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A Dark Mirror: Death and The Cadaver Tomb in The Awntyrs off Arthure
- Arthuriana
- Scriptorium Press
- Volume 27, Number 2, Summer 2017
- pp. 87-101
- 10.1353/art.2017.0014
- Article
- Additional Information
This paper proposes a modification to A.C. Spearing’s seminal view of the poem, The Awntyrs off Arthure, as a diptych, and suggests interpreting it as, instead, analogous to the medieval cadaver tomb. The poem then becomes a single ‘awntyr’: Guinevere and Gawain’s encounter with their own mortality and their subsequent failure to integrate this death-awareness into the social and psychological fabric of the Arthurian court.