Arthuriana Summer 2020

My apologies for the belated post. I believe this issue arrived during the fall, but I am just remembering to post on it now.

 

Here are the contents for the Summer 2021 number of Arthuriana. It offers a good balance of scholarship on medieval and modern texts, including an updated look on film by Kevin J. Harty.

As usual, the articles can be accessed by subscribers on the journal website and to researchers on Project MUSE.

 

Table of Contents
(30.2)

 
http://www.arthuriana.org/access/30-2Contents.html

Baldwin of Britain, His Vows, and the Chivalric Ideal in the Avowing of King Arthur
Roger Dahood	3
Reconciling the Uncanny: Forgiveness, Caritas, and Compassion for Malory’s Palomides
Annie Lee Narver	20
From Camelot to China, or, ‘A History or Moral Tale About a Young Sir Gabein’s Marvelous Adventures Illustrating Divine Providence’
Annegret Oehme	48
Reading the Grail: Parodic Metafiction in Patricia McKillip’s Kingfisher
Amelia A. Rutledge	73
The 2019 Loomises Lecture
James Bond, A Grifter, A Video Avatar, and a Shark Walk into King Arthur’s Court: The Ever-Expanding Canon of Cinema Arthuriana
Kevin J. Harty	89
REVIEWS
Glenn D. Burger and Holly Crocker, eds., Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion
Jennifer Sisk	122
Kellyann Fitzpatrick, Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones
Shiloh Carroll	124
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan and Erich Poppe, eds., Arthur in the Celtic Languages: The Arthurian Legend in Celtic Literatures and Traditions
Georgia Henley	126
John Marshall, Early English Performance: Medieval Plays and Robin Hood Games, Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies
Kevin J. Harty	128
Elly McCausland, Malory’s Magic Book: King Arthur and the Child, 1862-1980
Ann F. Howey	129
Gail Orgelfinger, Joan of Arc in the English Imagination, 1429-1829
Kevin J. Harty	131
Julie Ormelanski, Symptomatic Subjects, Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England
Anita Obermeier	133
Heather J. Tanner, ed., Medieval Elite Women and the Exercise of Power, 1100–1400: Moving Beyond the Exceptionalist Debate
Elizabeth Kinne	134

 

Guest Post: Dan Nastali Reviews By Force Alone

Tidhar, Lavie. By Force Alone. Tor/Tom Doherty Books, 2020. 416 pages, $27.99. ISBN: 9781250753458.

This is a dark fantasy novel that retells the traditional Arthurian story, from Uther Pendragon’s taking the kingship of Britain to Arthur’s final battle at Camlann, with incidents and characters drawn from a wide range of medieval sources. Here you will find new treatments of the familiar figures at every turn, but unless your tastes run to the grim and gory, you may have some difficulty digesting this version. The story is set in a post-Roman Britain more fully conceived than that of most Dark Age historical and fantasy novels, and the action shifts, not always smoothly, between the natural and supernatural worlds. Both offer more than a little gratuitous ugliness in the form of mutilation, murder, cannibalism, general bad behavior and rather too much excrement.

The McGuffin in this story is the grail—here a skystone or UFO that fell to earth in Uther’s reign and which somehow became both the source of gold and radioactive mutations, but that’s just one of many original takes. The sword in the stone, the Lady in the Lake, the Questing Beast, the Green Knight, even Glastonbury Well are given new and typically perverted twists, because this is not a novel that loves the tradition. It is basically a series of incidents hung on the bare bones of the legend. Britain and Fairyland coexist uneasily here. Londinium, the setting for much of the early story, is a mess of Roman remains, crime-ridden slums and mob-ruled trades—a sordid, cheerless place. The castles of the other world are not much better.

Arthur, when we meet him (and who never develops much distinctive character) leads a teenage protection racket and a round table of petty thieves and drug dealers before taking charge of the city and dealing with rival kings. Merlin, the offspring of a human and some unidentified unhuman, is a major figure throughout, but one whose powers and motives are never well-defined or of great consequence. The same is true of other supernatural creatures—Nimue, Morgause, Morgan, Cath Palug—who interfere with the mere mortals apparently by whim.

Guinevere is here a leader of a girl gang, Sir Kay the obligatory gay, Owain and Agravain are thugs, and so on. Lancelot has perhaps the most developed character through an elaborate back story which has him serving his master, Joseph of Arimathea, but there is little that distinguishes even Lancelot as a distinct personality. The dialogue of all of them, as well as the voice of the narrator, is in the naughtiness mode of teenage boys. The obscenities are so plentiful that any shock value has been wrung out of them by chapter two, so thereafter there’s little effect at all.

Tidhar is a cut above the writers of most modern fantasy in his descriptive abilities and understanding of the historical background of his tale, and he is a writer of solid prose. He incorporates, often unobtrusively, allusions not only to obscure medieval material, but also to Greek and Roman philosophers, Biblical writing and early Christian apocrypha, and even, if you’re attentive, to T.S. Eliot and Kurt Vonnegut. The book has its admirers—the back of the jacket is covered in favorable quotes—and when the writing is good, I tend to become a slow reader. I’m also always interested in new treatments of the legend, but with By Force Alone, I found myself rushing to its end.

Dan Nastali

Independent scholar

Kansas City, MO