Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (review)

Of all the recent companions or handbooks to the Arthurian myth, legend, or broadly speaking, Arthurian literature—and there have been quite a few in the last three years alone—the present one is the most original in both structure and approach. To start with, it is divided into two parts of roughly equal size, dealing with the "Evolution" of the legend and its "Themes," respectively. Therefore in this companion, unlike in other similar collections of essays, the editors have chosen to cut across geographical and linguistic boundaries and classifications and instead provide the reader with useful synchronic and diachronic views of the development of Arthur's story through the centuries. The advantages of this approach are manifold, not least among them the fact that the themes tackled in the second part of the companion are freed from the tyranny of place and period classifications, and instead the authors of the chapters in question can move fluidly from one century to the next, thus following the processes by which ideas are transformed and adapted in different periods rather than presenting a narrow analysis of only one author's work, as is often the case in other collections of essays.

Ronald Hutton's first chapter helpfully summarizes the critical debate over the historical Arthur to date; due to the fragmentary and debatable dating of the surviving evidence, the emergence of Arthur as a historical character—from Nennius's Historia Brittonum, the Annales Cambriae, and the earliest references in Welsh poems— is fraught with numerous issues. Several less credible theories are humorously dismissed while the core of the legend, the belief in an Arthur who was a dux bellorum of that name or a similar one, remains the more exciting and intriguing, especially placed in the context of the (still mysterious) survival of the archivolt at Modena Cathedral, which predates the boom in Arthurian literature in the twelfth century. Hutton concludes that "ever since he appears in the record, Arthur has been more than one kind of being, demanding more than one kind of understanding" (p. 34), a view which should provide researchers with a more open approach to the multiplicity of Arthurs that may still be discovered in years to come.

The focus of each of the following four chapters (dealing with one century at a time, from the twelfth to the fifteenth) emerges from the material: Ad Putter's chapter deals predominantly with the beginnings of romance in Chrétien de Troyes' romances (and their Welsh translations-adaptations), and Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. He discusses Geoffrey's restraint in his account of Arthur's wounding and death; Arthur is "mortally" (letaliter) wounded, though, Putter points out, Geoffrey leaves some room for interpretation by stating that Arthur was taken to the Isle of Avalon "to have his wounds healed" (ad sananda uulnera sua) (p. 41). Wace and Layamon receive cursory treatment in this chapter, though the former is tackled partly in Jane Taylor's subsequent chapter.

Jane Taylor's chapter on "The Thirteenth-Century Arthur" provides a clear and concise review of the development of the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate cycles and Robert de Boron's role in shaping the earliest Arthurian romances while also acknowledging the role played by Wace in developing the romance-chronicle tradition of the Brut. This chapter excels in bringing the reader up to date on the intricate relationships among the various elements of the cycle and its links with other romances in the same period, while it also discusses Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival at some length and places the writing of the various Gawain-focused romances in context.

J. A. Burrow's chapter on the fourteenth century naturally turns to English romance, in particular its most prominent example in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, while giving up only one paragraph to the development of the vernacular chronicle tradition in which Arthur is treated as a historical character. The Alliterative Morte...