Why Do Some Stories Keep Returning?: Modern Arthurian Fiction and the Narrative Structure of Romance

Given the extraordinary number of Arthurian narratives produced over the last few centuries, a modern scholar might be forgiven for hypothesizing that the famous epitaph “Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus” refers to the fictional returns of King Arthur rather than to any more mystical concept. Arthur is not the only figure from medieval literature to be reborn in modern dress, but he is certainly one of the most common, with representations in epic and lyric poetry, contemporary cinema, fantastic and historical fiction, comic books, and even role-playing games. According to an impressive but incomplete online bibliography maintained by Curtis W. Bobbitt, between 1990 and 2005, approximately 200 Arthurian novels were published or republished in English, and 16 short story anthologies.¹ By any standard, that is a lot of Arthur.

As significant, I believe, is the fact that in all this extravagance of Arthur, it is primarily the Arthur of romance who is best known to modern readers. Say the words “King Arthur” to any ten people, and at least nine will immediately think of noble knights in anachronistic plate armor and beautiful ladies in pointy hats. The more sophisticated will remember the Lancelot-Guinivere triangle, Camelot, Excalibur, Merlin, the myth of the “Once and Future King,” and, of course, the Holy Grail, which has been sought by characters as diverse as Monty Python, Indiana Jones, and Batman.² Despite occasional attempts by writers to tell the story of the “historical” Arthur, the British war-leader who fought Saxon invaders, it is most often King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table who return to fictional life. As testimony to the dominance of the Romance Arthur, even authors who begin by writing about the Historical Arthur sometimes find themselves writing romance as well. For example, Rosemary Sutcliffe published two novels about the “historical” Arthur (The Lantern Bearers, 1959, and Sword at Sunset, 1963), but she also wrote a Young Adult trilogy based on Malory in the early 1980s. In fact, in the Author’s Note to the first volume of that Malory-based trilogy, Sutcliffe argues that “behind the legends of Arthur as we know them today, there stands a real man” even as she justifies using the legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table in her current narrative.³ Perhaps an even more telling commentary on the dominance of Romance Arthur is Gillian Bradshaw’s determinedly Celtic Gawain trilogy, Down the Long Wind, which contains no Lancelot, no Grail, and no Round Table—but which still somehow manages to describe Arthur’s Queen Gwenhwyfar as having a destructive and adulterous affair.⁴ Clearly, it is the Arthur of Camelot and not the Historical Arthur who speaks to us most often and most powerfully. In this essay I will discuss some of the reasons for why this is the case. What is it about Arthurian legend that keeps the stories being told and retold, sometimes changed but still recognizable? My answer is that the narrative structure of Arthurian romance, the way in which the tales were originally organized and presented, provides an opportunity for later generations to remake the Matter of Britain into something relevant to their own needs. Audiences and authors find that these tales serve to generate and encapsulate questions as important to the modern world as they were to the 12th century.

Several scholars have, in fact, already commented on the appeal of Arthur in terms of the mutability or plasticity of the legend—the ways in which the material can be and has been reshaped for new audiences. For example, Donald Hoffman and Elizabeth S. Sklar point out that “the Matter of Arthur may be seen as an empty receptacle, waiting to be filled with whatever substance may speak to the individual and cultural moment.”⁵ Separately, Sklar also discusses the “generous and infinitely expanding cast of characters” that gives Arthurian legend its “extraordinary adaptability.”⁶ Meanwhile, others have concentrated on the popularity of romance in general: W. P. Ker connects the popularity of the genre to its “mystery and...