Arthurian Literature (short talk) - Gabriel Schenk

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Okay, ladies and gentlemen, I think we will make a start. Thank you very much for coming. Welcome back. Hope the lunch was good. Um, and a big welcome to all the people who are joining us online. It's about 500 at the moment, so we're reaching quite an audience. Um, this afternoon session is following on in the history of fantasy literature, and we're going to concentrate on medieval literature.

So first of all, if I could introduce Gabriel Schenck. Uh, Doctor Schenck is the co-founder and Coco runs the annual Tolkien lecture series on fantasy literature at Pembroke. Um, he's a writer of fiction and non-fiction and has taught at Oxford University. And also it's Signum University. And if you don't know Signum, you should definitely look it up, because it's a way of sort of doing online courses, particularly around all kinds of speculative fiction.

And Gabriel researches into fantasy literature and the inklings, and he's going to speak today a bit about Arthurian myths.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. Over the next ten minutes, I'm going to tell you about Arthurian literature and how it overlaps with fantasy. I will argue that just because a text is messy and complex and crosses over into multiple genres, as Arthurian literature often does, it doesn't mean that it can also be an important example of fantasy by Arthurian literature.

I just mean stories related to King Arthur about him, characters linked to him, or just set in a world in which he exists and is referenced. Arthur himself is a legendary king who probably never existed. I always feel like I'm breaking people's hearts when I tell them that, at least if there was a real historical figure behind the stories, then he would have been so different from what we mean by King Arthur that he might as well be unrelated.

But whilst Arthur's historicity is uncertain, what is certain is that people have been telling stories about Arthur and his related characters for centuries, around a thousand years or more. And at this point, I could go into extreme detail about the dating of texts like Good Arthur and so on. Um, which is why there's a question mark up to a thousand years. But, um, the take home point to this point is just that people have been telling stories about Arthur for a very long time.

Arthur's story is also not restricted to a single version, as Tracy D'Eon, author of the Legend Born series of young adult fantasy novels, writes. Author Rihanna is absorptive and has always invited invention and reinvention. Author exists in a network of narratives. There is no single story, no sacred text, no definitive version, no single voice. Instead, there are many versions of many legends, reimaginings and retellings.

As such, Arthurian stories can take any shape and fit into any genre, including science fiction set in the far future, with Arthur waking from a long Sleep. Young adult dramas set in American high schools where Arthur has been reincarnated as a teenage girl. Even cosmic horror Reimaginings, in which Arthur and his knights battle creatures from a different dimension. All of these could be described as speculative and therefore in a very broad sense, as fantasy.

But some Arthurian texts are closer to fantasy than others. Now, fantasy literature, as we've already heard this morning, is harder to define than Arthurian literature, but we can easily pick out some of its commonly shared components, such as magic a vaguely defined, medieval esque setting, not necessarily European supernatural creatures such as elves, dragons, griffins, etc. characters or quests. Uh, often in the context of a fight between good and evil.

This isn't my attempt to do a perfect definition of fantasy. This is just some components. Um, to get us started. Arthurian texts can also that also contain these elements and could be easily considered. Fantasy texts include. The aforementioned Legend Born series by Tracy Dillon began in 2020. And Lev Grossman The Bright Sword, published in 2024. But once, the Once and Future King is another example, and the one I'm going to spend the rest of my time exploring with you.

White was an English writer born in 1906. Died in 1964 who published a novel about King Arthur's childhood titled The Sword in the Stone in 1938. He followed this with sequels, continuing to follow Arthur's story as he becomes king, establishes his Knights of the Round Table, and navigates court drama, including his wife's affair and his son's rebellion. The Witch in the woods was published in 1939. The Ill Made Knight in 1940. And finally The Once and Future King in 1958.

This last one was a four part novel, which combined new versions of the first three books, with a fourth concluding part taking readers up to Arthur's final battle. White deliberately resists a specific time period as his setting, instead setting his work in a vaguely medieval period. As the scholar Elizabeth Brewer notes, white starts The Sword in the Stone in an implied 12th century, but seems to move forward several centuries by the end of the novel.

He also includes numerous anachronisms, including Eton College, founded in 1440, port, a drink from the 17th century, and even an illustration which included a Nazi swastika and a communist hammer and sickle. I see, and here. So this is from the first edition. Um. Uh, where you see elements from White's time in 1938. Uh, put into this kind of vaguely medieval, 12th century, 15th century period about, um, King Arthur.

And in doing this we followed the approach of Sir Thomas Malory, um, in his own Arthurian work, written and published in the late 15th century. As white wrote in a letter in 1939, I am trying to write of an imaginary world which was imagined in the 15th century. I'm taking the 15th century as a provisional forward limit, and often darting back to the positively Gaelic past. Mallory and I are both dreaming. We care very little for exact dates.

Now, this isn't always the approach of Arthurian writers. Some, such as Rosemary Sutcliff in Sword at Sunset, published in 1963, and Marion Zimmer Bradley and Mists of Avalon, published in 1983, set the narratives in a consistent time period, and it's close to a realistic setting as possible. The post-Roman early Middle Ages, which, if Arthur was real, is around the time he would have lived. We might say these texts are closer to historical fiction, even though they also contain some magic.

But by not attempting to write realistically or even have a consistent time period. White creates what he says in his own words, is an imaginary world which brings this author in work closer to other fantasy texts. He also includes magic, particularly in The Sword in the Stone, where Merlin turns the young Arthur into a variety of animals to teach him lessons about good leadership and supernatural creatures,

including griffins and unicorns. Here we see Merlin as depicted in the Disney animated version from 1963, using spell to pack items away into his bag. White's characters also go on quests, namely the quest for the Holy Grail and Arthur's quest to turn his knights desire to fight and be strong into positive causes rather than into conflict. And this is all in the context of good versus evil.

So if you return to this list of common components in fantasy, we can see that the Once and Future King contains all of them, making it easy to see how it could be considered a fantasy text.

But it's not as simple as just calling it fantasy and moving on. A lot of these components magic spells, supernatural creatures, and quests are found more at the beginning of the novel, and the sword in the Stone and fade as the novel progresses through the other three parts. In the Once and Future King, the time period becomes more consistently 15th century, and even the fight between good and evil takes a back seat.

After a more philosophical discussion of why humans go to war is is introduced at the very end. This is why the scholar Anna Lou Pack described The Once and Future King as the book that grows up. We could say that it starts as fantasy and ends up being closer to historical fiction or epic. But we don't need to do that. We don't need to choose a single category for this novel, or indeed any novel. The author and fantasy author Lev Grossman said this about White's work.

The sword in the Stone set, the standard by which I judge all historical fiction. It is also the most perfect story of a childhood ever committed to paper, and it is only the first part of the Once and Future King. White took hold of the ultimate English epic and recasts it in modern literary language.

The sword in the Stone was published in 1938, the year after J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and I often wonder why white isn't considered one of the founding fathers of modern fantasy, the way that Tolkien and Chris Lewis are perhaps one day in the future he will be. As Grossman says, White's work can be seen as historical fiction, children's story, epic, and a foundational text in the fantasy genre.

Perhaps the fact that it can be classed in so many different categories, and is part of the long and varied tradition of people telling stories about King Arthur, which means that the once future king hasn't been given the attention it might deserve as a fantasy text. So in conclusion, when considering fantasy. Don't ignore Arthurian literature, even when it is a bit messy and complex like the Once and Future King.

If you do, you might not only miss out on some great stories, but also, uh, you might not only miss out on some great stories, but also unnecessarily limits what you mean by fantasy. Thank you very much. I think this is why we speak with Grossman about why it should be considered in the same category as the founder of modern fantasy. Yeah, I mean, the whole concept of the founder of modern fantasy is incredibly complex, and I'm not sure I agree with that concept.

Right, right. So, I mean, as as Professor Roberts said this morning, you know, you can trace so many roots back to so many different places. So it depends what you mean by modern fantasy. I certainly think he's incredibly important. And people should read the ones The Future King and not be put off by the fact that it kind of doesn't quite fit perfectly into any particular genre.

Um, and I think I also, it's really interesting to think of the ways that it fits alongside things like, uh, Chronicles of Narnia, uh, and the Lord of the Rings The Hobbit. Um, in fact, I mean, um, it was Milton Waldman. Uh, uh, who would have advised Bill Collins not to publish The Once and Future King in 1941, which is when white originally tried to get it published. Um, and then later on tried to bring Tolkien's work over tolerance for publication in 1950.

Um, so you can see, uh, the way that people at the time was sort of seeing the once future King and the Lord of the rings was quite similar. Uh, and so I think today, uh, we should sort of read them in the same. Um, or if someone's reading Lord of the rings, you should also read the one speech King and vice versa. Um, we shouldn't sort of split them apart just because one's author and one's, of course, in quotes, fantasy. So I guess that's what I would say. Thank you, thank you. Uh oh.

I've not seen that insight. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. I think that it's for, um, genealogy from Malory through Spenser to Tennyson. And then why? I mean, you can do, um. I mean, Spencer's doing quite a different thing, but then so is Tennyson and Malory. Uh, and indeed White's. I mean, white's sort of going back to Malory, but actually, you know, apart from the fact that he, uh, blurs timelines, he's he's also doing very different things as well.

Um, so I think, I think the, the project of sort of tracing like a line between these different authors is possible, but in my opinion, sort of misses the point of Arthurian literature, which is that it is messy and different, and every author is sort of responding to a previous author or authors, but also doing their own thing as well. Um, which isn't to say that you can't do it. I just that's just my, uh, my approach is I don't think we should be too smooth and to linear about it.

Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.