8 - Questioning Arthurian ideals

Summary

'Romance purges life of impurities and presents chivalry in heightened and idealised form', according to Derek Pearsall. This idealisation may have had significant social and historical functions. Pearsall cites the argument of Georges Duby that romance could soothe tensions between different social groups within the aristocracy by offering an idealised version of unity in the form of the Round Table; he also suggests that in twelfth-century France, 'The glamorizing of a royal court at which barons would attend for long periods, and so be prevented from building up a power-base in their own provincial lands, was very much in the interests of the monarchy'. But the first twelfth-century French Arthurian romances were written not for the king but for powerful nobles. This may be one reason why the Arthurian court is not always presented as glamorised or united, nor is Arthur always a dynamic, astute or effective monarch. From its beginnings, Arthurian romance shows itself to be far from monolithic, far from uncritical. Oliver Padel suggests that in Welsh tradition Arthur was 'often an intrinsically comic character, and that Arthurian tales . . . occupied a humorous role, perhaps approximately comparable with comic-strip literature today'. Arthur's court is frequently extolled as the acme of chivalry, a tradition going back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who described in his seminal History of the Kings of Britain (Historia Regum Britanniae) (1130s) how knights from all over the world flocked there, and how they fought in tournaments to impress their ladies (Thorpe, ix.11, p. 222).