural morality plays about larger than life heroes dealing with larger than life threats, constant reinventions, inconsistent canon and frequent crossovers with other franchises (i.e The Round Table is basically the Avengers/Justice League, with its rank-and-file often consisting of heroes from assorted folklores like Welsh, Celtic, French, e.t.c).

The observation that mythologies are the proto-superhero genre isn't new, but I think Arthurian Canon really shows it.

Well, there's myth and then there's antique literature. Most of what we consider "mythology" is actually the work of writers (Ovid, Homer, Elder Edda, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretienne de Troyes, etc) who, in many cases, adapted older fables and folklore to their own ends. It ends up being hard to separate the literary creations from the original myths. A lot of "Arthurian" stories are old folklore involving knights of heroes that got folded into Arthurian canon by writers ("The Knight of the Fountain," for instance), which is how the Round Table got so big.