ABSTRACT
Arthurian legend in general lends itself to misconceptions through its strong hold on the modern popular imagination, with the result that many lovers of fantasy create in their minds a view of the Middle Ages that never existed. No body of Arthurian legend holds more possibilities for imaginative re-creations, however, than the fi gure of King Arthur himself. Modern ideas about King Arthur come almost wholly from a vast collection of modern popular novels and fi lms about the Arthurian legends.1 T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, a collection of four Arthurian books published under one binding in 1958, and inspired heavily by Sir Thomas Malory’s fi fteenth-century English Le Morte Darthur (ca.1470), supplies much of the basis for modern ideas about Arthur, even for those who have only come to it through the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone (1963), or Warner Brothers’ musical Camelot (1967).2 Modern redactions of Arthur are anachronistic in many ways, broadly conceiving the king as living in an Anglo-Norman twelfth-century world of chivalric ideals, plate armor, and stone castles, far from the fi fth-century surroundings of the original legend. Bluntly, if a historical Arthur ever existed, he would have lived in a world of large wooden halls, smoky with fi res emanating from central fi re pits, not in a world of ornate tapestries and turreted stone castles.
