The Once and Future King

[tcpip]

Over the past week or so I've been working my way through a great deal of core medieval literature, mainly courtesy of Project Gutenburg; Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (and others) obviously, but also those from the Arthurian legends, by which Bédier's Tristan and Iseult can be included, along with more obvious contenders such as Chrétien de Troyes Arthurian Romances. I will, of course, add Malory and Beowulf to the list, forthcoming. From what has been completed however, The Canterbury Tales does give an excellent eludication of life and language from multiple perspectives at the time despite a propensity for rhyming doggerel. Troyes is more evocative (Lancelot is particularly good), but it comes from a time when grammatical constructs such as a consistent tense was apparently optional, whereas Bédier has the most tragic narrative and more modern writing style.

Much of this reading is, of course, source material for the Pendragon game that I've been running in recent months. It started off as a "generation-per-story" game derived from the wonderful historical boardgame Britannia, but in recent months we've starting playing Pendragon as it is meant to be played, i.e., the full story of the Arthurian myth, which is, of course a genuine myth. There is a plot which includes impossible changes for narrative effect (i.e., with Arthur's rise the dark ages turn into the high middle ages - in technology and custom - and decline again). There can be no doubt that Pendragon captures this brilliantly, and is well-served by Phyllis Karr's extraordinarily researched The Arthurian Companion. It was quite a coup for Chaosium to be able to publish such a scholarly work; but at the same time I wonder that perhaps the author and the work will not receive the recognition deserved because it was published by a publisher that concentrates in roleplaying games.

Comments

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

I remember in my short-lived career as an arts student at Melbourne Uni, they had a whole semester subject devoted to Beowulf and it had a pre-requisite of (I forget which) Old or Middle English.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Probably old English, if memory serves me well.

The original computer clusters at VPAC were named characters from said book, a little pun on being beowulf clusters. So we started with Grendel, Brecca, Edda, Wexstan... And stopped at that point because too many people were having trouble spelling the latter!