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  • The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend
  • K. S. Whetter
Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xix, 261. £55.00; $90.00, cloth. £18.99; $28.99, paper.

The sheer scope of the Arthurian legend, medieval to modern, as well as the number of existing handbooks, means that any new companion needs to be more than typically creative and scholarly to stand out. Elizabeth Archibald and Ad Putter are aware of this, since they take pains in their introduction to situate the Cambridge Companion against two of its most obvious rivals, Derek Pearsall's 2003 Arthurian Romance and Alan Lupack's 2005 Oxford Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend: the first (it is said) overly selective, and the second overly descriptive. These are perhaps unfair criticisms, but Archibald and Putter's goal is “to strike a balance between” coverage and analysis, offering “an overview of the evolution of the legend in the dominant traditions”: Latin, French, and English in the Middle Ages, and primarily Anglophone materials in the modern tradition (2–3). German and Dutch materials do get occasional mention, but since these traditions were less influential both within and beyond the Middle Ages, Archibald and Putter utilize a laudable and practical aim, one that editors and contributors ably fulfill, thus rendering necessity a virtue. The editors’ next solution to the problem of coverage and rivalry is again to adopt a middle way. The Cambridge Companion is divided into two halves: the chronological Part I focuses on the “Evolution” of the legend, while Part II analyses sundry crucial “Themes,” usually with each chapter making use of both medieval and postmedieval materials.

The “Evolution” section begins with Ronald Hutton's overview of the problems and possibilities surrounding the historical, mythic, and folkloric “early Arthur.” Hutton clearly shares some of David Dumville's skepticism about the validity of the Historia Brittonum, but in general he offers an evenhanded account of the principal texts and issues. Ad Putter begins Chapter 2 by observing that “King Arthur came into his own in the twelfth century” (36), outlines the pan-European “traces of a vanished [Arthurian] tradition,” and then offers an outstandingly cogent, learned, and occasionally witty overview of and commentary on [End Page 297] the principal Welsh, Latin, French, and English texts of “the twelfth-century Arthur.” In her account of French verse and prose romance, including the Continuations, Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles, some German and Dutch romances, and Gauvain romances, Jane H. M. Taylor focuses on what she considers the thirteenth-century penchant for (one or more of) grails, deferred endings, and all-encompassing quasi-historical cycles. In the fourteenth century, says J. A. Burrow at the outset of Chapter 4, Arthur still belonged as much to the historical-political world of chronicle as to romance. Hence poems like the alliterative Morte Arthure. This is especially true of England, where, in contrast to France and Germany, romance enjoyed a relatively late flowering, including Ywain and Gawain, “the most writerly of all the English Arthurian metrical romances” (74), as well as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Barry Windeatt treads equally widely and perceptively in his survey of “the fifteenth-century Arthur,” but he uses Malory's dominant and “discerning” Morte Darthur as the touchstone of his analysis (84). In Chapter 6, Rob Gossedge and Stephen Knight have the unenviable task of accounting for “the Arthur of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries,” a period in which, in England as opposed to Scotland or Wales, Arthur was long the subject of irony, political “propaganda,” or “popular culture” (105). Tennyson reestablished Arthur as serious art, even if successors like Mark Twain still subjected Arthur to irony. In the final chapter of the “Evolution” section, Norris J. Lacy manages to survey “the Arthur of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” Although he does close with a brief account of non-English Arthuriana, Lacy introduces the Anglophone nature of his materials by observing that “just over 80 per cent of all Arthurian works in English date from the twentieth century,” particularly the 1980s and 1990s (121). Despite such a daunting subject, Lacy...

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