Foreword

Summary

When Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter kindly invited me to contribute a chapter on “Arthurian Ethics” to their Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend, I attempted to sketch a “bare bones” framework that, rather than considering the particular moral regimes of specific works, would assist discussion and comparison of how ethical questions were treated across, in principle, the entire range of Arthurian works in different media and discourses, produced over the past millennium and still to come – and including critical writing about Arthurian works among the modes of Arthurian discourse. Such a task is clearly impossible, but I enjoyed the challenge (more below on the role of failure in Arthurian ethics). I wanted, in particular, to outline some of the distinctive ways in which Arthurian works typically approach ethical questions: the kinds of things they construe to be “good” or “bad,” how they build the constructions through which they establish or question those values, and their attachment when doing so to particular narrative features (e.g. certain types of character, action, event, place, object, animal). I further aimed to sketch some of the characteristic parameters and scenarios in which ethical issues are both posed and debated in the Arthurian corpus: for instance, themes of loyalty and betrayal, adultery plots, or the decline-and-fall Mort ending that haunts some, though not all, Arthurian works. In writing this Foreword, I respond to the further kind invitation by Melissa Ridley Elmes and Evelyn Meyer to revisit my earlier chapter in the light of the essays contained in their excellent volume.

In “Arthurian Ethics,” I focused especially on the complex relationship to “real life” that seems to me core to the ways in which Arthurian works stage their ethical debates and to their constructions of ethical meaning. I approached this relationship through three heuristic analogies: temporal (“Arthurtime”), virtual (“Arthurlife”), and psychoanalytic (“the Arthurian scene”). By “Arthurtime,” I wanted to indicate both the timeframes in which Arthurian works are set and those in which practitioners (readers, viewers, writers, painters, critics, etc.) engage with such works; the time of reception is also distinctively Arthurian.