#general recommendation for Gerald Morris' books in general

[gellavonhamster]

I wanna start reading Arthurian…..where should I begin

*rubs hands* oh excellent

I'd say one way would be to pick characters or events you'd like to read about the most and start with the texts focusing on them. @fuckyeaharthuriana has a lot of lists of different works, including those sorted by character (links in the blog description). Then, if you decide you enjoy Arthuriana in general, you can move to other texts. Another way would be to start with something well-known and short. I believe Sir Gawain and the Green Knight fits the bill well. The translation linked is more like an example, because there's a lot of them, and I frankly don't know which to suggest best; the one I read is by Bernard O’Donoghue, but I can't find it online. I've also heard very good things about Tolkien's translation - understandable, because duh, Tolkien - but haven't read it (yet). The works of Chrétien de Troyes are also very good and readable and imo very well represent what a medieval romance is. My favourite is Yvain: Knight of the Lion, and I haven't read his Perceval yet, but I liked all the other of his romances too. (Ok, maybe not Erec and Enide, but that's because I found the main character very annoying)

I've compiled a small list of Arthurian texts I recommend before when answering a similar ask, and I still stand by it, except, taking into account what I've read since then, I'd also add La Tavola Ritonda - an Italian Arthurian romance mostly focused on Tristan and Isolde, weird and violent but also very enjoyable, in my opinion, Parzival (vol. 1, vol. 2) by Wolfram Von Eschenbach - a German romance and my favourite version of the Grail story so far, and Lancelot-Grail aka the Vulgate Cycle + the Post-Vulgate. I'm not sure starting with the latter is a good idea, though, because it's five huge volumes, very readable (except for The History of the Holy Grail. You can skip that, if you ask me) and with a great impact on the later Arthurian texts, including Le Morte d'Arthur, but HUGE, it took me half a year, lol. (Le Morte is also long and often drier in style, but still not THAT long). But I simply had to mention it because it's such a foundational work. A part of the Vulgate Cycle has been adapted by Patricia Terry and Samuel N. Rosenberg as Lancelot and the Lord of the Distant Isles or, The Book of Galehaut Retold. It's short and beautiful, and you don't need to be familiar with the rest of the Vulgate to read it.

Oh, and if you're interested in more modern retellings, Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr is an episode from Le Morte d'Arthur retold as a murder mystery solved by Kay and Mordred, and it's amazing. Also The Squire's Tales series by Gerald Morris is a lot of fun, kind of for a younger reader but very well-written and funny, even though some of his choices regarding certain characters drive me up the wall a little bit.

Also, here's a great site by @tillman with a lot of links to various Arthurian texts!

[dawnfire360]

Twenty minutes later they met a knight, on foot. He was soaking wet, and three brightly dyed feathers that once must have waved jauntily above his head were stuck to the side of his helm like drying plaster. One of the feathers, crimson in color, had bled dye in a pinkish line down onto the knight's shoulders. As their little cavalcade approached, the walking knight removed his helm and stared at them. "Gawain?" "Good morning, Griflet. You've...um...been bathing?"

The Princess, the Crone, and the Dung-Cart Knight, by Gerald Morris

[forthegothicheroine]

I don't know if you've had this ask before, but I can't find it, so: I don't suppose you have any recs for really good Arthurian adaptations? I try to read the older texts but can't get into them, and the adaptations I've come across are in the 'I am Mordred' vein. (Apart from T. H. White, but I've read that.)

I can't blame you for having a hard time! The old texts are an acquired taste, to say the least (and I'm definitely no fan of Malory!) The most accessible of those is probably Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; I read the translation by Tolkein, which was a lot of fun. (You don't need to have read it to see the Green Knight movie, but as a Gawain fangirl I'm of course into it!) Same goes for The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, one of my favorite Beauty and the Beast stories. Those two poems together are what made me Team Gawain, out of all the knights!

What really got me into this whole thing was the musical Camelot and the movie with Richard Harris. This is my Arthur. This is the king I fell in love with. It's loosely based on TH White, but I like it better- the plot is a lot more concise, and while it's still not the most flattering depiction of Guenevere, it's a lot less openly contemptuous of her than White was; she actually gets a really sweet meet-cute with Arthur! For a trippier movie that covers more of the story, there's always John Boorman's Excalibur, which attempts to compress all of Morte D'Arthur into a couple hours. I think this is the adaptation that started the trend of merging Morgan and Morgause, which upsets some people but I find very understandable, and Helen Mirren as Morgana absolutely steals the show!

For books, I'm a big fan of the Squire's Tales series by Gerald Morris, another Gawain superfan. This YA series shows the glory and then the fall of Camelot, often (though not always) through the eyes of Gawain's mysterious squire Terrance. My favorites in the series are The Ballad of Sir Dinadan and The Princess The Crone and the Dung Cart Knight, but start at the beginning and read all the way through for the full narrative- they're all fast reads! If you want to get into I Am Mordred-style stories about one particular character, there's a heartbreakingly tragic Mordred in The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein, and a gritty detective Kay in Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr. If you want to read more direct adaptations of Mort D'Arthur, I would recommend the series Arthur Dies at the End by Jeffrey Wikstrom, an extremely irreverent retelling that's much more readable. (One volume is called Sir Tristan is Just Awful.) I'm sometimes into Malory adaptations and sometimes not- I wish more adaptations in general didn't feel bound to the Mayday massacre just because it was in Malory, it wasn't in most of the texts- but these are very good.

I strongly recommend the podcast Myths and Legends in general, but in particular I love their King Arthur episodes. They follow the Mort D'Arthur story, which once again is not my favorite, but they do it in entertaining detail with lots of depth of character. It's pretty harsh on Merlin, but hey, he got all of TH White to build him up, he can take it!

Finally, I would be remiss in not mentioning The Great Pendragon Campaign, an old rpg supplement that runs through the plot of everything from the pre-Arthur era to the fall of Camelot. I don't always agree with the choices they make of what to include, but it's an attempt to combine all the 'canon' sources into one continuous narrative. It's available on drivethrurpg.com as a pdf.

Followers, add anything you'd suggest!

[jurakan]

What adaptations of King Arthur legends would you recommend?

Uh... okay. Coolcoolcool. I can totes answer this.

I’m including stories/books that are Arthurian retellings, rather than books that are good and contain elements of Arthuriana but aren’t really retellings of the stories (so The Dark is Rising, The Lost Years of Merlin and The Fionavar Tapestry, while good, won’t make this cut).

1. The Arthur Trilogy by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Okay this is a bit of a weird one because it’s sort of King Arthur and sort of not. The story is that Arthur is the son of a knight living on the Middle March, the border between England and Wales, during the 12th century. He’s given a Seeing Stone by the family’s old friend Merlin, and in it he sees the whole life story of Arthur. And as Arthur’s life goes on, he sees parallels to his own life and it helps him understand growing up, especially as he becomes a squire, learns more about his heritage, and eventually rides off to Crusade. Through his Seeing Stone, you see basically all the big name Arthurian stories, and a few that aren’t as common or popular.

I have some issues with Crossley-Holland’s depiction of medieval Christianity--he does, after all, have a cardinal declare that women are all evil, and he takes the shooing women out of the Crusaders’ camp as proof of this--never mind that all these women are the mistresses of the Crusaders, so, uh, yeah. And continuity between books is a little fuzzy; the second and third books have some gaps between them that made me scratch my head. But other than that? Crossley-Holland knows his shiz, man. There are so many random details about medieval life that made it into these books it’s astonishing.

It also has the benefit of being told through a filter. We’re seeing King Arthur’s story as something that already happened, as being watched by our protagonist. He’s sympathetic to a lot of these characters, but he does sort of judge them. Heck, the way Crossley-Holland tells it, it’s pretty judgmental of Lancelot in general, as a man who has deluded himself into thinking he’s done nothing wrong, even if he has the best of intentions. And this series, while it gets grim, does end on a somewhat happier note than a lot of Arthurian literature.

2. The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell

Cornwell attempted to write a “realistic” take on King Arthur and came up with this grim story set in post-Roman Britain. If I had problems with Crossley-Holland’s take on Christianity, I have loads with Cornwell’s. He does not like religion. Like, any religion. It gets to the point of having a scene where Merlin declares that all of Christianity is just a rehash of Mithraic cults, which is a common myth but definitively false if you’ve even dipped your toe into the subject. And there’s a lot of violence and sex and I wasn’t really into that. About a third of the way into the first book I almost gave up on it.

“This trilogy sounds terrible Jurakan, why is on this list?”

And then Lancelot is introduced.

If Cornwell hates religion, he seems to hate Lancelot just as much, if not more. And this is when the story become AMAZING because Cornwell’s Lancelot is THE biggest douchebag of all time, but he’s got a great PR crew (made up of poets and bards from his father’s kingdom) selling him as the greatest thing since Roman roads. And the protagonist, Derfel haaaaaaaaaaates him. Everyone does. Even Galahad (who in Cornwell’s telling is Lancelot’s brother rather than his son) hates him. And his affair with Guinevere is treated as just one more thing in a long line of betrayals that he plays off as him being the Good Guy.

Ultimately, Guinevere is played… well not necessarily sympathetically, but as a complex and interesting character who regrets her actions and tries to make up for them. But Lancelot? THE WORST. And once he and Galahad enter the story, is when it gets good, deconstructing that whole thing and it’s wonderful.

Maybe it won’t work for everyone, but I really hate that love triangle. So it worked for me. I also like that Cornwell uses a lot of lesser-known Arthurian characters? The main character is Saint Derfel, and Arthur’s retinue consists of his cousin Culhoch, Lanval, and Sagrimore.

3. The Pendragon Cycle by Stephen Lawhead

What if we tie a bunch of Atlantis stuff to a King Arthur story, use all the old Welsh names, and make it an explicitly Christian story? That’s Lawhead’s schtick. The love triangle is removed entirely; Lancelot only maybe had an analogue in the old Celtic stories anyway, and here he’s made Guinevere’s bodyguard and never a love interest. 

These books aren’t slow, precisely, but if you read the synopses you might get that impression because it takes a while to get to the parts mentioned there. And to be clear, Arthur himself doesn’t appear until the third book (which was the final book, but then Lawhead wrote two in-between-quels about Arthur’s adventures as king). This isn’t Lawhead at his best (that’s King Raven, which is his take on Robin Hood), but it’s pretty darn good, making the epic tale of Arthur even more epic as a battle for the soul of Britain.

Just be ready for hard to spell/pronounce Welsh names. 

4. The Squire’s Tales by Gerald Morris

I just started this series, and though it’s aimed at children and young adults, Morris goes hard into the details of little-known Arthurian stories and masterfully retells them. They’re sort of satire--they mercilessly mock a lot of the courtly love tropes that appear in the Arthurian stories. Tristan is, for instance, a completely unsympathetic moron and a bit of a meathead, who cannot understand why his love affair with Igraine won’t work (or how a vow of silence works).

Morris knows that Lancelot wasn’t always the Greatest of Knights, that Gawain was once The Man, and that any jackhole who tells you the Deepest Love is with another man’s wife is full of it. Lancelot and Guinevere are portrayed as shallow and silly when they start their affair, but when the affair ends they get a whole of character development that makes them much better and interesting characters.

Also these books are very funny. Gawain, for instance, is utterly baffled every time a knight makes him joust to just go down a road. “What are you guarding this creek from? Someone spitting in it?”

5. Sword of the Rightful King by Jane Yolen

Alright I haven’t read this one in ages but I remember it being good? It’s a cool little story about the beginning of Arthur’s reign, and how since people are questioning his reign, he asks Merlin to come up with a plan to legitimize everything. The result is… the Sword in the Stone. It’s a bit of a con, but if it works, it works, right?

Of course, not everything goes according to plan, and Morgan le Fay is planning something. Just what that something is, isn’t clear. And the new kid at court is a lot cleverer than he’s letting on.

It’s a fun little YA book. Like I said, it’s been forever since I read it, so I don’t know for sure how well it still stacks up, but I remember liking it.

Thanks for asking, friendo!

[nettlewildfairy]

Any book recommendations?

in general?

im a big fan of Howl’s Moving Castle, by dianna wynn Jones, The rook by Daniel O’Malley, Squire’s Tale (series) by Gerald Morris and The Raven Boys (series) by Maggie Steivfeir. 

[gellavonhamster]

me: I tried reading comics and realized it’s not my cup of tea unless it’s standalone graphic novels or limited series, because I find such amount of canon, even when sticking to specific characters, too extensive and difficult to follow, and different stories/series are often contradictory, which is confusing

also me: already thinking which Arthurian texts to read next having barely finished reading Le Morte 🤡

(the list below was intended for personal use - I obviously cannot recommend things I haven’t read - but then I realized that some of these works are available online/can be downloaded for free because they are public domain, so if I add links, someone else might also find this useful)

Medieval texts:

The Mabinogion. I think I’ve read some individual stories from it at some point and enjoyed them. in any case, excited to see the knights of the Round Table with magic powers

The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle. don’t know how I still haven’t read this one (even though I know what it is about in general), shame on me

The Romance of Morien. heard good things about this one, also curious to see an Arthurian text with a Black man as the main character

Sir Gawain and the Lady of Lys. honestly, no idea what this one is about, but the full text is on Wiki and it’s pretty short, so I might as well give it a try

not losing hope to find Les Prophéties de Merlin in English because I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it in French. please, internet, just let me read about Morgan and her girl gang

Modern texts:

The Idylls of the Queen by Phyllis Ann Karr. everyone seems to love this one, and “Sir Kay solving a murder mystery” sounds pretty awesome

The Ballad of Sir Dinadan by Gerald Morris. it is Book 5 of The Squire’s Tales, but the description seems like I would be able to understand it without reading the previous installments. if I like it, might read some other books from this series (there is a novel about Lynet and a novel about Lunette, not sure if they aren’t combined into a single character but I like both of them anyway)

Gawain and possibly Lancelot by Gwen Rowley. saw a post recommending them, sounds like something I might enjoy

Tristan and Isolde: Restoring Palamede by John Erskine. probably??? do it for him (Palomides)

Non-fiction: 

King Arthur's Enchantresses: Morgan and Her Sisters in Arthurian Tradition by Carolyne Larrington. looks extremely relevant to my interests

(to be continued?)