The Arthurian Way of Death: The English Tradition (review)

Death comes suddenly and often in Arthurian literature, and this collection explores the narrative uses of it in texts from Geoffrey of Monmouth's twelfth-century history to modern film. The general focus is not death as a universal end that comes to everyone, but individual death, the end of characters from Mordred's unnamed children to Arthur himself. The essays ask how authors use the deaths of characters to indicate the value and shape of the knights' lives; to illuminate the values of kinship, duty, and monarchy; to navigate between genres; or to tie the Arthurian past meaningfully to the present. The collection focuses on English works, defined as either works from England in whatever language or works in English wherever produced. It is arranged in three loose sections, "The Early Tradition in England," "Middle English Romance and Malory," and "Medieval Influence and Modern Arthuriana."

Siân Echard begins the first section with an analysis of the words and phrases Geoffrey of Monmouth uses to describe the deaths of kings and lords. She argues that scenes of grief at the death of major characters is basically unique to the Arthurian section, marking it off as a space of romance where individual lives are celebrated. The mourning, however, is seen at the deaths of Kay and Bedivere, not Gawain and Arthur, whose curtly narrated deaths are more in keeping with the deaths of the other kings whose reigns have come and gone. The result is to celebrate Arthur's reign as a temporary retreat from the grim demands of history into the world of romance, but also to insist on his return and loss to the historical world. Edward Donald Kennedy looks at the deaths of Mordred's sons (sometimes portrayed as adults, sometimes children) in a variety of medieval English and Scottish texts through the sixteenth century, suggesting that the varied treatments of their killings reflect the political commitments of their authors on issues such as the king's power, purity of blood, needs for civil order, and the legitimacy of English claims to Scotland. Karen Cherewatuk analyzes early stories of the deaths of three close kinsmen, Gawain, Mordred, and Arthur, in many accounts at each other's hands. The various configurations of who kills whom, and the details of who mourns and who condemns, show responses to the complex questions of the importance of kinship, personal and family honor, and justice.

These three essays that make the section "The Early Tradition in England" show how ideas of death, grief, and vengeance reflect and shape beliefs about honor, family, and political legitimacy, and so it is no accident that they focus on deaths of (or ordered by) the central characters of the legend.

The second section, "Middle English Romance and Malory," begins with Michael W. Twomey defending Gawain's religious preparations for death. Arguing that critics have unfairly judged Gawain's religious piety for relying on external gesture rather than internal conviction, Twomey suggests that this is a false dichotomy growing out of later Protestant theologies, and that Gawain practices a proper late medieval fusion of belief and ritual properly as he prepares to face his beheading. K. S. Whetter argues that there is a persistent connection between death and love (both romantic passion and fellowship) in a variety of Middle English romances. This connection can be used to condemn earthly love, but often it is used to show its worth and its value in defining life and confronting death on the lovers' terms. Thomas Howard Crofts looks at how Malory's penchant for naming minor characters, coupled with the Winchester scribes' rubrication of names and marking in the margins the deaths of characters, darkens the mood of Le Morte Arthur by comparison with the lighter romances, in which deaths of unnamed characters merely prove the worth of the hero; in the contrast, the cost of chivalry becomes plainer. The naming of the dead does introduce...