onceandfuturecourt

[onceandfuturecourt]

stuck at my desk waiting for work assets to come through does anyone have a little knight (or adjacent) they would like me to draw 🧍‍♂️

[onceandfuturecourt]

(Source: Vulgate Cycle - Lancelot, pt. I)

So Vulgate Cycle states King Claudas, of the Land Laid Waste, and enemy of the Benoic faction, is stated to be 9 feet tall.

However, as far as I can find, Claudas is never referred to as a giant or a half-giant. Indeed, other characters are noted to be tall and/or giants, without inference to Claudas' height.

Galehaut, a half-giant, is described thus (as wells as a bit of Caradoc of Dolorous Tower):

[...]

Does this mean 9 feet is still considered reasonably human?

For comparison, this is Esclamor, who is implicitly taller:

And I looked at the other giants mentioned in Vulgate, and hoo boy, they are in the -teen range:

[...]

[....]

I may have to rethink my headcanon heights of Gwenhwyfar, Gogfran, Morholt and others.

[onceandfuturecourt]

History of the Holy Grail has defeated me for now. I quit.z I can’t make myself slog through it.

I’m going to start with The Story of Merlin and then come back to HotHG after Death of Arthur.

It was one of the last pieces to be written, after all, so it’s fine to read it last, right? (It’s like. The “begats” of the Holy Grail lineage and I am not motivated enough for this.)

[onceandfuturecourt]

even kays most strongest supporters can't defend him 😔

[onceandfuturecourt]

The blog: Arthuriana from a queer, polyamorous, psychological perspective.

The blogger: A queer, late-30-something psychotherapist who writes/facilitates live-action roleplaying games, takes care of horses, and reads Arthurian medieval literature.

Expect influences from: existential psychology, chronic illness/disability, trauma psychology, ADHD, theater/larp, equestrian experience, aviculture, queer culture, polyamory, bdsm culture, being a white U.S. ex-vangelical pastor's kid with religious trauma, and Western occultism.

Fandom-focused introduction on my main blog, liminalpsych

AO3: liminalpsych

Frequent/relevant tags:

#arthurian medlit quest: My first impressions, reactions, and stream of consciousness thoughts in response to reading through the huge backlog of Arthurian literature and exploring Arthuriana in general. - Reading progress: All the Arthurian literature I’m reading or have read, and I’ll try to include links from specific texts to the corresponding tag.

#character study: Character analysis and character-focused posts.

#my writing: My writing (that isn’t just a rambling essay, anyway). Larpwriting and fanfic, mostly. - Once and Future Court: Everything related to the Arthurian live-action roleplaying game I’ve written and facilitated.

#resources: Arthuriana resources I’ve found or reblogged.

#reading list: Arthurian literature and academia to read later.

#queering arthuriana: Queer readings (and sometimes retellings) of Arthurian medieval literature. - #qrv: Queer reading of the Vulgate Cycle.

[onceandfuturecourt]

most homoerotic arthurian texts

Lancelot and the Hart with the White Foot

its got everything. lancelot trying to avoid getting married, a DOG, greek mythology gay people parallels, gawain rescues him and cares for him homosexually, gawain freaking out when lancelot is gone for 48 hours while guinevere looks on, corn? for some reason,

look the dutch went off with this one they really did.

the galehaut section of the lancelot section of the vulgate lancelot-grail cycle. here is the first part scanned by valentine lanzelet

honorable mentions go to:

–the second half of chretien de troyes knight of the cart

–the first half of the stanzaic morte

–bisclavret (gay werewolf knight gay werewolf knight)

and finally, who could forget gawains classic christmas kiss exchange, told in the famous–

greene knight, an alternate, gayer version of sgatgk knight that exists. is the poetry worse yes is it gayer also yes. god speed

[onceandfuturecourt]

from Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, edited by Mark Thompson, Daedalus Publishing Company, 1991

[onceandfuturecourt]

Lanval live-react, pt 3

So after the claim and rebuttals are provided at the court date, the nobles get to cast judgment. The duke of Cornwall speaks for them and essentially says that if Lanval's lady comes forward and it's true what he said about her, then he'll receive mercy, but if he can't provide proof of his claim of his love's beauty/worth/etc, then he's got to leave the king's court and service.

Lanval of course can't do that, because he broke the rules, and he says that he would never get help from his lady. And just as the nobles are about to give their verdict, the two maidens-in-waiting to Lanval's faerie lover show up. Dressed in "nothing but purple taffeta down to their bare skin", so just… sheer cloth? Faerie clothes, I guess. Not much for human modesty, which makes sense.

Gawain and company think maybe one of the maidens was Lanval's beloved? They're super hopeful, but no. (Gawain is very much on Lanval's side in this story, I love it.)

So then two more maidens show up, this time in light silk and riding Spanish mules (I'm guessing the offspring of an Andalusian donkey and a horse; the Andalusian donkeys weren't allowed to leave Spain in some eras, though probably not this one, but regardless they were rather prized animals). Now Yvain goes to Lanval and is hopeful that surely one of them is Lanval's beloved, so he's saved; but no, he recognizes neither of them.

But these maidens are "certainly worth more than the queen ever was", which is … kind of crappy to say, honestly, and I'm not sure how they're measuring worth here. (Beauty, probably; the lai mentions that "many people greatly praised their bodies, face, and coloring").

Both sets of maidens have asked the king to provide lodging and prepare for their lady who is coming to speak to the king, and he's agreed readily.

So after these many interruptions, the king asks for the verdict from the nobles, as the queen is getting angry that she's been made to wait so long. And yet again they're interrupted, this time by…

Any guesses?

Yep, it's Lanval's lady. (His friends tell him about her, and they are cautiously hopeful that she's the one who will be able to help him. He looks up and sees her, and is elated. "In faith, it is my beloved! Now I care little who may kill me, if she does not have mercy on me; for I am cured when I see her."

But no need to worry about that, because she wants to make sure Lanval is freed. Everyone agrees that Lanval's boast of his lady was no exaggeration, and so he wins his case and is freed. He climbs up on a giant mounting-block and jumps onto the horse behind her as she passes it, and they go to Avalon, and no one ever hears from him again.

(I mean, he could at least have said goodbye to Gawain and Yvain and the others who advocated for him. Or written to them. Or something. Oh well. Probably he did say goodbye at some point in there, and the lai just didn't share it with us.)

Gotta say, this was an engaging read. It was rhythmic and passionate, had fantastical elements to it, and there was a lot of intense Feelings on the part of the characters, without the dubious consent situations of the previous lais. (I mean, there was the queen's attempt to get Lanval to be her lover, but he didn't give in.) I like it better for that alone. But also Lanval was genuinely interesting, as was the faerie lover. Even the queen was interesting, if extremely petty.

I find it interesting that the lady said he might never see her again if he spoke of her, but then she showed up in the end. On the other hand, she showed up in person after having ridden some ways, rather than appearing more phantasmallly to him. So maybe him talking about her just broke the enchantment that allowed her to manifest around him yet not be seen by anyone else, and then she had to actually travel from the otherworld to get to him, which took a lot longer.

[onceandfuturecourt]

QRV - History of the Holy Grail 2-3

preface | intro pt 1 | intro pt 2 | HHG 1

With the preamble framing device established, the History begins with the death of Jesus and the role of Joseph of Arimathea. Joseph collects the cup used for the last supper from the house where the last supper happened, and then pulls the body down and collects the blood in the cup. (I'm guessing the cup becomes the Grail.) He then wraps Jesus's body up and lays it in a grave, then sticks the cup full of blood in a special place of honor in his house.

And…. welp, Anonymous gets a bit antisemitic in this section. (This is the challenge of medieval literature, unfortunately - it's not great about religion, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender, even when it's better about it than you'd expect.)

(If you want non-antisemitic medlit, try the Hebrew text Melekh Artus/ King Artus if you can find a copy, or the 1789 Yiddesh text Gabein.) Let's just say that Joseph is captured, placed in Caiaphus's stronghold prison and not given any food or water for the next 42 years. The apparition of Jesus visits him along with the Grail cup full of blood (…ew?).

Meanwhile, his wife refuses to remarry until she knows for sure that her husband is dead (Penelope vibes), and raises their son Josephus who "was so in love with Jesus Christ because of his mother's guidance that he said he would never marry any other but Holy Church" because… piety and purity, or something.

(Buckle up. There's gonna be a lot of this any time the Grail comes up. It'll mostly stop when we're out of the Grail content. This is one of several reasons I always skip the History of the Holy Grail when reading through the Vulgate.)

Anyway. That brings us to section 3, where we get a history lesson in the succession of Roman emperors, and Emperor Titus's son Vespasian has leprosy, making the emperor very upset. They're searching for a cure, and eventually they find someone talking about being cured by Jesus, and go hunting for something that Jesus touched.

A knight (from Capernaum - apparently a fishing village on the sea of Galilee had knights in 75 CE. knights in that region/era sure is news to me) is the one who brought up the idea, and manages to find an elderly woman with a cloth that Jesus wiped his face with at some point. It's got an imprint of his face on it, because Catholicism. Sure enough, it works and heals Vespasian of leprosy and he becomes a fanatic, travels to Jerusalem and decides he's going to burn everyone who had a role in the death of Jesus (this is where the antisemitism really shows up; I'm not gonna repeat those parts here).

So then he threatens people until he finds out where Joseph of Arimathea was stashed. Turns out only a weekend has passed for him over the past 42 years, and he hasn't aged at all. So he doesn't recognize his wife or son, of course. Eventually it's all sorted out.

Vespasian goes back to Rome. Joseph gets a vision that he's supposed to go evangelize outside of Jerusalem and is never going to return. Also he's supposed to have more kids because Josephus took a vow of chastity and can't continue the line of Joseph of Arimathea. (I assume this is eventually going to lead us to Britain somehow, but it'll probably take a while to get there.)

[onceandfuturecourt]

QRV - History of the Holy Grail 1

preface | intro pt 1 | intro pt 2

Here we go… History of the Holy Grail. The first section of the Vulgate Cycle. I don't know how closely I'll read this, to be honest. I might end up skimming. But I'm going to make an attempt.

We start out with…. a lot of religiosity. and then a lot of self-flagellating by the purported narrator. The "most sinful of all sinners," and "the most humble and despised person ever created," etc, etc.

Hehe. "I saw a man standing in front of me, so handsome and charming that his beauty could not be described by any mortal man's tongue." Now, see, beauty in these times was associated with virtuousness and was a literary shorthand for purity/goodness. So that's probably why the beauty is being emphasized, since apparently this is literally God who's appearing before the narrator.

But… I swear, the beauty of men gets enumerated in waaaay more detail throughout this book, whereas women's beauty is often "she was the most beautiful in the world" and that's about it. (Sometimes it gets expounded on, but not to the degree we'll see much later with, say, Lancelot.)

Still, this particular instance does seem to be the writer trying to convey an impression of divinity.

…anyway. After much pageantry and vision symbolism, the narrator receives a little book packed full of his lineage/ancestry, which he's very excited about for some reason. And then eventually it says, "The book of the Holy Grail begins here."

…More pageantry, visions, angels, etc. Narrator locks little book up in a box. Narrator opens chest to read and the book is gone. Narrator is told they'll undergo great difficulties before they see the book again, go on a quest to… Norwegia?? Norway???

(Oh. A footnote mentions that it was a territory in Scotland occupied by Vikings at the time. "Western part of the country north of the Clyde and the islands.")

But on the way to … Norwegia, the narrator encounters a variegated beast that sounds to me like the Questing Beast. So he follows it to a hermitage, blesses a hermit though he's upset because "I was a sinful man and thus could not give (my blessing)" (narrator has abysmal self-esteem).

Questing Beast (?) returns! More fantastical symbolism all along the way, and random knight encounters. It all feels very dreamlike and surreal. I think this is all preamble still?

There's a brief weird exorcism (involving the narrator finding his little book in a chapel and using that to exorcise a devil), and the narrator takes care of the victim for a while afterwards at the chapel where he found him. Questing Beast (?) returns again, and the exorcism subject is the first person other than the narrator who can see the Questing Beast.

Narrator has a vision that he's supposed to copy the book, and that's when the History actually begins. So this whole thing has been a framing device for the History of the Holy Grail, got it.

[onceandfuturecourt]

Queer reading of Vulgate pt 3, intro pt 2

preface | intro pt 1 | intro pt 2

Still on E. Jane Burns' Introduction to the Vulgate Cycle. It continues exploring the same basic thesis: the indefinable nature of the Vulgate, and the author(s) of and influences on the text.

"If the Vulgate’s textual genealogies demonstrate an obsession with origins that parallels that shared by Chapelain and Lot, they reveal simultaneously how, in the case of these narratives, the preoccupation with origins leads consistently to no verifiable authorial source. We are left rather with a plurality of authorial voices and competing subtexts that cannot be aligned in logical sequence. Credit for narrative invention falls on a cohort of fictive authors that range from the chivalric heroes who speak their adventures at King Arthur’s court to the Active dictator Merlin and his vernacular scriptor Blaise, to the bogus author/translator Walter Map, the storyteller Robert de Boron, and the oracular voice of Christ. Amid all these references to creators and their sources, both written and oral, no mention is made, curiously, of the actual textual antecedents for the Vulgate Cycle. Yet there are many."

Burns goes in depth on the textual antecedents, but it doesn't provide anything new to talk about for the purposes of these reading reaction posts, so I'll gloss over those.

"The truth told here is obviously of a different sort. It is a truth not of events or revelations, but a truth anchored solidly in the pleasurable, rhetorical use of words. Herein lies the answer to critical objections raised by Chapelain and Lot. For the insistent repetition of too many words that put Chapelain to sleep and offended the aesthetic sensibilities of Ferdinand Lot lies at the very heart of the Vulgate’s project to validate the literary text over and above its more erudite predecessors. Repetition serves in many ways as the hallmark of the Vulgate romances: repetition of authorial voices, of stock motifs and thematic material, or of whole segments of narrative lifted from the Queste and relocated in the Estoire. And that repetition draws attention to the specifically literary character of the Vulgate romances, undermining their professed pretentions to more lofty theological or historical expression."

Apparently, repetition of this variety was a liturgical device, theological. So the Vulgate's use of repetition becomes a kind of "textual idolatry" (as far as St. Augustine would see it).

"Thirteenth-century clerical pronouncements deplore the falsehoods and lies written about Perceval and the Holy Grail, lamenting those who have abandoned religious truth in preference for stories about Lancelot and the secularized holy relic. If the Grail material is the most religious component of the Vulgate corpus, it appeared as most irreligious to medieval Church authorities."

So even the religious elements of the Vulgate Cycle were seen as distractions from true spiritual pursuits by the religious authorities of the times. Sacrilegious, even.

(In other words, don't confuse all the Christian symbolism for religiosity. That was just the symbolism of the era. Writers worked with what they had available to them.)

The Quest for the Holy Grail, of course, is the most religious. Some think it might have been written by Cistercians; others think it was by laypersons trying to make it palatable or acceptable to the Cistercian order. Burns argues that "Meaning in the Queste is not first hidden and then revealed, but rather it is systematically displaced from one textual segment to the next." Adventure stories are interspersed by a hermit telling a parallel Biblical tale that doesn't actually have a lot to do with the event they're supposedly interpreting. (This … makes the Quest make a lot more sense to me, actually. The parables always felt shoehorned in and interruptive rather than actually relevant.)

"In their narrative wandering, the thirteenth-century prose tales of love and adventure remind us that when analyzing them we need not look for a reassuring map to guide our literary voyage. And that in taking this trip we need not choose necessarily between unity and disunity, coherence and incoherence, between the ingenious author’s masterpiece and the barbarian’s literary dungheap. These excessively polarized options are perforce limiting and exclusionary in their own way."

Is Burns arguing that we should read the Vulgate in a nonbinary way? Delightful. :D

"…that very distortion can lead us to ask more productive questions, in particular questions about those sectors of the literary terrain that the quest for authority and textual unity has so often marginalized or effaced."

Oh, don't worry, Burns, I have years of practice deciphering queercoding in media. I'm all about looking for the "marginalized sectors of the literary terrain".

And that's the introduction! Whew. Finally. Now to actually reading the Vulgate Cycle. Starting with my least favorite: The History of the Holy Grail.

[onceandfuturecourt]

Queer reading of Vulgate pt 2: Intro pt 1

preface | intro pt 1 | intro pt 2

The introduction is written by the translator of The Quest for the Holy Grail, E. Jane Burns. Burns begins by laying out the context of the Vulgate Cycle's structure, its history and development, and the different expectations historical readers have brought to the text.

Which underscores how expectation colors perception.

What happens if we imagine the possibility of multiple writers with different backgrounds, views, progressiveness, and agendas? Instead of assuming heteronormativity, homophobia, toxic masculinity, misogyny, and a single unified author with a singular agenda and vision - what if we stay open to the possibility of a different concept of gender than we're used to? What about possible queer subtext and the possibility of queercoding in medieval fiction, not just in modern fiction?

What if we look for those things, rather than assuming and looking for explanations that match the modern stereotypical assumptions of medieval people/writers/beliefs? (After all, it's those modern assumptions that lead to the phenomenon of "history will say they were roommates," or the all too common error of "woman buried with warrior stuff? must be religious, can't possibly be because she actually fought.")

That's what I mean by reading with a queer lens. Because most of the time, these works are read with a heteronormative, gender-normative lens, just unconscious or subconscious as a bias, and so any queer elements are missed entirely.

(Like. I still don't understand how anyone can read the passages with Galehaut as anything other than Extremely Gay. How do you miss that? Yet so many people assume it's "comrades" and "bros" despite the text going out of its way to say that it's more than companionship. Because of the default, unexamined lens that they're using.)

….anyway. off the soapbox. Back to the intro.

"Many literary historians… have mistakenly sought in Arthurian romance a recognizable ancestor text for the modern novel" and are disappointed in the somewhat disjointed conglomeration of the Vulgate. They then either dismissed it as incoherent and terrible, or defended it as having an underlying coherence and attempted to legitimize it by imagining a singular author (or unifying editor).

"The unwieldy mix of spiritual and chivalric modes that crisscross unevenly throughout… mark the Vulgate Cycle as a product of the emergent social and political tensions in thirteenth-century France," with the popularized chivalric tales of knights from the mid-twelfth-century getting infused with Biblical allusions and Grail mysteries around 1200. Prose had a more religious connotation and association than verse, which was more recreational (condemned sometimes as "vain pleasures").

"Lady readers, in particular, were exhorted after 1200 to abandon the deceptive tales of Arthurian knights." Which supports the idea that one of the primary audiences for these stories were women! Women of the 1200's French court, in the case of the French romances, though I'm sure readership extended beyond that.

This is another example of how expectation shapes perception. There's a tendency for modern readers to assume that medieval literature will be dry, dull, misogynistic, homophobic, etc… and so I've seen people assume that the vast numbers of unnamed ladies/maidens/queens are a product of misogyny, of being seen as too unimportant for distinct names.

And certainly there was systemic misogyny in the culture, just as there is nowadays - but I don't think that's the core reason for the nameless female characters. It doesn't match up with the Vulgate's characterization of these women as clever, competent, independent, and saving knights more often than being saved by knights. (Nor does it match up with how many women are named.)

I've heard a theory (probably on Tumblr somewhere, I can't remember where) that the unnamed women are the equivalent of "y/n" ("your name") in modern fanfic. Reader-insert. Perhaps the author(s) expected women reading the story to project themselves onto the characters, and so made extra room for them to do so.

…But back to the introduction once more. Burns unravels the idea of a single author or even a solid, novel-like coherent narrative for the Vulgate Cycle, and arrives at this:

"The Vulgate Cycle then provides us with a text that is not a text in the modern sense of the term, a text that is always fragmentary but always a composite of more than one text, a text located somewhere and uncertainly in the complex relation between many narrative versions created by many authorial if not authoritative hands.

"The literary map accurately representing this cycle of tales would contrast starkly with Lot’s set calendar. It would be a map that changed continually as we move through the narrative terrain it charts. Although it might incorporate on one level and for the text of the Prose Lancelot in particular the existence of a predictable calendar of events, a map detailing the whole of the Vulgate Cycle would have to reflect a much looser and more flexible narrative structure.

"It would be a map with no fixed perimeter, and no set or authorized format, a map that could shift and reshape itself at successive moments and with successive readings."

A shifting mélange of a narrative, flexible and unbounded, containing multitudes, eluding attempts to define or confine it into one single known element…

…Well. That sounds like the very definition of queer.

[onceandfuturecourt]

Queer Reading of the Vulgate Cycle pt 1: Preface

preface | intro pt 1 | intro pt 2

Some context on 1. this readthrough and 2. the Vulgate Cycle in general!

I've read large chunks of the Vulgate Cycle all out of order, sporadically, but I haven't read it from cover-to-cover yet. I want to remedy that, though I want to read it through a queer lens. (Also a trauma psychology lens, but I don't have a good shorthand term for that.)

The Vulgate Cycle (aka the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, the Prose Lancelot, or the Pseudo-Map Cycle) is an Arthurian romance composed between 1215 and 1235-ish, by Anonymous. Who may have been one person, but more likely was multiple authors. (I'm in the "multiple authors" camp, I can see no other explanation for the dramatic tone shift of The Quest for the Holy Grail. Or the History of the Holy Grail, for that matter.)

It's a massive text. It attempts to "elaborate the full story of the Arthurian era and to set that era in a framework of universal history" (so writes Norris J. Lacy in the preface to the translation).

The History of the Holy Grail (originally the "Estoire del saint Graal") - actually one of the last sections to be written, even if its contents come first chronologically. Traces the early history of the Grail and Grail-keepers. Lots of Bible fanfic bits in this one. My least favorite section (I find it tedious and dull).

The Story of Merlin - also one of the last sections to be written. Focuses on Merlin and his role in Arthur's conception, birth, and coronation. Also focuses on Arthur's early days as king, and some of his early knights (young Orkney brothers!), and Arthur's early relationship with Guinevere (back when things were really good between them).

Lancelot Proper (aka Le Roman de Lancelot, Lancelot propre, or just "Lancelot du Lac") - Lancelot's life and adventures (and everyone else's adventures that end up vaguely connected to him) from birth until… right before the Grail quest. Divided into 3-6 parts by modern scholars (Lacy divides it into 6, so that's what I'll be going with).

The Quest for the Holy Grail (La Queste del saint Graal) - My second-least-favorite section; it's less tedious and dull than the History, but it's such a departure from the tone of the rest of the Vulgate Cycle, and it feels like a text designed to convert people to Christianity (and that may indeed have been its intended purpose). It's possible that the tone shift might be because each sectio nhad a different translator, but I don't think that explains it sufficiently.

The Death of Arthur (La Mort Artu) - the most readable section, imho, and probably my favorite. It promptly unravels all the purity nonsense that Quest put into place (feels like when a show gets a new showrunner for a season, and then the old showrunner gets the reins back a season later and is doing damage control on all the weird turns that the interim showrunner took), Lancelot and Guinevere get back together, and the story leaps into intense drama and beautiful tragedy.

Then there's the Post-Vulgate, which is basically just a grimdark and more religious rewrite of the Vulgate, minus the Lancelot Proper. Lots more Grail focus. I don't know if I'll do a readthrough of it or not.

The specific translation notes in the Preface are fascinating, and I highly recommend them (I love translation notes), but the most relevant bit is this:

"…the translators have tried to steer a middle course. Our primary concern was to present a reliable and readable text to modern readers, but we have also made an effort to retain a certain number of the stylistic features of the Old French romances, provided those features were reasonably compatible with the characteristics of modern English usage.

Lacy warns the reader that the History of the Holy Grail has "a convoluted, dense style" far more than most texts of the period. (It's so tedious, do not recommend.) "The author appears to be far more concerned with substance and symbolism… than with concision and grace." They've cleaned up the text in some places but overall kept the characteristics of the style. If this is the more accessible version, I would not want to read a literal direct translation. D:

Next up: Introduction (more translation notes) to the History of the Holy Grail.

[onceandfuturecourt]

My collection groooows

Left to right:

The Complete Arthurian Encyclopedia

Gallant & True (an Arthurian zine I think I backed on Kickstarter at some point, it’s BEAUTIFUL)

The Mabinogian (Sioned Davies translation)

Black Book of Carmarthen

Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (Faletra translation, also includes Vita Merlini and a bunch of excerpts from various texts eg Nennius)

The Lais of Marie de France (Waters translation)

Lanzelet (I tried reading it. I’ll try again. It’s so dry)

Chretien de Troyes: Lancelot, Erec and Enide, Yvain, Cliges (Ruth Harwood Cline verse translation, I only just now realized they’re out of order, it’s gonna bug me but not enough to fix it and take another picture)

Perlesvaus (Nigel Bryant)

Lancelot-Grail books 1-10 (including Post-Vulgate and chapter summaries)

Silence (Le Roman de Silence)

An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (Putter)

Le Morte d’Arthur (Keith Baines version)

Of Giants (look, Cohen posted some beautifully gay Galehaut/Lancelot and Green Knight and Gawain commentary excerpts on Tumblr and I couldn’t resist)

Arthurianism in Early Plantagenet England (recommended to me by someone who almost did her doctoral thesis on this topic until learning she’d been beaten to it by this text—a history of Arthurianism including the larping that a bunch of nobility did. It just arrived in the mail, I haven’t read it yet)

The Goddodin (Gillian Clarke version; not pictured on the shelf because it’s on my poetry shelf instead. It’s so beautifully translated though, highly recommend Clarke’s version)

Also not pictured: anything I have in ebook format (Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, various modern fiction)

And then there’s the Arthurian adjacent and medieval and Renaissance stuff that isn’t really Arthurian but it’s related, so same shelf.

Return to Avalon (short story collection, modern, found at a used book store, why not)

The Book of Chivalry of Geoffrey de Charny (picked this up as a larpwriting reference forever ago, it’s a fascinating read)

Various editions of the Compleat Anachronist, the SCA’s publication

Life in a Medieval City by Gies (I don’t actually remember where I got this or why I have it or if it’s any good. I’m guessing it was another larpwriting reference)

The Book of the Courtier - Castiglione (larp prop and larpwriting reference, actually a really neat read)

Prism Knights by Winter J Kiakas (queer knight short story collection)

Letter Writing in Renaissance England (got this used as a larpwriting reference and it has been SO USEFUL and so fascinating!)

[onceandfuturecourt]

Here's a genuine, good-faith question for Agravain fans: what stories of his do you like? Are there specific aspects of him you enjoy, or is it more about protectiveness over him getting blamed for catching someone else cheating?

[onceandfuturecourt]

The Once and Future Court

The Court of Camelot is reborn throughout the ages with all its fractured bonds. Now it gathers once more in the modern era, drawn together by dreams, invitations, and the whisper of hidden memories.   A live-action roleplaying game about belonging, identity, and choice.

You’ve grown up in the modern era with the indescribable sense of something missing, of not quite fitting into the here-and-now. But then your past life as a figure of Arthurian legend began to creep into your modern life as dreams, personality shifts, and visions.

Then a curious invitation arrived—one that only made sense if the sender knew. It’s uncanny enough to provide a glimmer of hope that you don’t have to keep living like this: unsettled, interrupted, haunted.

The Court gathers each lifetime to make a choice: renew their age-old bonds and memories, or forget and return to a quiet life.

Will you take up the mantle of the past or shed it for a quieter eternity? Is it possible to mend the old wounds between comrades-in-arms, star-crossed lovers, and sorcerers, or is King Arthur’s Court ever fated for destruction?

Themes include:

Belonging, kinship, and competing loyalties

Relationship rupture and repair

Past trauma (from battle, betrayal, abuse)

Grief, loss, and mourning

Destiny vs choice

Faith, belief, and skepticism

Memory (gained, lost, and its impact on identity)

Please note:

There are no happy, untraumatized characters by the end of the source material.

The larp can have a somewhat happy or feel-good resolution, but it can just as easily end in a bittersweet or tragic way.

Almost all Arthurian romantic relationships involve some element of: infidelity, tragedy, love triangles/webs, abuse, or unrequited love.

If you're not familiar with Arthurian literature pre-Le Morte d'Arthur (Sir Thomas Malory), please know that it is far more queer and gender non-conforming than you might expect.

Arthurian literature is a giant pile of fanfiction building on itself, written over the course of centuries. Characterization of Arthurian past lives in game may differ from the legends you’re familiar with due to the many different versions of the character in the literature.

For those curious about source material, this larp draws primarily on the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, also known as the Vulgate Cycle and Post-Vulgate, with occasional borrowings from earlier or later texts.

Content Warnings

This larp may contain:

Depictions of bigotry (in backstories, canon-typical gender dynamics, homophobia, and classism; in modern times, not as applicable but the historical backstory experience may come up in conversation)

Depictions of abuse (canonical, in backstories, may show up between characters in game if players have negotiated it)

Realistic simulations or descriptions of violence (canon-typical in backstories, may show up between characters in game if players have negotiated it)

Content involving rape (canonical, in backstories, opt-out available)

Character histories may include canon-typical Christian themes, which may or may not play into modern character portrayals. Modern character histories may contain themes of faith and belief (in religion, magic, folklore, legend, and mythology).

May also contain the following (canonical, in character histories): Arranged or forced marriages, incest, curses and geases, love/lust potions, and supernatural elements.

[onceandfuturecourt]

Do you have a translation of the French Vulgate?

Yes if you mean in general. I have Lacy Lancelot Grail series.

But if you mean as an online shareable text, unfortunately not.