Ask them what they think the single most important factor was in the fall of the Round Table.
I could go on about this for ages and I’d rather just link you to my book… but that would be self-serving. Instead, I’d just casually mention that the fall of the Round Table is the chivalric ideal itself.
After the wars are won, the Table Knights fall into what T.H. White refers to as ‘games mania.’ They have nothing to fight for because the wars are over and the knights inevitably begin to fight each other. The battle against Mordred could have been against anyone. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s Arthur’s inbred son, jealousy amongst the knights, the Lancelot/Guinevere affair–which is of later tradition–or any of that; eventually, someone would prevent the eternal peace of Arthur’s kingdom because we, as humans, are flawed. The chivalric ideal is a concept that cannot be maintained without an outlet for the knights’ inherent violence and the imperfection of human nature.
Category: the once and future king
“The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there,…”
“The Dark and Middle Ages! The Nineteenth Century had an impudent way with its labels. For there, under the window in Arthur’s Gramarye, the sun’s rays flamed from a hundred jewels of stained glass in monasteries and convents or danced from the pinnacles of cathedrals and castles, which their builders had actually loved. […] Did you know that in these dark ages which were visible from Guenever’s window, there was so much decency in the world that the Catholic Church could impose a peace to all their fighting - which it called The Truce of God - and which lasted from Wednesday to Monday, as well as during the whole of Advent and Lent? Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine, Black Death and Serfdom, were less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza and Conscription? Even if they were foolish enough to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe, do we not ourselves believe that man is the fine flower of creation? If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?”
- T.H. White, The Once and Future King.
- T.H. White, The Once and Future King.
forthegothicheroine:Sometimes reading Arthuriana feels like reading Alice in Wonderland.“Well,” said…
Sometimes reading Arthuriana feels like reading Alice in Wonderland.
“Well,” said Alice, “these are a dreadfully strange assortment of objects!”
“They all symbolize different aspects of Our Lord’s martyrdom,” said the Fisher King, casting a line into his teacup.
“Indeed. I am sure everything symbolizes something else, for if everything was only itself I should be very confused. Might I ask what the point of the bleeding lance is?”
Alice regretted asking the question as soon as she had done so, for she saw the pun that would likely be made about the word point. Instead, however, the room erupted in applause and shouts of “The Grail! She has achieved the Grail!”
The next castle she visited, Alice resolved to herself as the inhabitants of this one danced for joy, would be more sensible.
“Why should I shy away. If fate is kind or cruel, man still must try.”
“Why should I shy
away. If fate is kind
or cruel, man still must try.”
- from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. by Simon Armitage.
away. If fate is kind
or cruel, man still must try.”
- from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. by Simon Armitage.
mighty-meerkat: Everyone’s going on about having a ‘traditional, old-fashioned Christmas’, but when…
Everyone’s going on about having a ‘traditional, old-fashioned Christmas’, but when I burst into the house covered in green paint and demand a champion strike my head from my shoulders with my own axe so that I may return the blow next year, I’m ‘scaring Grandma’.