Volume 5, Issue 1

In 2015 the publication of the long-awaited volume Arthur of the Iberians promoted, alongside more traditional areas, the need to study contemporary Iberian Arthurian literature, the subject matter of its last chapter. This état présent insists on this idea and makes the claim that a world of research opportunity awaits those interested in this subfield of study. International scholars interested in Arthuriana will be introduced to the how, when and why the matter of Britain staged a very slow comeback to the Iberian Peninsula as the nineteenth century progressed. The prejudice against chivalric fiction and the so-called curse of Cervantes’s Don Quixote proved very difficult to forget. The fundamental role played by translation in the contemporary period and the lack of a full account of Latin American Arthurian literary output are two key areas for further research. Arthur in Iberian fine and performing arts and in Iberian popular culture are two other territories demanding deeper exploration. In other words, King Arthur also belongs to contemporary Portugal, Spain, Latin America and other parts of the Hispanic world.

Stemmatics, that is the branch of philology concerned with analysing the relationships among extant variant versions of a text, is not a common tool in the study of the manuscript traditions of Arthurian Old French Prose Romances. Moreover, the lack of faith in the method has often led to its being implemented unsatisfactorily. However, it would be possible to proceed differently in applying stemmatics to this type of textual tradition; and this method could also be very useful in order to understand the genesis of texts, their reconstruction, and their reception. The discussion focuses on editions of the most important romances, such as the Lancelot-Grail -Cycle, the Prose Tristan and the Guiron -Cycle.

This article examines how Malory’s Morte Darthur re-emerged from the shadows in the eighteenth century. It considers how the fates of Malory and Caxton were intertwined, the reputation of one closely connected to the reputation of the other: the perception of Malory as ‘light’ or morally questionable reading first impacting on Caxton’s standing, then later the resuscitation of Caxton’s reputation impacting in turn on Malory’s growing status as a literary hero. Questions about the reputation of Malory’s Arthuriad surfaced across a wide variety of literary media in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and these ongoing discussions about the morality and value of Malory’s work occurred at the same time as the first flowering of English historical bibliography. This serious historical study of typography and printing was central to the revival of Caxton’s reputation, and thus also central to the establishment of Malory’s work as worthy to be included in the canon of English Literature. Hence, I argue that a series of key early publications by notably John Lewis (1675–1747), the first biographer of Caxton, who championed the reputations of Caxton and Malory, and by Joseph Ames (1689–1759), a ‘pioneer historian of printing’, should correctly be viewed as part of the continuum which ultimately led to the Arthurian Revival.

This article presents a survey of the work of Jessie Weston and examines her role in the development of Arthurian studies in the first half of the twentieth century. In her considerable output of articles, editions, and retellings of Arthurian romance tales, Weston attempted to establish links between major themes in medieval Arthurian romances and the ancient traditions of the Celts. These speculations reached their height in her most famous and most controversial book, From Ritual to Romance , where she suggested that the origins of the medieval Grail story could be traced back to an initiation ritual in an ancient mystery cult that survived into the medieval period. Although From Ritual to Romance has influenced modernist literature and culture, current Arthurian scholarship has largely rejected Weston’s theories about the relationship between Celtic civilization and romance. However, the popularity surrounding this controversial work, especially outside mainstream scholarship, has obscured Weston’s other work, and the present study is intended to present a wider context for her achievements and to examine their contribution to the study of Arthurian tradition at the beginning of the twentieth century.

During the national revival between the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, medieval texts, including the matter of Arthur, became available to audiences both in the form of new editions and creative adaptations. Among the latter, the operas of Richard Wagner, inspired by medieval and, in particular, Arthurian motifs, were influential far beyond Germany. One of the authors who drew inspiration from Wagner’s work was T. W. Rolleston, an Irishman who is better known nowadays for his political works, but who also wrote works inspired by medieval matter, both Celtic and Arthurian. The present article discusses a poem of T. W. Rolleston, Parsifal or the Legend of the Holy Grail , which was published for the first time in 1912, in a luxurious edition illustrated by Willy Pogány. The aim of the article is to examine the interaction between carnality and spirituality in the version of salvation through the Holy Grail created by Rolleston and Pogány, while highlighting the impact of three Rolleston’s sources, Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s romance Parzival and Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval.

Résumé La présente étude vise à examiner les différents aspects établis par la critique concernant le début du Tristan en prose , à savoir l’histoire des ancêtres du héros éponyme qui relie la famille de Tristan à celle des gardiens du Graal, dont son ancêtre, Sadoc, serait le neveu de Joseph d’Arimathie et le frère d’Helain le Blanc. Cette “préhistoire“ a dû subir le jugement inexorable de G. Paris qui n’a su attribuer aucune valeur littéraire à cette partie introductive au roman et la jugeait complètement inutile. La critique a, notamment suite à la publication du premier tome de l’édition par R. L. Curtis en 1963, pris deux positions diamétralement opposées dont un réexamen sera de mise : celle qui n’a pas cessé de défendre l’utilité de la préhistoire pour la suite du roman, car elle est imprégnée, entre autres, de la thématique de l’amour-passion au même titre que le récit tristanien qui s’ensuit. De l’autre côté, de nombreuses études ont montré que la préhistoire, bien qu’elle introduise la thématique du Graal tout au début, n’a aucun impact sur le destin de Tristan, qui est dû à son penchant pour la luxure, exclu a priori de la Quête du Graal qui a lieu plus tard dans le roman. De plus, notre étude montrera d’autres points mis en évidence par la critique ainsi que des perspectives pour la recherche concernant ce sujet : outre la question de l’intertextualité, avec comme modèle principal l’ombre mythique d’Œdipe, et la dominance de Chelinde, l’élément féminin, comme point-pivot de l’histoire, le chantier le plus évident reste le réexamen de la tradition textuelle pour laquelle Curtis avait, jadis, établi un stemma , mais dont la méthodologie est aujourd’hui dépassée. Ainsi, nous espérons qu’un jour il sera possible, grâce à un classement des manuscrits obtenu par des méthodes plus opérables pour le traitement des textes en prose, de pouvoir apporter de nouvelles connaissances de la genèse d’au moins une partie de cette œuvre littéraire très vaste.

Zusammenfassung Der Oxforder Gelehrte Galfred von Monmouth veröffentlichte 1138 die Historia Regum Britannie , die berühmte erste Artus-Sage im eigentlichen Sinn, in deren Mitte er die ebenso berühmte Weissagung des autochthonen Propheten Merlin eingefügt hat. Unmittelbar nach ihrer Veröffentlichung stiessen die Prophezeiungen auf grosses Interesse von Seiten der führenden Persönlichkeiten in Politik und Kirche, und eine lange Tradition der Auslegung nahm ihren Anfang. Heute sind uns ungefähr vierzig Kommentare zu den Prophezeiungen des Merlin bekannt, die zwischen dem 12. und 15. Jh. entstanden sind. Die dunkle und doppeldeutige Sprache der Prophezeiungen erlaubten den Kommentatoren die Figuren der Artusliteratur mit den wichtigen Ereignissen und politischen Persönlichkeiten ihrer Zeit in Verbindung zu bringen und die anglonormannischen Könige und ihre Gemahlinnen zu kritisieren. Aus Angst vor Strafe musste diese Kritik jedoch vorsichtig zum Ausdruck gebracht werden. Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts begann der berühmte Chronist, Matthaeus Parisiensis, Mönch von St. Alban, die Arbeit an der Chronica maiora und verfasste einen Kommentar zu der Prophetia Merlini , die unter dem Jahr 465 in die Chronica eingefügt worden ist. Matthaeus verkehrte in den Kreisen der politischen Elite seiner Zeit und kannte namentlich Heinrich III. persönlich. Obwohl das Werk, und im speziellen die Chronica maiora , des Matthaeus Parisiensis Gegenstand zahlreicher Studien und Untersuchungen ist, wurde sein Kommentar zu den Prophezeiungen weniger beachtet. In dieser Studie werden einzelne Erklärungen des Matthæus untersucht, mit welchen er führende Persönlichkeiten der anglonormannischen Dynastie, wie Eleonora von Aquitanien und König Richard Löwenherz, kritisiert, indem er sie den Figuren der Prophezeiungen des Merlin gleichsetzt.