The Matter of Britain

As a point within my eternal studies that bounce randomly between a variety of sources, I have recently found myself re immersed in reading up about the historical and legendary King Arthur. I have recently picked up where I left off in Keith Baines' rendition of Le Morte d'Arthur in modern idiom. I am about halfway through. Before this I was copiously going between wikipedia and this site, trying to put together some idea of the known historical figures of the period. I was taking notes as I went, to try to codify the figures in my mind in some form, the way they related to each other and traveled through history, and come up with some kind of timeline of events that takes into account the various historical, semi-historical and legendary veins to the story. Heck, I even read some of Gilda's On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. It's kind of tedious, and I really don't feel like I am enjoying reading a lot of these things, and kind of want to retreat back to doing something else, like rereading a William Gibson book or something (Pattern Recognition was looking so welcoming and inviting on my bookshelf today).

The fun of it, really, is the making up my own version of the story in my head, taking the ways others have told the story, refashioning it to the historical record, and seeing what grows out of it, trying to figure out how to work the more plainly legendary characters into the historical framework, making the more historical figures conform more closely the to the bare facts, watch them spring to life in my mind, then watching them shift in my mind as I stumble onto more facts, chortling when some stroke inspiration hits about how to connect certain dots together. It's all a lot of fun, thought a little aggravating, since everything is prone to change.

That's why I am reading a version of Le Morte d'Arthur right now. It's basically the earliest compendium of all the details of the various Arthur stories put in one place. Reading it gives a good overview of how all the different characters interact emotionally, as well as pointing out all the major legendary events one would not want to neglect in one's own telling, even if those events aren't the most important. I hadn't heard of the questing beast until I started reading this, but now I couldn't imagine how one could leave it out of their telling. It's pretty awesome. Likewise, I now can't see leaving characters like Palomides, Lamorak or Dynadan out, though they almost undoubtedly lack a historical precedent.

That said, the book is actually kind of boring. It's almost an endless stream of various knights jousting with each other. I can only get through by making unofficial rankings in my head. Oh, so and so unseated so and so, so he's better at jousting, but so and so is better at swordplay.... Right now, I think the unoffical ranking of knights in it is Lancelot, Tristam, Lamorak, Palomides, then maybe Gawain and Dynadan. I can't remember the rest, but most of them have died or not really interacted with these guys.