Volume 12, Issue 1

Résumé Réputé pour sa tonalité tant belliqueuse qu’épique, le Roman de Meliadus , premier volet du Cycle de Guiron le Courtois , se solde sur une invasion saxonne et le conflit armé qui en découle. Héros éponyme du texte, le roi Méliadus de Léonois, père de Tristan, fait partie des forces arthuriennes au combat et luttera dans un duel final contre Ariohan, prince des Saxons à leur tête. Ariohan se révèle un personnage non seulement individualisé, émergeant de la masse saxonne que connaissent habituellement les romans arthuriens en prose, mais également courtois, valeureux, digne d’un statut arthurien que d’autres personnages extérieurs au royaume de Logres ne connaissent que rarement. Cet article étudie l’élaboration de ce personnage au fil du Meliadus ainsi que son intertextualité arthurienne.

Early in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Arthur Merlin predicts that the child Lancelot will become ‘the moste man of worship of the world’ ( MD 100.7). Later, in King Arthur and the Emperour Lucius , the still-youthful Lancelot is heralded as having ‘no felowe’ in ‘wyse wytte and . . gret strengthe of his ayge’ ( MD 168.17–19). Still a major character in the next four sections of the Morte Darthur  – ‘Sir Launcelot du Lake’, ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’, and the two ‘books’ of ‘Sir Tristram […]’, he loses his dominant role in The Sankgreal. As the Grail Quest begins, in fact, Malory revises his presentation of his chief knight. Thus Lancelot learns from a suddenly-appearing damsel that he is now only ‘the best knyght […] of ony synfull man of the worlde’ ( MD 672.9, 14–19). Thus lessened, he begins his Quest only to be lessened further, first defeated by Galahad, then by virtually every knight he challenges. Moreover, he is beset by sudden nap-attacks. Thus hampered – by his unconfessed sin, we learn – Lancelot fails at almost every chivalric endeavor he attempts in the Quest. The ‘hero’ of The Sankgreal is Galahad, of course – but the thematic center and the most ‘conflicted’ character is Lancelot – who, contradicting his earlier valor and success, yawns or at least naps through many of the high points of The Sankgreal . Ironically, his greatest success is a final defeat – for which he thanks God.

Based on its inclusion of non-Hebrew Italian loanwords and the sole surviving manuscript copy being Italian, the current consensus among scholars is that an Italian Jew authored Melekh Artus (1279), the only extant medieval Hebrew translation of Arthurian material. The following study destabilizes this consensus opinion demonstrating why these loanwords are a precarious tool when ascertaining this text’s linguistic provenance. Not only are most of the said loanwords not necessarily Italian, but, using Italian copies of the French biblical commentator Rashi, this study establishes that Jewish Italian scribes sometimes Italianized Old French loanwords they encountered in their Hebrew sources. Thus, the few loanwords that are Italianisms do not prove Italian authorship but merely that the sole surviving copy was produced by an Italian-Jewish scribe adhering to the scribal conventions of his times.

Résumé L’ annominatio est une figure de rhétorique qui met en jeu la forme sonore, voire graphique, d’un mot en lien avec un ou d’autres mots selon de multiples modalités: elle est fondamentalement une figure de diction mais, dans la mesure où la répétition en est un élément constitutif essentiel, elle tient aussi d’une figure de construction. À l’époque médiévale, l’ annominatio conditionne l’esthétique littéraire en général, l’écriture des vers en particulier, leur récitation ou leur lecture; elle n’est évidemment pas spécifique de la littérature arthurienne, mais la coloration et le dynamisme qu’elle apporte à ces textes permet d’entrer dans le style de leurs auteurs, de particulariser leur plume, voire, sur certains points, de l’identifier. Elle fait entendre le caractère très sonore de la langue française de cette époque. Comme toute figure de style, elle a un rôle argumentatif (elle insiste, souligne, établit des liens implicites et symboliques entre ce qui, a priori , semble ne pas en avoir, elle aide à la mémorisation) et un rôle ornemental (elle est plaisante, elle induit la variation ou la surprise, conduit le rythme, elle creuse des sillons sonores, graphiques et sémantiques dans la platitude du texte). Dans la succession de mètres courts comme les octosyllabes à rimes suivies, elle possède une importance particulière, parce qu’elle investit par prédilection la rime, en exemplifie les possibles réalisations et c’est sur ce sujet que je concentrerai mon attention dans la seconde partie de cette étude. S’intéresser à l’ annominatio aux xii e et xiii e  siècles dans quelques textes jalonnant la littérature arthurienne, c’est attirer l’attention sur l’histoire littéraire, l’esthétique et les considérations grammairiennes sur le langage telles qu’on peut les trouver dans les arts poétiques, autant que sur l’art de la versification dans nos romans, trop souvent laissé pour compte.

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of medieval onomastic repertories devoted to Arthurian literature. It focuses in particular on the unfinished project of the Onomasticon Arthurianum, but at the same time considers a broad chronology from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day, taking into account the entire European Arthurian production.

Although John Heath-Stubbs’s long modernist epic Artorius is largely unknown, this ambitious text combines a cyclical vision of history with a linear one on its way to understanding Great Britain’s loss of imperial status. If this point has generally been missed, the complexity of Heath-Stubbs’s multiple symbolic superstructures partly accounts for the text’s unfortunate reception. Accordingly, I present an explanatory schema for Artorius in line with what other modernist texts – most famously Joyce’s Ulysses  – have benefitted from. Besides unpacking the symbolic superstructures used by Heath-Stubbs, I also address how the poet, who lived in Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis, uses them to answer a British nation that can no longer identify as a global power.

Presentation of the Japanese Branch of the International Arthurian Society, including a discussion of the contribution of its members to international Arthurian scholarship, especially on Malory studies, in English Arthuriana.

Beginning with the appropriation of medieval iconography by alt-right movements, particularly in the contexts of Brexit and the January 6 2021 American insurrection, this article highlights how modern adaptations of the Arthurian legend (in particular, Tracy Deonn’s  Legendborn , Kazuo Ishiguro’s  The Buried Giant , and the video game  We Happy Few ) resist white nationalist rhetorics. These texts remix figures and symbols from the Arthurian oeuvre to offer stories wherein characters come to recognize and thus resist systematic forgetting, or a societal attempt to overlook uncomfortable facts from the past, thus offering alternative visions of identity and belonging. The ethical implications of historical representation and the power of narrative in contemporary political discourse make these texts powerful works of art that speak to and counter white supremacist attempts to claim and revise medieval iconography to serve their own ends.