From Camelot to Obamalot: Essays on Medieval and Modern Arthurian Literature by Joerg O. Fichte (review)

In his essay collection with the catchy title, From Camelot to Obamalot, Joerg O. Fichte produces an arc of Arthurian literature, culture, and significance from twelfth-century Latin chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth to U.S. President Barack Obama. A longtime researcher of Arthurian myth, Fichte achieves what German academics often accomplish after a long and fruitful career: the collection of topically related essays into a corpus that prides itself on its intertextual and comparative analysis. His compendium aims to treat “general topics” (p. 3), such as genre, typology, historiography, the wondrous, the Grail, Utopian and Dystopian fiction, imperialism, and origination myth. This anthology comprises an introduction, six essays on medieval Arthurian literature, and six articles on Arthuriana from the nineteenth century onward. Except for the last essay, the others have been previously published, albeit some in German (numbers 2, 5, 8, 10, 11); those have been translated and thus been made more widely available to an Anglo-American audience. The essays have been reworked and updated, though not always satisfactorily; the footnotes demonstrate a limited rather than an exhaustive engagement with scholarly production since the original date of publication.

The first two essays tackle issues of genre. Even though the Introduction maintains that the first essay, “Grappling With Arthur or Is There an English Arthurian Verse Romance?” proffers “four major categories” (p. 3) of Middle English Arthurian romances, those categories are not easily detectable in the structure of the essay. The revised article argues that both the “actual” and “abstract” (p. 20) Arthurian court determines Fichte’s generic distinctions. Chrétien de Troyes’s works, however, are the real measurement of the Middle English verse romances in the article, as the comparisons depict the Arthurian worlds of Chrétien and how the Middle English authors follow or deviate from them. Ywain and Gawain, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Lybeaus Desconus, and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle are discussed respectively as Utopian, historical, utilitarian, and parodic. The ending appears chopped, and a conclusion that clearly reiterates these models would have been desirable. The second essay, “‘Fact’ and Fiction in Twelfth-Century Arthurian History,” continues Fichte’s generic investigation, now into historiography. Fichte compares three types of scenes (“addresses by leaders before a decisive battle,” councils, and dreams [p. 32]) in Geoffrey, Wace, and Layamon with rhetorical principles to prove convincingly that fact and fiction blend due to the clever use of rhetorical devices that makes historiography look like fiction and fiction look like fact.

Essays 3 and 5 deal with Middle English Gawain romances. Both genre and Gawain discussion continue in Essay 3, “Historia and Fabula: Arthurian Traditions and Audience Expectations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Contrasting the historical Brutus opening and Order of the Garter ending of SGGK to its adventure-driven Arthurian romance core, Fichte argues that in the “prismatic nature of the poem . . . historia is refracted by fabula and fabula by historia” (p. 44). He deduces that the Gawain poet wants his audience to take seriously “the complex moral issues Gawain faces during his quest, issues that cannot be resolved within the fictional context of romance but that have to be confronted in the nonfictional framework of a universally valid system of Christian ethics” (p. 55). In the very useful “The Function of the Wondrous in the Middle English Gawain Romances,” Fichte delimits the wondrous as a “neutral term” that encompasses “representation, apparitions, and experiences” and sees it operating mostly in “legend, saint’s life, exemplum, epic, and romance” (p. 69). Armed with two of Walter Haug’s three classifications of the fantastic—“the court’s changed identity and the lack of crisis” for the protagonist (p. 75)—Fichte examines eight of the eleven Northwest Midlands Gawain romances. He deduces that “Gawain’s main task in these late medieval romances seems to be the integration of the elements inimical to the ethics of...