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Dec. 31st, 2008 12:08 amCompilers of the Mabinogion: made shit up.
Geoffrey of Monmouth: made shit up.
The Gawain and the Green Knight poet: made shit up.
Chretien de Troyes: made shit up.
Alfred Tennyson, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tom Holt, and 3,956* other nineteenth- and twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors: made shit up.
They all told the stories they wanted to tell! Some versions of the Arthurian complex of legends are entirely incompatible with each other! Lancelot is a late addition! So's the grail quest!
So, you know, when I see people apologising for liking a TV show despite it having the unspeakable! temerity! to create a new version of the story, or even offering this as a reason they've avoided the program, I get annoyed almost beyond reason. The TV show is good or bad, you like it or you don't, either is fine. But the Arthurian complex is not a fixed object, some dead butterfly stuck through with a pin; it's several hundred versions of scores of different stories about a group of people who may share names and titles but have almost no other constant qualities. And absolutely everyone has the right to try to tell their own new story about them.
(Also, Gawain could have Lancelot. Any day. Sure, Lancelot never lost a fight - because he avoided fights he'd lose. Where was he at Badon, huh? Away in a "hermitage", like the coward he is. I fart in his general direction.)
*I counted them.**
**May contain lies.
Geoffrey of Monmouth: made shit up.
The Gawain and the Green Knight poet: made shit up.
Chretien de Troyes: made shit up.
Alfred Tennyson, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tom Holt, and 3,956* other nineteenth- and twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors: made shit up.
They all told the stories they wanted to tell! Some versions of the Arthurian complex of legends are entirely incompatible with each other! Lancelot is a late addition! So's the grail quest!
So, you know, when I see people apologising for liking a TV show despite it having the unspeakable! temerity! to create a new version of the story, or even offering this as a reason they've avoided the program, I get annoyed almost beyond reason. The TV show is good or bad, you like it or you don't, either is fine. But the Arthurian complex is not a fixed object, some dead butterfly stuck through with a pin; it's several hundred versions of scores of different stories about a group of people who may share names and titles but have almost no other constant qualities. And absolutely everyone has the right to try to tell their own new story about them.
(Also, Gawain could have Lancelot. Any day. Sure, Lancelot never lost a fight - because he avoided fights he'd lose. Where was he at Badon, huh? Away in a "hermitage", like the coward he is. I fart in his general direction.)
*I counted them.**
**May contain lies.
