Telling Tales
“You shall not budge from your bed. I have a better idea.
I shall hold you fast here on this other side as well
And so chat on with the chevalier my chains have caught. . . .
My lord and his liegemen are a long way off;
Others still bide in their beds, my bower-maidens too. . . .
My young body is yours. Do with it what you will.”
Lady Bertilak in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1375)
Just as being snubbed or ignored can be one of the worst feelings, the moment of being understood or recognised by someone can be one of the most fulfilling, exhilarating human experiences. These are the moments we realise that a pattern has arisen from the midst of life’s chaos – we suddenly see or feel that our story is not isolated, but resonates with another person’s journey. Birds of a feather flock together because they’ve winged their way across the same blue skies, weathered the same storms, soared above the same chasms, and sung the same songs of tenderness, of hope, and despair.
The stories we tend to tell and consume as people are, well, telling. They point towards the narratives that most occupy us, either because they have been powerful presences in our lives, or prominent absences. What we most long for, abhor, lust after, or adore, are all deeply personal and specific in their detail, but coalesce into recognisable narrative groups at the social level, where genre is an indicator not only of the flavour of the story, but of the person too. It’s therefore no coincidence that the word ‘genre’ itself is derived from the Latin genus, meaning ‘birth, race, or stock’. The stock narratives we love or hate the most say a lot about the life we’ve had, and the lives of our predecessors.
I was recently asked to create a start-to-finish course on English Literature, beginning with Anglo-Saxon and powering through the entire canon (within reason) down to the present day. After an initially effusive response, I left it for some weeks before I finally sat down to start the planning process, and it was only then that the sheer enormity of the task started to dawn on me. Not, as you may think, because of the number of texts I wanted to include, but rather more because of the number of texts I felt I simply couldn’t leave out. In other words, I began to see that I had to cut swathes of literature out of the course quite ruthlessly, and worse still, quite arbitrarily, unless I had a clear selection policy.
Rather than lose sleep over this, I had to accept that the contents of the course would be as much a reflection of me as they would of the English literary canon. Being something of a dreamer, at home amongst robots and runes alike, the first ‘thread’ I picked was the (hi)story of King Arthur and the Round Table, with the aim of tracing its origin and development from Arthur’s real life – at least what little we know of it – all the way to contemporary pop culture. Of course, this was a safe choice since the Arthurian legends and the stories of Camelot and his knights (collectively called ‘The Matter of Arthur’) run deep in not just the English but the international psyche. With Arthur the King released in cinemas this year, it seems our fascination with this figure still burns unabated after almost 2’000 years (depending on which historical source one chooses as the basis for the myth).
What I discovered is that the Matter of Arthur is anything but a homogenous, neatly conforming network of stories, but rather a swirling mass of contradictions, competitions, adjustments, and inversions. Arthur is represented by countless authors as everything from a man of gravitas, the saintly saviour of the nation, to a charming rogue, and even a boyish hothead. It seemed fair to say that the Matter of Arthur was both ‘matter’ in the sense of ‘substance, weight’, but also in the sense of ‘issue, problem’. Arthur not only had issues, but for me he also started to become something of an issue. As a literary and historical figure, Arthur seemed to have many faces, and by some accounts wasn’t even a King at all, but rather a brave (or perhaps reckless) commander who led a cavalry charge at the Battle of Badon. Never heard of it? Exactly. No one even knows when it took place.
As I traced the various renditions of our famed Britannic hero through the tracts of time, I saw that like the colour black, the very mystery surrounding Arthur was absorptive. Like photons, it pulled people of all sorts of creeds, colours, births and beliefs in, allowing them to project themselves into a space that was welcoming because it was so dark and ill-defined. What emerged was not so much a picture of Arthur, but a glittering panoply of all the human stories that illuminate his murky mythology, pouring out their hearts and minds as they animated the legend in their own particular way.
For Anglo-Saxons, living under constant existential threat, Arthur was an heroic commander, the kind of liege-lord you wanted, capable of providing security for your crops and for exacting wergild (literally “man payment”) in the form of blood or treasure for damages to one’s family or household. After the Norman Conquest, once the new French aristocracy had settled in and reduced the Anglo-Saxon nobility to less than 10% of the land they had once controlled, a new Arthur emerged. Grown complacent in the (relative) stability ushered in by William the Conqueror, and enjoying the lavish lifestyles afforded by established, well-defended Norman courts, the 14th century court of King Arthur in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight appears distant, decadent, and deceitful. By the 19th century, in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the Arthurian Romance is a way to escape the brutish industrialisation forcing change and charcoal upon the British Isles. In our own more individualistic era, Simon Cellan Jones’ 2024 film Arthur the King is only a very loose association with the myth, but reflects our 21st century concern with self-transcendence through sport.
As many people have told me – sometimes for better, sometimes for worse – it’s not what you say, but the way you say it. By extension, with our stories, it’s the way you tell it. I like to see the Matter of Arthur as something of a metaphor for life writ large. Vast, sprawling, and totally untameable, the miasma of myths and histories cannot be grappled with, and certainly admit no single, correct perspective. However, when taken as a landscape to explore, the contrasts between different versions are revealing, and the sheer variety of what we encounter enables us to triangulate our own identity.
Like sailing by the stars, we can only learn our path through this life by taking a clear-eyed look at what appears brightest, and what seems darkest, from precisely where we are. Where we steer the ship next is up to us.