Alan Lupack's Guide to Arthurian Literature and Legend sets itself the ambitious goal of providing an overview, not just of a single author, period, language or branch in the Arthurian tradition, but of that tradition in its entirety--from Nennius to Monty Python and beyond. Perhaps the greatest emphasis is given to the medieval texts of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, with a strong secondary interest in modern Arthurian writings, but considerable attention is given also to the situation of these two great flourishings of interest in Arthurian material. Lupack generally stresses continuity rather than rupture: while certain works and writers are acknowledged as great, even as decisive turning points in the tradition (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, and Malory, for example), there is little talk of origins other than the murky kind. On the question of Arthur's historicity, which will undoubtedly draw some readers to this book (not least because of OUP's unfortunate blurb slogan "Explore Camelot and find the Holy Grail"), Lupack is tactfully agnostic, stressing that "real or not, Arthur has inspired a vast cultural tradition, which is manifested in poetry, fiction, drama, music, art, film and popular culture, and has been adapted to the concerns of each succeeding age" (5).
Yet it is this interest in the full range and variety of the Arthurian cultural legacy that represents the two greatest difficulties for a project of this kind. The first, and in ways least serious, is the problem of coverage: Arthurian material appears in many languages, both medieval and modern, and in so many works that the quantity threatens to become quite unmanageable. Of necessity, then, the Guide is selective in its treatment, with some works and sub-traditions (such as Scottish Arthurian romance) receiving a relatively cursory treatment compared to writers such as Chretien, who is rightly given credit as the decisive influence on the romance and Grail traditions. Works not explicitly Arthurian in influence are not addressed, even if they engage with medieval romance more generally--with some exception granted for the case of the Tristan material, discussed below. For the reader's orientation in potentially new fields, Lupack indicates major critical debates and provides bibliographies by chapter, though these are again restricted so as to provide a starting point for further study rather than trying to duplicate or compete with overviews such as Norris J. Lacy's Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, or his recent History of Arthurian Scholarship,, let alone such monumental works on single areas as Douglas Kelly's Chretien bibliographies . With this, we come to the second and greater difficulty: the organisation of so much material. Lupack takes pains in his Introduction to stress the complexity of the tradition, and freely acknowledges that his is not the only possible approach. Describing the intertextuality of the material in terms of intersecting and diverging threads that do not observe convenient rules of genre, time or place, Lupack offers what he describes as a "hypertextual" volume (6): that is, one not wholly ordered according to such rules, but in which the reader may follow a thread for a time before referring to the extensive contents pages or the convenient index of "Arthurian People, Places, and Things" in order to pursue another topic. Lupack's contents pages and indexes are in fact so detailed that it would be desirable to have a genuinely hypertextual Guide--that is to say, one in electronic format that would facilitate non-linear reading and cross-reference in a way simply impossible for any printed book.
Yet the Guide is ultimately a print work, not an electronic one, and will be read as one, if often in sections. To accommodate this more conventional mode of reading, Lupack divides the Guide into chapters on the following topics: early accounts of Arthur, chronicles and (pseudo-) historiography; the romance tradition; Malory and later romance; the Grail; Gawain; Merlin, and Tristan. Each chapter follows one branch of the tradition in roughly chronological order from the earliest texts to modern material: thus, for example, the first chapter closes with a look at Arthurian historical drama and novels, while the chapter on Malory and his influence concludes with a discussion of modern writers such as T. H. White and Steinbeck. This approach is in itself quite reasonable, but it leads to some rather unnatural divisions: Chretien's Perceval is not discussed with his other romances, but at the beginning of the chapter on the Grail. Discussion of the Vulgate cycle is similarly spread over these chapters, and the chapter on Gawain would benefit from discussion of texts such as Chretien's Charrette and Perceval, as well as Wolfram's Middle High German adaptation of the latter--in all of which Gawain is presented in a form of rivalry with the hero, competing on the same quest at the same time.
While Lupack takes pains to stress relationships of influence and development rather than disjuncture, the effect of these separations is not only disruptive to those readers looking to research certain single authors or topics which happen to straddle the emergence of a new sub-tradition, it tends to create an impression of greater disjuncture at these emergences than is really the case. In the case of the Grail, as Lupack rightly points out, it is not until Robert de Boron that it becomes the Holy Grail--around a century after Chretien's Perceval, in which it is but one marvellous artefact in a world that seems at times to be filled with little else. The chapter headings do respond to some degree to branchings that occur in the tradition at various times, yet many of these areas are less discrete than they appear in the Guide, and remain closely entangled with mainstream Arthurian material for a long time. The chapters on Malory and Gawain seem rather Anglo-centric, not because they overplay the merit of the texts they discuss--they in fact devote relatively little space to these major texts--but because of the implicit comparisons they draw: why not have separate chapters on Chretien, or Lancelot, for example?
A problematic exception of sorts here is the Tristan legend: if the other sub-traditions discussed tend to diverge and evolve over time into semi-independent genres, the story with Tristan is rather one of gradual but erratic convergence with the Arthurian court. Certainly, some of the earliest texts and their later representatives like Beroul set the legend squarely in the Arthurian world, yet in Gottfried, one of the most developed versions of the unhappy lovers' tale, Arthur's court is mentioned purely for purposes of unfavourable comparison with Mark's. It is only with later texts like the mid-thirteenth century Prose Tristan that the two legends are definitively integrated, with Tristan becoming a member of the Round Table. Again, this belies a degree of Anglo-centrism (Tristan plays a major role in Malory); more seriously, there is little discussion of the relations between the two traditions and the degree to which they may be seen as distinct. This is unfortunate, first of all because readers unfamiliar with the topic will likely wonder how the texts discussed in this chapter relate to the mainstream of Arthurian tradition, and secondly for the missed opportunity to discuss some truly fascinating literary relationships. Some of these links are made elsewhere, for example in the discussion of Chretien's Cliges (which admittedly predates most of the extant Tristan texts) as an "anti-Tristan", but in a chapter which seems more suited than most to Lupack's treatment of the topic by sub- tradition, it seems a pity not to offer at least a brief history of its relations with the Arthurian world.
Within each chapter, Lupack's approach nonetheless works well: the overall effect is of a series of overlapping literary histories of specific areas of this complex tradition, with a particular focus on the adaptation of material from writer to writer. In the interest of brevity, there is little discussion of critical interpretations beyond than the most major debates, though short bibliographies are provided for each chapter. These are generally adequate as a starting point (though it would have been desirable to see some reference to Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann's study of French post-Chretien Arthurian verse romance, particularly with the added emphasis Lupack places on continuity in the tradition), but are no substitute for a specialist bibliography. This is not really the point of Lupack's volume, however: as a Guide, it aims to provide orientation and direction in the subject matter, and the "Bibliography of Basic Resources for the Study of the Arthurian Legends" which follows the Introduction does indicate such more specialised works to the reader. As a Guide, the present volume's primary contribution comes in the overview it provides of the many, many Arthurian works produced over the centuries, and the relationships it outlines between these. Plot summaries are provided throughout, and will be of immense use for quick reference and in the planning stages of a research project, as well as helping undergraduate and even graduate students in familiarisation with the topic. Medievalists may be disappointed by the absence of any real discussion of transmission and manuscript history, but this would be beyond the scope of an already dense volume.
In all, the Guide will be of considerable use as a reference work and to scholars working in any period who wish to familiarise themselves with the Arthurian field. It cannot take the place of critical works with a narrower focus, nor even provide much introduction, on its own, to any single topic--but it will certainly find its place on library shelves and reading lists.
References:
Kelly, Douglas, ed. Chretien De Troyes: An Analytic Bibliography, Research Bibliographies and Checklists; 17. London: Grant and Cutler, 1976.
---, ed. Chretien De Troyes: An Analytic Bibliography. Supplement 1., Research Bibliographies and Checklists. New Series. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2002.
Lacy, Norris J., ed. A History of Arthurian Scholarship, Arthurian Studies. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006.
---, ed. Medieval Arthurian Literature: A Guide to Recent Research, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. New York and London: Garland, 1996.
Schmolke-Hasselmann, Beate. Der Arthurische Versroman Von Chrestien Bis Froissart: Zur Geschichte Einer Gattung. Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1980.
---. The Evolution of Arthurian Romance: The Verse Tradition from Chretien to Froissart. Translated by Margaret and Roger Middleton, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.