The editors have collected fourteen studies of the passing of Arthur as depicted in three literary-historical movements: (1) the British Arthur, whom Geoffrey of Monmouth introduced to a wider medieval world in his Historia Regum Britanniae (1136); (2) the Middle English Arthur, culminating in Malory's Morte Darthur (1469); and (3) the modern Arthur, whose physical death is variously highlighted or obscured by later writers, but expresses in most versions a common elegiac theme. Marxist critics might complain that the legend of Camelot exudes a not-so-surreptitious nostalgia for an imagined aristocratic glamour and naturalized class privilege that laments its absence from the real world by depicting the king's sad demise, and encouraging intimations of Arthur's eventual return as rex quondam rexque futurus. Caxton invoked this valedictory thrust of the Arthurian legend in his first printed edition of 1485, co-opting the title of Malory's very last section, The Most Piteous Tale of the Morte Darthur saunz Guerdon for the king's whole life story. Caxton's version is the ultimate source of all modern renderings discussed in the third section. The Arthurian way of death--both the king's own and that of the other characters in his story--thus offers a key point of comparison among its multiple retellings through time, each offering its own inflection of what precisely has been lost and whether it may ever be recovered again.
Part I: The Early Tradition in England
In "'But here Geoffrey falls silent': Death, Arthur, and the Historia regum Britannie," Siân Echard argues that, for this Welsh author seeking preferment in Norman England, the figure of Arthur represents the "fantasy of stable, competent, indigenous rule" (18), belied by Geoffrey's own depiction of the incessant in-fighting of native British rulers. Geoffrey's Arthuriad thus ends in contradiction, as its king is both letaliter uulneratus 'mortally wounded', but also carried to the isle of Avalon for the healing of his injuries. Arthur's "not-death does not mean he remains alive," Echard argues, but the king's unfinished dying in Geoffrey's account does grant him "a kind of eternal life" (32). Arthur is neither buried once and for all at Stonehenge like his predecessors nor dies abroad like the saintly Cadwallader. Instead, the image of the stricken but living king emblematizes the chronic vulnerability of all native authority in Britain, the constant internecine violence that has characterized the island from its very first founding.
Edward Donald Kennedy follows the fates of "Mordred's Sons," as well as that of their slayer, Arthur's successor Constantine, in both Geoffrey's Historia and texts adapted from it for various audiences. These two sons may be minor, unnamed characters, but their slaughters at or near holy altars in Winchester and London serve as a litmus test for the narrator's own attitude toward the British nation as a whole. In Geoffrey, Constantine's sacrilege provokes the judgment of God upon his consequently short-lived reign, confirming the disinheritance of the Britons from their patrimony. But subsequent adaptations of this episode in Norman French, Middle English, medieval Welsh, and Latin verse, as well as in prose chronicles and romances, justify Constantine's severity toward the traitors, bringing Mordred's now adult sons to their just deserts. It is not until the late fourteenth-century Middle English alliterative Morte Arthure that the old Galfridian view reemerges. Here, Mordred's sons are children again, one an infant offspring of Arthur's ex-queen Guinevere. The king orders these babies "secretly slain and slung into the river," associating himself with Pharaoh, who similarly condemned the Israelite boys in Exodus 1:22. Going a step further, sixteenth-century Scottish chroniclers depict the Orkney-born Mordred "as the true heir to the British throne" (44), so that Constantine's slaying of Mordred's little sons constitutes a heinous atrocity requiring the opprobrium of all loyal Scots.
In "Dying in Uncle Arthur's Arms and at His Hands" (50-70), Karen Cherewatuk also considers the adaptation of Geoffrey's Arthur as a once just king turned bloody tyrant in the alliterative Morte Arthure. She notes that in the king's last battle, his two potential heirs perish: one, the loyal Gawain, bearing the king's arms he was to have inherited, is killed by the other, Mordred, with his uncle's stolen sword Clarent, which Arthur then cuts from his hand even as the king receives his own death wound. The house of Arthur is thus exterminated in a blood bath of self-destruction, rendered complete by the posthumous execution of Mordred's sons on the dying king's orders.
Part II: Middle English Romance and Malory
A more positive, though still conflicted depiction of death in Arthurian narrative appears in an alternative tradition of Middle English verse and prose. In "'Hadet with an aluisch mon' and 'britned to noght': Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Death, and the Devil," Michael W. Twomey retracts his earlier view (2005) that the hero feels only public shame as a knight for hiding the green girdle, rather than sincere remorse as a Christian for his lack of faith and fear of death--"beheaded by an elvish man" and "chopped up to nothing," in the words of Arthur's court quoted in the title. Twomey rejects the currently fashionable view that the hero's religion is merely a "performative identity," now preferring to read the poem in the more period-specific terms of Catholic moral psychology. Gawain's wound in the neck, inflicted by the Green Knight as punishment for his (venial) failing, heals into a scar that physically manifests his recovered spiritual health within: his sin has been redeemed by repentance, confession, and satisfaction. The perfect virtue so idealistically emblazoned in his armorial device, the Pentangle, has now been even further perfected by the hero's acknowledgment of his own imperfection, a genuine humility at his real failure made manifest by the green girdle that Gawain now wears as a penitential baldric.
K. S. Whetter stresses the relationship between "Love and Death in Arthurian Romance," noting that Middle English authors make no bones about the fact that the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere is the very cause of the lovers' own deaths, the death of their lord, and of almost everybody else in the story as well. Yet, in each of the texts he examines--Ywain and Gawain, the Awntyrs of Arthure, the stanzaic Morte Arthur, and Malory's Morte Darthur-- "death or the threat of death valorizes rather than negates Arthurian achievement and Arthurian ideals," especially "in those narratives where love creates the most death" (114). Whetter does not trace this theme to its likely origin in Celtic narrative tradition, as illustrated by the Old Irish legend of Derdriu and Noisiu, but he does observe that, contrary to the Old French Vulgate and Post-Vulgate Cycles upon which they are based, these Middle English Mortes consistently treat romantic passion as simultaneously ennobling and destructive. The very quality of the lover's devotion to each other is revealed by its power to destroy lives.
Thomas H. Crofts describes "Death in the Margins: Dying and Scribal Performance in the Winchester Manuscript" of Malory's Morte Darthur. In particular, Crofts notes the way that the Winchester scribe rubricates all proper names in red, often including a pointing hand and marginal obituary to mark the death of a particular character. This technique accentuates a feature of Malory's adaptation of his French sources in that he gives personal names to many anonymous characters and changes the telos of their stories from the end of a particular quest to the conclusion of their knightly career in death, formally memorialized in the margin. This practice creates problems when minor knights are killed at one point in the story only to reappear alive in a later section, but Malory's emphasis on his characters' individuality communicates "something concrete and incorrigible...with every knight named and killed" in his book (123). The Morte Darthur becomes a cumulative roll-call of fallen heroes that reads less and less like a chronicle or romance and more and more like a tragedy or epic.
Michael Wenthe reads "The Legible Corpses of Le Morte Darthur," observing that the presence of dead bodies, often in gruesome or disturbing circumstances, almost always presents a challenge of interpretation to the living characters in Malory, such as Gareth at the sight of forty hanged knights, Pellinore at the severed head of a damsel to whom he had refused aid, the corpse of Elaine of Astolat in the barge, and the headless bodies of other women killed on purpose or by accident. These corpses all force their observers to ponder the inherent contradictions and unspoken ambiguities of the chivalric code, where the physical capacity to inflict deadly harm is as much a criterion of knightly excellence as service to noble ideals. Even so, Wenthe finds the most provocative and "ambiguous body" in Malory's story to be "Arthurs own" (134), the one corpse nobody ever gets to see. Its meaning, like its whereabouts, is "uncertain" (135), so that reading the story of the Morte Darthur replaces a viewing of the king's physical remains, making his absent body "the most profoundly legible corpse...of all" (134) in that it is always read but never buried.
Lisa Robeson considers "Malory and the Death of Kings: The Politics of Regicide at Salisbury Plain." Citing the classic King's Two Bodies by Kantorowicz (1981), she notes that in medieval political theory a dying king becomes one with his heir apparent in mutual possession of "the invisible and perpetual Crown," a shared ownership of the body politic that transcends their physical bodies as men on earth (148). Malory offers a parody of this symbolic union in the mutual slaughter of the king and his nephew/son: "Arthur and Mordred do become one, physically connected by the lance and sword. At the moment of Arthur's wounding, the two men form a closed circle-- Arthur's right hand and arm on the spear that has impaled Mordred, and Mordred's right hand holding the sword that has connected with Arthur's skull[,]...a circle that destroys legitimate succession rather than confirming it" (148). Arthur accepts the end of his temporal rule when he returns Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake, but his other royal body--the "ideal of kingship" he represents (149)-- lives on despite this abdication. Arthur's kingship is thus "removed from the realpolitik of Malory's Britain to survive in legendary Avalon" (150).
In "'Layde to the Colde Erthe': Death, Arthur's Knights, and Narrative Closure," Cory James Rushton agrees that Arthur's living translation to Avalon invests his kingship with a kind of eternality, but that the deaths of his leading knights clearly described in the story signal the permanent destruction of the Round Table as an institution, one which will never again be restored. The dissolution of this chivalric fraternity is already anticipated in Malory's own Quest of the Sangrail, where the king laments that the coming of the holy vessel to Logres will cause the permanent break-up of his fellowship of knights. Even its temporary revival as a "rump" parliament of unhappy and acrimonious survivors of the Quest merely provides a stage for the Round Table's final denouement. Rushton notes that few subsequent authors are interested in depicting the Round Table as a fully functional brotherhood of 150 noble knights, suggesting that Malory's depiction of its failure undermined the Round Table's potential as an inspiring image for later authors.
Part III: Medieval Influence and Modern Arthuriana
In "Arthurian Exits: Alone, Together, or None of the Above," Janina P. Traxler argues that the ambiguous death of Arthur in the traditions recounted by Geoffrey and Malory made his story a perennially open and adaptable vessel for subsequent writers: "If the medieval Arthur had died as definitively as Achilles, the legend might have become fixed in its early state--still important for generations to come but not malleable" (192). Instead, the open-endedness of the king's demise meant that the death of other characters, especially the lovers, would become equally important to that of the king and thus endlessly re- imaginable and expressive of the preoccupations and values of subsequent ages. The king's not-dying, Traxler concludes, enabled other Arthurian characters to "live on to die another day" (192).
James Noble explores "Woman as Agent of Death in Tennyson's Idylls of the King [1859-85]," noting the poet's distinction between "true" women like Enid or Elaine and "false" women like Vivian or Guinevere. These latter are shown to resist male authority and thus what is inherently good both for themselves and for others, especially for men. For Tennyson, a "woman's role is to support and sustain her husband by subordinating herself to him to the point of self-erasure" (194). True women inspire good men to become even better; false women distract men from their most sacred duty, in Guinevere's case by keeping Lancelot "falsely true" to herself, rather than to the king to whom he owed a higher allegiance.
Julie Nelson Couch explores the depiction of "Death as 'Neglect of Duty' in Howard Pyle's The Story of the Grail and the Passing of Arthur." Pyle's retelling of Malory for middle-class American boys was published during the first decade of the twentieth century, when the spiritual ideals of Malory's quest of the Sangrail and Lancelot's own pious and passive death presented serious problems to the storyteller. Pyle wanted to keep the focus of his narrative on devotion to duty in this world rather than morbid preparation for the next: "Arthur, as the one who does not die, remains the icon of the ultimate triumph of masculine action imposed upon a world of (feminine) temptations" (224). Couch thus sees Pyle's perspective in two ways: (1) as "distinctly American," recalling Mark Twain's "endless parody" of medieval spirituality in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1881); and (2) as recursively "Anglo- Saxon," in its stress on death as a "glorious struggle" to perform one's duty on earth, as in the Old English poem Beowulf, "rather than a passageway through penance to heaven" (224).
Samantha Rayner hears echoes of the Morte Darthur in "Death and the 'grimly voice' in David Jones's In Parenthesis," showing how the poet interpreted much of his experience in the trenches of World War I through recollections of Malory. In Jones's 1937 poem the "grimly voice" is uttered by the death-strewn battlefield itself, not by the thirty grim knights who threaten Lancelot at the Chapel Perilous. Yet, that hero's courage in entering the ruined building demonstrates "a faith that transcends the horrors of the present" (239). In a later poem, "The Sleeping Land" (1974), the poet asks: "Does the land wait the sleeping lord/or is the wasted land/that very lord who sleeps?" (quoted 240), suggesting that Arthur's living death in Avalon is a figure for his ruined country, the king's own body, which will be healed upon his reawakening and return to life.
Kevin J. Harty concludes the collection with a charge to "Roll the Final Credits: Some Notes on Cinematic Depictions of the Death of Arthur." Just as medieval authors equivocate about the death of the king, so modern films also "want to have it both (or even more) ways." Harty observes: "What is most notable about cinematic depictions of the Arthuriad is the number of films that simply ignore the death of Arthur" (242). "When cinema arthuriana does present the death of Arthur, it more often than not borrows a page from art, framing 'the most piteous' scene as a series of tableaux peopled with different groups of survivors and attendants, at times invoking the promise of the Arthurian return, and at times ignoring it" (248).
It is indeed a remarkable phenomenon of literary history that this obscure Welsh folk-hero, emerging from the shambles of post-Roman Britain, should evince such perennial powers of imaginative resuscitation, even while cheerfully radiating death and destruction wherever he goes. It has been like this from the beginning. In the first extant Arthurian poem Preiddeu Annwn, "The Spoils of Annwn," preserved in the fourteenth-century Book of Taliesin, but composed much earlier, perhaps in the ninth century, Arthur goes out to rescue one of his men from a mysterious fortress of glass ruled by the Lord of the "Un-world" or "Otherworld" of archaic Celtic tradition. The attempt is a "magnificent disaster" from which only seven of Arthur's men return. Likewise, in the first complete Arthurian prose tale, the eleventh-century Culhwch ac Olwen, the king hunts a wild boar all over Britain and Ireland. As the beast attempts to cross the Severn river, Arthur says, "The boar Twrch Trwyth has killed many of my men. By the courage of my men, he will not go into Cornwall while I am still alive. I will not chase him further, but will go against him myself, life for life. Do what you can." Twrch Trwyth escapes and, at the end of the day, Arthur forgoes all pretence to royal dignity, severing a scalding witch in two with his knife. The king gets this dirty, dangerous job done alone, finally fulfilling his promise to help Culhwch win Olwen, but only after much pain, humiliation, and loss of life. Yet, the king's staunch "loyalty down" to his young kinsman means that a prince of the royal family can now marry a springtime maiden who will bring the blessings of peace and prosperity to Arthur's realm. It is this fiercely winning Welsh Arthur, constantly revived across the millennia, who has kept the Arthurian way of death alive.