#alka reads arthuriana

[alkalinefrog]

I finished The Sword in the Stone book in The Once and Future King and---

"Will you stay with me for a long time?" asked the Wart, not understanding much of this.

"Yes, Wart," said Merlyn. "Or rather, as I should say (or is it have said?), Yes, King Arthur."

[alkalinefrog]

More Arthuriana reading journal:

The Once and Future King is SO GOOD you guys, I'm on the first book with the Sword in the Stone and I adore the relationship between Merlin and young Wart/Arthur. It's supposed to get darker as he grows up and I'm so excited to see!!

I DID give Mallory's original another go but the formatting of the middle english bothered me too much aldbsksvaksv all the copies that I could find in the library didn't split the dialogue from the main text.

I'm halfway through reading Marie de France's lais (an English translation of them anyway) and they're really beautiful. Could have done without the part in Lanval where Guinevere accuses him of being gay as a derogatory thing but it's from medieval times in christian England so eh, it is what it is rip.

Sir Yvain's still my favourite knight hands down

[alkalinefrog]

I picked up some new books on Arthurian legend from a used bookstore yesterday!!

The Mystery of King Arthur by Elizabeth Jenkins

a comprehensive overview of the legend and characters (including the knights!!), chronicling the evolution of the story as well as its historical roots across various cultures in the British Isles. For an academic text, it looks pretty accessible for the general audience (like this fool *points at self*)! I doubt I'll read the entire thing but this is great to have instead of jumping in between wikipedia articles lmao

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Arthurian Legends by Ronan Coghlan

THIS IS THE ONE I'M THE MOST EXCITED ABOUT!!! It documents every important item/character/setting A-Z, including the Welsh, Celtic, and Roman influences!! It's a GORGEOUS book and the drawings are so nicely laid out. It also has an overview of the legend and its various origins at the start that's way more concise than The Mystery of King Arthur, so I'll read that first as a jumping off point.

The Book of Merliyn by T.H. White

The Sequel to The Once and Future King, centered around Merlyn!! TOAFK is one of my favourite books now, I'm so stoked to finish it and then read this one!

And I tried reading Idylls of a King by Tennyson but the poetry makes me sleepy alsdfjklasdjfl I'll give it a shot when I've read through the whole story at least once

[alkalinefrog]

Merlin's so petty in The Once and Future King, he just gives people rheumatism when they annoy him 😭😭😭😭

[alkalinefrog]

I’m gonna start live-blogging about arthuriana things I read because I have so many thoughts. FIRST ROUND!!

Mists of Avalon (i didn’t even know this was a book before naming the fic lasjflkasdjfaslfkd) is such a slog so far, but I’m only on Igraine’s POV who’s setting the stage for what the status quo is in early Christian Briton so that readers have a frame of reference for the Celtic/Druidic lore that comes into play later

^^^ it’s also over 430k words long :’’’’D why did reading otnwas 5 times feel faster than reading this laskfjdlasdj

EDIT: OKAY NEVER MIND ABOUT MOA, SOMEONE JUST TOLD ME ABOUT THE AUTHOR'S BACKGROUND AND YIKES

Also got The Once and Future King by T.H. White queued up! I tried reading the original Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory but I can’t do it man, just gimme the modernized version, I don’t know why I was going so hard alsdkfjalsdjf

It’s so funny that Yvain just forgot about his wife for a year, then had the worst reaction to her breaking up with him ever and literally went and lived in the woods like a caveman while going insane

^^^ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS COME BACK AFTER A YEAR OF QUESTING WITH THE LADS DAWG

maybe he was too preoccupied being in love with Gawain. I still need to read up on Gawain, but I’m shipping these knights regardless

[alkalinefrog]

Since you've been doing some background research on Arthurian content, did you know that a lot of the mythos involving the Round Table, chivalric romances, & the Holy Grail was developed by 12th century French poet Chrétien de Troyes; 400 years after the core Arthurian elements were first recorded in the Historia Brittonum?

Yeah, one of the first things I did when I started researching for the fic was to get a comprehensive look at the origins of the mythos! I found an ebook in the library that had a super digestible summary of the timeline, covering Historia Brittonum and Malory of course, but ALSO going into the Welsh and Celtic influences that predated Christian influence, which was SUPER COOL. Unfortunately the book only focused on the King Arthur character, and didn’t go into much depth about the other knights, ladies, faeries, etc.

The book didn’t go too in depth about Chrétien de Troyes other than to mention the titles of his contributions, so that’s another area for further reading I want to get into. I know him best for the story of Sir Yvain and the Lion, which was one of the first stories I stumbled across that just screamed HTTYD.

Like. Yvain meets the Lion by cutting its tail off??? (albeit it was to save it from a dragon where Hiccup was trying to kill Toothless at first alsjdfkalsdjf) and then the Lion becomes his best bud???? AND IT’S THROUGH THIS FRIENDSHIP THAT YVAIN IS REDEEMED??? AAAHHHH

At one point the Lion gets injured after defending Yvain, and Yvain makes a bed of grass on the back of his shield and literally drags the Lion to a town, then cuddles up next to him while he’s healing up, even though everyone’s hella scared of this wild animal BAWWWW

Other than that, I haven’t looked to deeply into his work! I made a bunch of notes on what early influences pre-dating Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth that I wanted to use in combo with modern retellings that most people are familiar with!

[alkalinefrog]

Had a really basic idea years ago about how the Arthur story could have gone better after he discovered Lancelot's & Guinevere's affair. Like, Arthur's travelling the lands, Guinevere is home running the kingdom and Lancelot is basically the most trusted person to keep queen & castle safe. It's a polycule waiting to happen and while Arthur & Lancelot are sparring/working out, Guinevere is sipping wine watching her men get physical and heated up.

Honestly—barring historical accuracy, medieval values, and thematic symbolism in the stories—a lot of things in Arthurian Legend could have been cleared up if people just talked through their relationship problems and/or were queer LMFAO.

That being said, I do like their love triangle being doomed from the start as one of the greatest tragedies ever written, if anything for the EMOTIONS :’’’D It IS fun to think about them as a functioning polycule though, they could have been such a powerhouse all together and the round table would have survived even Mordred (possibly). WE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALLLLL

[alkalinefrog]

Hiya Alka! I just finished what you have up of your Arthuriana AU for HiJack- it blew my socks off!

I study medieval literature as part of my undergrad degree and I was astounded that you included Yvain's story with the lion! He's such an underappreciated knight! And the queer themes with both that tale and Gawain and the Green Knight? AND that Gawain appears in Yvain's tale? *chef's kiss* (is this foreshadowing?)

Thank you for your writing- it's clear that you are extremely talented and that you work extraordinarily hard on what you put out!

I hope you are having a great day!

AWWW Thank you so much omg!!! I'm so glad to hear that you like the Arthurian aspects of it already, especially if you're studying it, WOW!!

Oh thank god I'm not just projecting my own queer themes on them, I'm glad to hear confirmation of that from someone else LMAO. Regardless, I was ready to bastardize them into being gay, but I'M GLAD THERE'S A REAL BASIS TO IT.

Yeah dude!!! When I was first going into this AU I only knew about the basic story with Arthur and the love triangle and Mordred and all that, so this is the first time I'm reading into more of the knights and general lore! I started off by reading "King Arthur" by Daniel Mersey, which I found as an e-book at the library and that was a really great digestible intro to all the different historical origins of the story. It also had a lot of different mentions to the stories about the other knights, so I wrote a list down that I want to read more into (and am still reading into lol). Sir Yvain IMMEDIATELY became one of my faves because of that friendship, and I'm waiting on my hold on the "Sir Yvain: The Knight of the Lion" graphic novel by MT Anderson and Andrea Offermann to look at it more in depth!

Actually I completely forgot that Gawain makes an appearance in Yvain's story too aslfdjasldkfjlkasfdj I'M STILL NEW TO THIS LMAO. I'm not gonna be able to read up about everyone in depth, so it's been a lot of wikipedia article jumping so far!

If you have any book recs (preferably more accessible ones for beginners lol), I'd love to hear them! I'm like, intentionally avoiding watching BBC's Merlin because I want the fic to be its own separate take on the source material and I feel like it'll spoil the fun of researching for me lol. I might watch it after I get a better sense of what the plan is!

I can not confirm or deny what's being foreshadowed, but there's a reason I'm making you read through a bunch of bad live-theatre LMFAO.

Thank you so much for swinging by dude!! This made me really happy to read!