#liridi

I think often about @liridi’s headcanon that sky blue is the traditional bridal color of the Rohirrim, and let me tell you, she is correct 🩵

📍from the summit of Edoras, looking north towards the barrow downs.

OMMGGG hiiiii lovely I missed you, so happy to hear from you and glad you're doing ok!!! happy Christmas! I've been alright, just withering away at work and missing being terminally online on tumblr dot com 😩

Hi!

You’re right on the money with your parenthesis, most texts don’t acknowledge it or at least not as fully as it could. It also sort of depends on what constitutes “villainous” behavior.

For example, in the Vulgate, it’s Arthur who sneaks into Morgause’s room and crawls into bed with her. She believes him to be Lot (ignore the impracticality of that, medieval logic to absolve her of culpability) so she has sex with him and becomes pregnant with Mordred. She then forgives him and they agree not to speak of it. Like. Madam that was rape you did not consent to sleep with this random squire kid! Who it turns out is your brother! And while Arthur is tormented by dream visions surrounding his sin, it has more to do with unknowingly committed incest that admonishing him as an active participant in any crime. Even after that, he goes on to have numerous illicit affairs that result in sons who grow into men that join the Round Table. Pretty messed up from Guinevere’s perspective to see Loholt, Arthur the Less, Mordred, et cetera all reaping the benefits of their noble births by association to Arthur while she's unable to have children or criticize the King for cheating. It’s just whatever!

I think the starkest example is the Post Vulgate where, after once again impregnating his sister with Mordred, Arthur orders the May babies to be put to death in the hopes of culling his incestuously conceived son. That’s what Malory was drawing on, so it has a lot more depth in Post. (For better or worse, probably worse.)

Another example could be Alliterative Morte Arthure. There Arthur’s fatal flaw is his fixation on expanding his territory and power. There’s no illicit affair between Guinevere and Lancelot. Rather, while Arthur is far away for over a decade, Mordred takes the throne by marrying Guinevere, and she's the mother of his sons. Mordred wields Clarent, the sword of peace, which is a subtextual signal to the reader that Arthur is the aggressor in his actions on returning, choosing to challenge Mordred for the throne at the cost of everything rather than accepting defeat for the good of the kingdom. Or, you know, having not abandoned it in the first place. At the end, once Mordred is dead, the remaining loyalists go on to kill his sons as well to end the line of succession.

There’s also the elephant in the room about punishing Guinevere for the affair with Lancelot but not really punishing Lancelot. Guinevere was to be burned at the stake, while Lancelot had fled and was, evidentially, not pursued and captured. It’s only for that reason Guinevere doesn’t die, obviously, as Lancelot returns with his kinsmen to save her. Arthur was going to go through with it! That’s the outcome in most versions of the story, at least from a medieval literature standpoint. Pretty villainous.

So Arthur sucks just as often as he is good, if not more often. Modern retellings are a whole other can of worms. If we count Sonic and the Black Knight, Arthur is straight up the final boss and replaced by Sonic at the end. LOL. So, you know, Arthuriana is a spectrum. ;^)

-

OK, sorry, screenshotting this as not that closely related except in my brain and only in conversation with the tags, actually

I was thinking of how these two were raised with very specific roles in strongly class-based culture

And that both inescapability of that forming influence and yet compulsion to redefine it as the “crazy”

And Tolkien in conversation with the same changing mores and social structure as

Dorothy L. Sayers and the way Wimsey in Clouds of Witnesses is reflecting on noblesse oblige and also class vis a vis a dying nobility class in all the books??