This volume serves extremely well as a Companion, providing an excellent and comprehensive range of useful information. The first part of the book, “Evolution,” takes a chronological approach (the four-page “Selective Chronology” of Arthurian texts [pp. xv-xviii] is itself a useful tool), with separate chapters for “the early Arthur,” and then the Arthur of the twelfth-, thirteenth-, fourteenth-, fifteenth-, sixteenth- through nineteenth-, and twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries. It traces the stories and the texts in which they appear mainly in Welsh, French, English, German, and Latin, laying out developments as they shift between countries (including the States), between prose and verse, and between chronicle and romance (and going into genres such as painting, stage musicals, and film).
The second part of the book tackles the material by themes: “Questioning Arthurian Ideals,” “Arthurian Ethics,” “Imperial Arthur: Home and Away,” “Love and Adultery: Arthur’s Affairs,” “Religion and Magic,” and “Arthurian Geography.” These chapters examine the same materials by tracing certain characters and motifs as they develop. Each chapter is written by a different, well-respected scholar (or pair of scholars) in the field, but the chapters have been beautifully edited to feel seamless; I repeatedly forgot that the author had changed between one chapter and the next. This volume shares with other guides, however, the inherent problem of the genre—finding the balance between assuming either too much or too little knowledge on the part of the reader—and occasionally stumbles. Some stories are summarized in too much detail, some in too little.
Though this volume will be of interest to many folklorists, it is not a folklore book—nor does it claim to be—but since this review is for a folklore journal, I need to comment on the matter. It includes only passing references to folklore, with assumptions of a pre-literate oral tradition and mention of Arthur’s mark on the landscape, mainly in place names. Nonetheless, while reading this compendium with its discussion of variations in motifs and the ways in which the stories were adapted to fit the current socio-political needs of their narrators, I realized that the body of Arthurian literature, which is for the most part highly literary (we can only guess at crossings into oral tradition), shares important characteristics with folklore. This volume provides a fine example of what can be done with combining synchronic and diachronic studies of a topic. Whether for folklorists or not, I recommend this book for both those well read in a particular language or century of Arthurian literature but wanting a ready guide to how that fits in to the larger body of Arthuriana, and for those simply desiring an overview of the artistic expression of a beloved character and his companions.
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[Review length: 452 words • Review posted on January 19, 2011]