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This chapter proposes that the 1840s tendency to expatriate British epics to foreign parts reflected a postnationalist turn in the construction of British identity. Even heavy-duty royal heroes like Fitchett's Alfred and Bulwer-Lytton's Arthur evidently earn the crown by executing Continental, incipiently Eurasian tours that fill out their poems'plot. Epic work from this decade was typically built to travel light, as the surest way home to a readership that was getting used to global-commercial mobility. Maginn on Homer's grounds and Macaulay on Virgil's set up heroic figurines in balladic pastiche that simultaneously affirmed ancient values and enjoyed their supersession. Although Tennyson's poker-faced pentameters and Clough's hexametric honky-tonk played with epic norms, the poets were not trifling when it came to securing modern ideals through a reclamation of hierogamy as the salvation of the race.

The Poet Laureate's generic apostasy and recovery frame this chapter's argument that the High Victorian epic reached maturity when it entrusted to myth, as a culture-shaped repository of value, the conscious ambivalence of modern faith. Around 1860 Tennyson seemed, like Patmore and Barrett Browning, to have surrendered epic to the triumphant realist canons of prose fiction, over ineffectual protest from mini-revivalists of biblical apocalypticism (Ingelow, Bickersteth). And then, in an extraordinary convergence of sundry literary talents at the second hour of Victorian franchise Reform around 1868, all at once Eliot let epic mythmaking take her where the novel could not go, Morris fled modern circumstance into a library of traditional myths that harbored modern malaise anyhow, and Browning repossessed lost history by means of a narratorial distribution many decades ahead of its time and unified by transpersonal mythic concordance. And, in that same year, Tennyson learned to wield the epic matter of Arthur anew by seizing its mythic core as an uncanny representation of celebrity politics in a mass-media age.

Two contemporary images of the history of medieval England help establish the central theme of this book. The first image — seen in Flores Historiarum — displays the coronation of the Kings of England from Edward the Confessor to John, with the exception of Harold and the addition of Edward I in the thirteenth century. King Arthur, here, was portrayed as a significant constituent in the canonical version of English history. The second image, which is now located in the west and north windows of the antechapel at All Souls College, Oxford, shows kings who are known for either their sanctity or their contributions to history. These images raise issues regarding King Arthur and other issues that involve the history of England and the English monarchy. The study involves an Anglocentric approach in looking into the relationship between England and the rest of the British Isles.

This chapter attempts to put the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood into a cultural context. First, it provides a brief survey of the previous historical development of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Then it turns to the construction of King Arthur and Robin Hood as explicitly national heroes, a process which began during the third quarter of the eighteenth century and culminated during the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. In this period, the selective mobilisation of the past and the medieval past in particular acted to overcome the tensions created in the present by the often tempestuous relationship among the nation's constituent communities. Given this cultural context, the chapter argues that it is not surprising that the years between 1790 and 1820 saw a literary apotheosis of King Arthur and Robin Hood, two of the nation's greatest medieval heroes.

This chapter examines the role of the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood in the first half of the twentieth century. As well as complicating the racial identities of Robin Hood and King Arthur, the twentieth century has also raised new questions about the roles of women and the British empire in the two legends. But for the most part, the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood continued in the first half of the twentieth century to represent views which were in opposition to each other. King Arthur was the hero of the knightly classes, as Robin Hood was the hero among men of the poorest sort. One is the story of a great and mighty king, while the other is that of a lowly outlaw.

This chapter discusses issues of inclusion and exclusion from an imperial perspective. From the earliest versions of his legend, King Arthur has been depicted as an imperial ruler whose vast domains provide his court with much splendour. In contrast, Robin Hood has traditionally inhabited a much more circumscribed territory. In fact, his problems, and the problems of his society, have often been attributed to a misguided imperial adventure. The chapter displays the complexities of late Victorian attitudes towards empire by showing that an emphatically pro-imperial figure such as Arthur could function as a national hero alongside the anti-imperial Robin Hood. Different individuals and groups promote various values and attitudes, resulting less in consensus than in competition. Thus, this chapter shows there is always plenty of room for more than one type of national hero in a particular community at a particular time.

This chapter begins by describing the Idylls of the King according to Tennyson. It characterises Arthur as king of the Round Table. It explains that one of the several contemporary political issues with which the Idylls establish a relation, is the growth of the British Empire. It explains that in the Idylls of the King, the similes are ‘triumphs’; almost without exception, they compare human thoughts and actions to events in a nature bereft of human presence.

This chapter discusses the construction of a new national history in nineteenth-century Britain, looking at the popularity and meaning of the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. Like many other European nations in this period, Britain turned to the past as a potential source of unity in the present. This process required considerable manipulation and at times blatant fabrication. What emerged was a British history that focused almost exclusively upon English actions and accomplishments. The chapter looks into the role the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood played in this process, for they can have no true cultural meaning without cultural prevalence. Lastly, this chapter provides a general explanation of the meaning of the two legends in a broad sense.

This chapter gives a broad outline of the events that occurred at Châlus. There is not the least doubt about Richard I's main intention in laying siege to Châlus. He went into the county of Limousin as an overlord wishing to inflict severe punishment in accordance with feudal law on treacherous vassals. The chapter also shows that at the age of seventy-eight, Eleanor of Aquitaine came out of her Fontevrault retreat to play an active role in what was a real war now flaring up. King Arthur and his troops laid siege to the town and soon made their way in, forcing Eleanor to go farther into the town and take refuge in the castle. Eleanor managed to send messengers out to her son John, then in the neighbourhood of Le Mans, and to William des Roches, who had replaced Guy of Thouars at Chinon.

The extraordinary success enjoyed by Arthurian romance in Plantagenet domains has led most historians and specialists in twelfth-century literature to see it as part of a propaganda exercise orchestrated by the dynasty itself. Today, there is a tendency to accept the idea in a more tempered form; people prefer to talk about ‘diffused’ propaganda' for the Plantagenet ideology. Thanks to the success of Geoffrey of Monmouth's work, the Historia regum Britanniae, the prestige of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere rubbed off onto Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose ancestors they were taken to be now that the court of King Arthur had been ascribed historical status. This chapter states with some confidence that the Plantagenet court adopted the Arthurian one and made it its own by assimilation, for a variety of ideological motives.

This chapter presents the scope and outline of the topics covered in the book's study. The study examines how the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood played a role in both displaying and shaping British national identity in the nineteenth century. It focuses upon the way in which King Arthur and Robin Hood contributed to, but also challenged, the attempt to build a consensual, celebratory national history based on the notion of Britain's uniquely felicitous political evolution and a related sense of a distinctive national character. It looks upon the complex nature of British national identity and how in many ways it was shaped as much by conflict as it was by consensus.

This chapter contends that Richard I, King of England, gave King Tancred of Sicily a sword that the chroniclers identified, rightly or wrongly, with the sword of King Arthur. It is known that the Plantagenet monarchy had invested heavily in the promotion, the diffusion, and, most of all, the ‘takeover’ of the Arthurian legend as a component of its ideology. Eleanor of Aquitaine herself, who inherited the image of Queen Guinevere, the fascinating adulterous wife of King Arthur, played a major role in that ideology, which made the mythical Arthurian court the ancestor and archetype of the court of the Plantagenets. However, the myth had certain risks attached to it that needed to be contained. For, according to several interpretations, Arthur did not die of the wounds he received in his last battle with Mordred, but was borne away to Avalon, to ‘another world’, a world of faery, magical or demoniac, where his wounds were tended.

This chapter focuses on quest patterns in order to take a closer look at the evidence and to show that the role of chivalry in issue or order appears in entire works less than in passages selected from many works. It presents three examples that allow people to explore the links between quest and chivalry. These examples include The Quest of the Holy Grail, The Death of King Arthur, and Robert the Devil/Sir Gowther.

In the twelfth and the early thirteenth centuries, medieval thinkers disagreed about the historical value of accounts of King Arthur. Many historians of the time expressed skepticism about the more marvelous aspects of this king’s legend and even about his very existence. In the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles, the barons of the Kingdom of Logres doubt that the seemingly low-born youth who draws the sword from the stone is their rightful king. Some of Arthur’s vassals fail to recognize the greatness of his rule and his court to the point where they ally themselves with the traitor Mordred, rebel against their lord, and bring about the destruction of the kingdom. The most influential account of Arthur’s last days, The Death of King Arthur, stresses the uncertainty of the king’s last surviving retainer, who was the only eyewitness to these fantastical events and who could not make sense of what he saw. A great ruler, a great court, a great kingdom, these texts suggest, are never experienced in their full plenitude in the present, but are always remembered as something that occurred in the past or anticipated as something that will reoccur in the future.

The Archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, was ostensibly charged by Richard I to work with William Longchamp, but really he was to keep an eye on him. Eleanor of Aquitaine's role as regent, assisted by Walter, now became even more important than before. This chapter notes in passing, though, that she had to have a man beside her, first William Longchamp and then Walter of Coutances, able to take decisions and enforce them. It was unthinkable at that time that government should be entrusted ‘officially’ to a queen, even one of Eleanor's character and quality. The chapter also argues that while suspicious of John, Eleanor sought first and foremost to preserve the dynastic heritage for her sons and to prevent King Arthur from becoming a candidate for the succession should Richard I not beget an heir. The events described here, then, foreshadow to a certain extent those that followed the King's death some years later.

This chapter explores the mythical legends that are taken up in Terry Gilliam's Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), and later in its stage adaptation, Spamalot (2005). The film consists of a series of comedic sketches based loosely on the Quest for the Holy Grail, one of the central and perhaps best known and most popular elements of the Matter of Britain—King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Throughout the film, the heroic Arthurian tradition is continually undercut, creating a deconstructive text that provides a parody of itself as the narrative moves forward. Scenes such as “Knights of the Round Table”, “The Tale of Sir Galahad”, and “The Tale of Sir Lancelot” are easily recognised as part of traditional Matter of Britain. However, such scenes as “Coconuts”, “The Trojan Rabbit”, and “The Holy Hand Grenade” suggest a dialectical movement between the sublime and the ridiculous that is the foundation of much Pythonic humour.

This chapter focuses on Merlin's much less known cycle of romances, in which his connection to demons and his supernatural powers made him a major figure in the legendary history of Christianity. Merlin's evolution from one of the greatest-ever prophets and magicians to a hero in romances of his own took a significant amount of time, and it was his creation, King Arthur, who dominated the early romances, focused as they were on human emotions and knightly combat. Nevertheless, as the new genre of “courtly” or chivalric romance, written in French vernacular poetry and telling stories of love and adventure, grew ever more popular with consciously sophisticated, aristocratic audiences, it absorbed more and more famous names and stories. Figures not only from the French and Breton past but also from classical and British history were all transformed into heroes and heroines of romance.

This chapter analyses the ways in which James VI and his supporters used his authorial persona to advance his claims to the English throne at a time when open discussion of the succession was forbidden in England. Through indirection and oblique allusion, one form of ‘authority’ was made to insinuate another. To promote the son of Mary Queen of Scots as her executioner’s legitimate successor was no small task, but progressive appropriation of the Arthurian mythology central to Tudor iconography helped to present the Stuarts as their dynastic heirs in supposed accordance with a providential plan to restore the (imagined) unity of ancient ‘Britain’. Insofar as this notion of union became central to James’ self-presentation, the poetic fictions that promoted his success ultimately came to define his failure.