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nuclearshill gau/cho  4mo ago (image post) 183 thread views #283858

Arthurian legend books :marseythegrey: :marseywizard: :marseyking: :marseycrusader:

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!bookworms !classics have you guys ever read them? What are your takes?

I mean all the corpus ranging from Geoffrey of Monmouth fanfic history about WE WUZ TROJANZ N SHEET to "Le Mort D'Arthur" and most recently "The One and Future King"

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I really liked The Once and Future King. Weird book, but I'm glad I read it. The first half is mostly a silly pisstake for the 1940's equivalent of "modern audiences" while the second is kind of hard to categorize. I'll repost my last comment on it since it was pretty late in a weekly book thread

The book seems closer to magic realism than fantasy. Supernatural elements are out of focus and presented very matter-of-fact-ly. They're a big part of the "plot," but the text is much more interested in the people living in this world. Stuff that another author might have spent five chapters on (wars, epic quests, finding the Holy Grail) gets summarized in a few paragraphs or related in dialog so we can get back to cuckold drama or discussions of governing philosophy. The book is extremely well written, but also sometimes frustrating for this reason. And it makes me want to read some older Arthurian tales.

I'd recommend it, but keep in mind that it assumes a certain baseline familiarity with the Arthurian legends that your average 2024 burger probably doesn't have.

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The first half is mostly a silly pisstake for the 1940's equivalent of "modern audiences"

Lmao, do you mind elaborating on that one?

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Lots of deliberate anachronism, poking fun at various characters from the mythos, slapstick humor, etc. Pellinore going after the Questing Beast is borderline Looney Tunes stuff, there's even a part where a couple guys dress up as a similar beast and then it falls in love with them. Merlyn experiences life backwards (he was born in the future and clearly remembers modern events). Duels between heavily armored knights are farcical because they can't hurt each other or see what they're doing. It's criticized as a social game nobles play while actual soldiers are stuck killing and dying.

Merlyn trains Arthur by transforming him into a series of animals so he can explore what kinds of social structures they have. The palace falcons are hierarchical and conservative, and one starts ranting about "BIPOCs and Bolsheviks" or something to that effect. Ants' messages are phrased like military radio jargon.

Anachronism continues into the second half of the book (a lot of the discussion of governing systems makes clear references to 20th century concerns) but it stops being used for comedy.

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The palace falcons are hierarchical and conservative, and one starts ranting about "BIPOCs and Bolsheviks" or something to that effect. Ants' messages are phrased like military radio jargon.

Lmao, that's just Monty Pythonesque. It fits the legends though. The medieval Arthurian romances themselves were filled with anachronisms. The stories are set in 5th century Britain but there are castles and fully armored knights like in the late Middle Ages, even knighthood didn't exist in the 5th century lol, at best there was some imitation of Roman equites.

I have to check those eventually.

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White actually deliberately changes the setting to like 1300, and then still has anachronisms within that. So there's probably some meta humor there about the original stories

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