An Introduction to British Arthurian Narrative by Susan Aronstein (review)

This new series from the University Press of Florida offers introductory surveys aimed at undergraduate students, graduate students, and general readers. To create a ‘compact’ survey of so sprawling a subject as the British Arthurian tradition is a particular challenge, and in many ways Susan Aronstein’s engaging book succeeds admirably. The author’s careful historical contextualizing of her many texts (starting with a helpful Chronology at the beginning of the book) creates a persuasive thread of continuity from pre-Conquest Arthurian ‘history’ through to Thomas Malory’s late-medieval summa Arthurianica. There are times when the detail is subject to challenge or correction, but a reader new to this literary tradition is certain to enjoy, and learn much from, Susan Aronstein’s overview.

After a brief introduction that demonstrates both the persistence of the tradition and the nostalgia that has always characterized it, the first section of the book is devoted to ‘the circumstances that made the legend particularly appealing to writers and their audiences’ (p. 13). These circumstances are, Aronstein argues, a British history of crises of legitimacy, warfare, and persistent appropriations of useful stories from the past. A survey of some 500 or so years of this history forms a bracing prelude to the meat of the chapter, a discussion of the English chronicle tradition. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laʒamon all code the Arthurian story as history, though for somewhat different ends; but the themes of conquest, imperialism, and confrontation/ control of various ‘others’ are common throughout the discussion. Next are two poems focusing on the death of Arthur, the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Stanzaic Morte Arthure. While the first starts with a vision of Arthurian plenitude, the second is already marked by a wistful sense of days gone by, and Aronstein’s evocation of the atmosphere of ‘transience and loss’ (p. 54) is telling and moving.

Chapter Two, ‘British Arthurian Romance,’ deals with works concentrating on the ‘golden age of Arthurian plenitude’ (p. 55). In contrast to the relentless forward motion of the historically-inflected chronicle texts, the romances in this chapter pause to focus on the individual. Aronstein begins with Welsh texts, moving through Culhwch ac Olwen’s nostalgia for the good old days of the Welsh warrior nobility to the reflection of Welsh politics in the Welsh Arthurian romances. A section on popular Arthurian romances follows; the texts are presented ‘as both fantasy and critique’ (p. 80), speaking to and of the fractured social landscape in the wake of the Black Death. By organizing these texts around the themes of War and Conquest, Chivalric Adventures, Chivalric Identities, and Otherworldly Encounters, Aronstein weaves the many works into a coherent presentation. Particularly striking is how her concentration on the Gawain romances allows her to present Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as part of a unified, often popular, tradition. It is potentially misleading to argue that the importance of Arthurian popular romances is suggested in part by their being ‘among the first printed books at both London and Edinburgh’ (p. 73), for while Malory belongs to the first generation of print, most of the texts Aronstein deals with here are attested primarily after the first quarter of the sixteenth century, and some derive, as she notes, from the seventeenth-century Percy Folio. Nevertheless, this overview is full of excellent points about the texts being described, and valuable for bringing many neglected works into conversation with more well-known ones. The focus on the construction of chivalric identity, and the role of wealth, birth, and violence in that identity, is particularly helpful for understanding how each text fits into the larger picture. Sir Launfal, for example, one of the works presented under the Otherworldly Encounters title, is shown to be a text ‘that would have been particularly pointed during the reign of Richard II…[skewering] a society that equates wealth with worth, and [ridiculing] a...