King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table

Description

Immerse yourself in the earliest roots of English myth and culture in this captivating twentieth-century retelling of the Arthurian legends. In these thrilling tales, the courageous fifth-century leader and his loyal band of knights wage battle against enemies both foreign and domestic.

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781776678990
• Langue: English

Extrait

KING ARTHUR AND THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE
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Edited by
RUPERT S. HOLLAND
 
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King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table First published in 1919 Epub ISBN 978-1-77667-899-0 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77667-900-3 © 2015 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Introduction THE COMING OF ARTHUR AND THE FOUNDING OF THE ROUND TABLE I - Merlin Foretells the Birth of Arthur II - The Crowning of Arthur and the Sword Excalibur III - Arthur Drives the Saxons from His Realm IV - The King's Many and Great Adventures V - Sir Balin Fights with His Brother, Sir Balan VI - The Marriage of Arthur and Guinevere and the Founding of the Round Table VII - The Adventure of Arthur and Sir Accolon of Gaul VIII - Arthur is Crowned Emperor at Rome IX - Sir Gawain and the Maid with the Narrow Sleeves THE CHAMPIONS OF THE ROUND TABLE X - The Adventures of Sir Lancelot XI - The Adventures of Sir Beaumains or Sir Gareth XII - The Adventures of Sir Tristram SIR GALAHAD AND THE QUEST OF THE HOLY GRAIL XIII - The Knights Go to Seek the Grail THE PASSING OF ARTHUR XIV - Sir Lancelot and the Fair Elaine XV - The War Between Arthur and Lancelot and the Passing of Arthur
Introduction
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King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table! What magic is in thewords! How they carry us straight to the days of chivalry, to thewitchcraft of Merlin, to the wonderful deeds of Lancelot and Percevaland Galahad, to the Quest for the Holy Grail, to all that "gloriouscompany, the flower of men," as Tennyson has called the king and hiscompanions! Down through the ages the stories have come to us, one ofthe few great romances which, like the tales of Homer, are as fresh andvivid to-day as when men first recited them in court and camp andcottage. Other great kings and paladins are lost in the dim shadows oflong-past centuries, but Arthur still reigns in Camelot and his knightsstill ride forth to seek the Grail.
"No little thing shall be
The gentle music of the bygone years, Long past to us with all their hopes and fears."
So wrote the poet William Morris in The Earthly Paradise . And surelyit is no small debt of gratitude we owe the troubadours and chroniclersand poets who through many centuries have sung of Arthur and hischampions, each adding to the song the gifts of his own imagination, sobuilding from simple folk-tales one of the most magnificent and movingstories in all literature.
This debt perhaps we owe in greatest measure to three men; to Chrétiende Troies, a Frenchman, who in the twelfth century put many of the oldArthurian legends into verse; to Sir Thomas Malory, who first wrote outmost of the stories in English prose, and whose book, the MorteDarthur , was printed by William Caxton, the first English printer, in1485; and to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who in his series of poems entitledthe Idylls of the King retold the legends in new and beautiful guisein the nineteenth century.
The history of Arthur is so shrouded in the mists of early England thatit is difficult to tell exactly who and what he was. There probably wasan actual Arthur, who lived in the island of Britain in the sixthcentury, but probably he was not a king nor even a prince. It seems mostlikely that he was a chieftain who led his countrymen to victory againstthe invading English about the year 500. So proud were his countrymen ofhis victories that they began to invent imaginary stories of his prowessto add to the fame of their hero, just as among all peoples legends soonspring up about the name of a great leader. As each man told the featsof Arthur he contributed those details that appealed most to his ownfancy and each was apt to think of the hero as a man of his own time,dressing and speaking and living as his own kings and princes did, withthe result that when we come to the twelfth century we find Geoffrey ofMonmouth, in his History of the Kings of Britain , describing Arthurno longer as a half-barbarous Briton, wearing rude armor, his arms andlegs bare, but instead as a most Christian king, the flower of mediævalchivalry, decked out in all the gorgeous trappings of a knight of theCrusades.
As the story of Arthur grew it attracted to itself popular legends ofall kinds. Its roots were in Britain and the chief threads in its fabricremained British-Celtic. The next most important threads were those thatwere added by the Celtic chroniclers of Ireland. Then stories that werenot Celtic at all were woven into the legend, some from Germanicsources, which the Saxons or the descendants of the Franks may havecontributed, and others that came from the Orient, which may have beenbrought back from the East by men returning from the Crusades. And if itwas the Celts who gave us the most of the material for the stories ofArthur it was the French poets who first wrote out the stories and gavethem enduring form.
It was the Frenchman, Chrétien de Troies, who lived at the courts ofChampagne and of Flanders, who put the old legends into verse for thepleasure of the noble lords and ladies that were his patrons. Hecomposed six Arthurian poems. The first, which was written about 1160 orearlier, related the story of Tristram. The next was called Érec etÉnide , and told some of the adventures that were later used by Tennysonin his Geraint and Enid . The third was Cligès , a poem that haslittle to do with the stories of Arthur and his knights as we havethem. Next came the Conte de la Charrette , or Le Chevalier de laCharrette , which set forth the love of Lancelot and Guinevere. Thenfollowed Yvain , or Le Chevalier au Lion , and finally came Perceval , or Le Conte du Graal , which gives the first account of theHoly Grail.
None of these stories are to be found in the work of Geoffrey ofMonmouth, who had written earlier in Latin, nor in any of the so-calledchronicles. It was Chrétien who took the old folk-tales that men hadbeen telling each other for centuries and put them into sprightly versefor the entertainment of his lords and ladies. He fashioned the storiesaccording to the taste of his own gay courts, and so Arthur and hisQueen Guinevere, Lancelot, Perceval and the other knights became farmore like French people of the twelfth century than like Britons of thesixth. And in introducing the Holy Grail, that sacred and mystic cupthat was supposed to hold drops of the blood of Christ and to have beencarried to England by Joseph of Arimathea, Chrétien added to theArthurian legends an old religious story that had had nothing to do withArthur originally.
From this point in its history that sturdy ancient English oak, theoriginal story of Arthur and his knights, an account mainly of warlikeadventures, sent forth four new branches that have now become part andparcel of the parent legend. These four branches are the story ofMerlin, the story of Lancelot, the story of the Holy Grail, and thestory of Tristram and Iseult. Some of the writers who came afterChrétien took one of these stories, some another, each enlarging histheme according to his own taste, until each story was the center of alarge number of new and romantic offshoots. Practically all of them,however, were bound together by the thread that led from the court ofthe great King Arthur at Camelot.
The story of Merlin, that man of magic, is the least important of thefour branches, though Merlin is still an intensely interesting figure inthe story of Arthur that we read to-day. The story of Lancelot was toprove very important; starting as a romance that had very littleconnection with Arthur, it became with Malory and Tennyson the realcenter of interest of the plot. The story of the Holy Grail provedalmost equally important. In the earliest accounts of this Perceval wasthe knight chosen above all others to reach the Grail Castle, butPerceval was too rough and worldly a knight to suit the taste of themonks who wrote out the legends and so they created Galahad to take hisplace as their own ideal of perfection. And into these adventures arewoven some of the tales of Sir Gawain, among them the delightful storyof Gawain and the Little Maid with the Narrow Sleeves. To the legend ofPerceval, Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian, added the story of the sonof Perceval, or Parzival, as he calls him, the story of Lohengrin, thefamous Swan-knight. Tristram and Iseult, the fourth of the branches,though less connected with Arthur than either Lancelot or the HolyGrail, became immensely popular with poets and remancers because of itsgreat love story, and is to be found told again and again in widelyvarying forms all through the Middle Ages.
So we have seen that a British chieftain, winning a great battle in theyear 500, became in time celebrated throughout Europe as the greatestking of romance. So far it was mainly the French who had made himfamous. Layamon, an English priest, had written a poem in Englishconcerning Arthur shortly after 1200, and told of the founding of theRound Table, but it was to be a considerable time yet before any Englishwriter was to attempt what the French had already done. Chaucer toldnone of the Arthurian stories, though he placed the scene of his Wifeof Bath's Tale at King Arthur's court. An unknown English poet wrote Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight somewhere between 1350 and 1375. Itis not until we come to the Morte Darthur of Sir Thomas Malory,finished in 1469 or 1470, that we reach the next great step in thehistory of the legends since the time of Chrétien de Troie