#sorry mobile

1. Who’s your favorite Arthurian character(s)?

I mean it depends on the adaptation, right?  Because there’s not a single one of these characters who does not swing wildly between totally different personalities going from one adaptation to another.  Like you have Ceu the amazing and half-magic right-hand man of Arthur and Kay the boorish bully.  You have Gawain the flower of knighthood and Gawain who accidentally chops off a lady’s head and makes jokes about it.  Arthur himself might be a barbarian warlord or the last bastion of Roman civilization or a confused boy or an impotent cuckold or a dumb jock (@BBC come fight me).  Even the most central characters pop in and out of existence going from retelling from retelling.

But yeah ok it’s Arthur.

To me he represents--at his best--the attempt to Hold On, to cling to the light even when the world is going dark around you.  I love the version of the story where the Saxons are closing in, and the people closest to him have betrayed him, and he decides that he’s still going to persist, to keep the candle burning as long as he can in the hopes that someone in the future will remember them and relight it again.

2. Who’s your least favorite character(s)?

Lancelot tbh.  I don’t like cheating stories at the best of times, and when it’s at the expense of my man Arthur I have no patience for it.  It doesn’t help that my first exposure to him was in Camelot the musical and he’s a big stupid dick in that incarnation (entertaining as hell, and his songs are an absolute delight to sing in the car.  but not a character to love).  Also he’s supposed to be Arthur’s best friend, come on!  Any story that tells you that romantic love necessariliy trumps friend love loses me.  

I’m not a far of Guinivere for the same reasons but I try to keep an open mind in part because there are so few girls in these stories that I feel like I need to be generous to them (and also she probably didn’t choose to marry Arthur so like, its not exactly breaking a promise).

6. Do you like [Galahad]?

I don’t know?  Okay so part of this is I know so very little about Galahad.  I have only sort of scratched the surface of some of the core Arthurian retellings (haven’t even read any Chretien de Troyes if you can believe it) because my reading/research focused on the oldest, mostly Welsh stories, and on the Orkney clan.  And as i recall Galahad is kind of on the fully opposite side of the spectrum of legends, in the newer, more French, more Lancelot-centric stuff, and in particular the Grail stuff and while I am obsessed with the Grail Quest mostly what I’ve read is about Percival.

So here’s what I know about Galahad: He is 100% perfect, the ideal perfect faultless pure knight.  He is the only one to actually fully complete the Grail quest and at the end of it he just kind of Elijahs up to heaven because he’s too pure for the world.  All of this sets me up to absolutely hate this kid.

But I have this feeling that actually maybe Galahad could be really cool and a fascinating character if you got him away from the like medieval Catholic picture of a Perfect Man?  In particular things like this intrigue me with the prospect of a Galahad who is good but in a way that is fully integrated with a broken and fucked up world, rather than withdrawing from it.

(Which honestly, he’s a Christ-figure, right?  I assume?  So like, if you make your Christ-figure actually like how the historical Christ was, he’s pretty damn cool.)  

11. How did you first get into Arthurian legends?

This is actually a really good question and I have been sitting here trying to remember?

Cause like, I’ve known about Arthurian legends since way back, I remember reading (or probably actually listening to my mom read) one of the Rosemary Sutcliff retellings, and there was a little tiny hardcover copy of a Parzifal retelling that I read, and I know I knew the story of Gawain and the loathely lady.  But I don’t think I was like into Arthurian legends per se--I was very into fantasy and the ideals of honor and nobility and justice and the image of a knight-errant, but not specifically obsessed with the Arthurian legend.

I think actually the tipping point was Camelot (the musical).  This is honestly a shitty musical, the songs that represent the most loathesome ideas and plot-points are absolute bops, and the songs that cover the most beautiful ideals and story elements are utter trash.  There is nobody to truly admire and the Mordred in the stage version is a fucking cockroach despite having the best motivations of anyone to oppose Arthur.  BUT.  This is a moment in the musical (in the film version at least, I never saw the stage musical, only listened to the sountrack) that is just hear-wrenching.

It comes right after “How to Handle a Woman,” which is Exhibit A in the list of Horrible Songs That Are Trying To Communicate Something Beautiful.  I will not defend this song, it sucks and I hate it and i hate that this scene that could have been so very good was ruined by this steaming pile of shit.  But in the film, right after he finishes singing, Arthur has this monologue.

He’s just found out that his wife and best friend are cheating on him, breaking his heart and betraying the ideals he’s built his kingdom around.  His initial thought is to punish them, to blow it all up in his hurt and his anger.  And then he stops, and he realizes what that would cost, not just for him but for the people he leads.  And he decides that the “civilized” thing to do, the right thing to do, is to show mercy and to put his personal pain aside for the sake of his people.  I just found it on YouTube and watched it again and to be honest it doesn’t fully hold up to what it was in my memory?  But at the time, this soliloquy was a fucking sword through my heart, and I was so taken by this unselfish and beautiful and painful vision of a bright spot of glory in a dark world that I fell in love.

13. What is your favorite Arthurian story?

Okay i’m getting super long-winded so I’m going to do the last two real quick!  My favorite story isn’t a story so much as a sub-plot--it is the plot thread of the Orkney brothers.  Not only are their characters and the way they respond to the pain of their childhoods so fascinating (esp in the TH White version) but I love the way this story wraps through the whole of the legend, so that this flawed foundation is actually what brings Camelot down in this end (Lancelot and Guinivere could’ve fucked on for years in peace if Mordred hadn’t decided leak the story).  I also appreciate how Mordred and his family are honestly fully justified in being angry at Arthur.  I think the twisted up morality of this version of the story is a hundred times more interesting than simple good vs. evil. 

14. What part(s) of Arthurian legend really annoys you?