This book unites twelve articles by German medievalist Joerg O. Fichte, all of which were previously published between 1991 and 2010. It offers a welcome survey of Fichte's longstanding and wide- ranging critical approach to both medieval and modern Arthurian texts. Moreover, the ambiguous nature of King Arthur and the various textual approaches to this colourful character are brought to the fore in this collection. A "floating signifier" to which different meanings can be attached, King Arthur has captured the imagination of medieval and modern audiences alike. [1] Paradoxically, for the English he is a stalwart figure of resistance against barbarians, "even if those barbarians, in the end, are [] the English." [2] Obviously, the need for glorification is stronger than ethnic origins and it ignores the fact that Arthur is depicted as an inept and weak figure in quite a few medieval English texts (e.g. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Launfal). Therefore, as Fichte points out, Arthur emerges as a figure of identification whenever "models of national grandeur are relished" (2). A recent example is the association of King Arthur's rule with the presidency of John F. Kennedy and, by extension, that of Barack Obama (hence Obamalot in the title).
The essays collected here are not (and need not be) presented in chronological order of their original appearance. Naturally, they can be read as stand-alone articles, but given that Fichte explores similar topics in different (con)texts it is possible to draw parallels and make comparisons. The first six essays "treat general topics in medieval Arthurian romance and historiography" (3). Another six articles are devoted to an analysis of modern Arthurian texts and focus on mythmaking, imperialism, utopia and dystopia. To bring older essays up to date, Fichte has reworked them in several instances. Individual sentences and entire paragraphs have been modified or removed. Moreover, "relevant new studies" (3) have been added. Essay three, for example, lists the latest scholarly discussions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in the footnotes and essay four uses a more recent edition and translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae. It is a pity that translations of quotes in Middle English have been dropped, which makes the original texts less accessible to the modernists Fichte also wishes to address in this publication. Conversely, by translating into English those articles that were originally published in German (numbers 2, 5, 8, 10, 11), Fichte has made them available to a wider audience. Even without these modifications, Fichte's hope that his articles are still topical is certainly fulfilled. The collection offers a range of approaches to a variety of medieval and modern Arthurian texts. Quite usefully, some articles extend the critical discussion of selected Arthurian texts to more general topics.
Thus, the first essay, entitled "Grappling With Arthur or Is There an English Arthurian Verse Romance" and originally published in 1991, presents a convenient overview of the slippery definitions of romance. It includes the latest critical approaches to the genre in the footnotes and it therefore also shows, at least in the margins, how scholarship on romance has developed in the last twenty years. Fichte then proposes to focus on the king's court as both an actual locale and a symbolic place to determine "the limits of the transformational abilities of Arthurian romance" (20). While this is a valid way of grappling with Arthurian (verse) romance, it cannot yield a conclusive answer to the question posed in the title.
In the second essay, Fichte draws on philosophical and rhetorical approaches to historia and fabula in classical antiquity to examine the connotations of these terms in the historiographical writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace and Layamon. Concentrating on selected passages dealing with Arthur, Fichte shows how Geoffrey of Monmouth, by appropriating the rhetoric of historiography, conflates "fact" and fiction so impeccably that it becomes impossible to distinguish the two. Recognising this, Geoffrey's translator and adaptor Wace cautions his audience that the stories about Arthur are neither a complete lie nor the complete truth. In the following essay, Fichte continues his examination of the interwoven nature of historia and fabula in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this poem, "fact" and fiction influence one another as "[t]he fabulous story is historically integrated, and history, at least Arthurian history, appears to be affected by the tale" (44). The interrelationship of historia and fabula from classical antiquity up to the fourteenth century as exemplified in these two articles may serve as a trigger to think about the relationship of the two terms in our day and age, for example in connection with the making of the mythic hero as discussed in the last essay of this collection or as superbly done by Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman in King Arthur and the Myth of History. [3]
Pursuing the complex link between "fact" and fiction, Fichte offers, in essay four, a comparative analysis of the narrative structures in French and Middle English texts dealing with Arthur's death. He argues that components of romance such as adventures and quests are replaced in the second part of the French Mort Artu by elements from Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and therefore "the action is now determined by the course of history rather than by the individuals themselves" (59). Drawing on the Mort Artu, the Middle English Le Morte Arthur is set from the beginning more firmly in history and the romance is therefore "closely connected with reality" (66). While Fichte's remarks on the narrative structure of the two texts are convincing, his linking of the texts with "history" and "reality" remains problematic, for he does not make clear exactly which history and reality he has in mind.
Essay five presents a brief synopsis of the various approaches to the wondrous, which is applicable not just to the Gawain romances under discussion, but to other romances as well as other literary genres featuring the wondrous (e. g. hagiographies). In the Gawain romances themselves, the wondrous is shown to appear in various guises (the monstrous, the fantastic, the magical, the miraculous), depending on, and defining the role of the protagonist.
The quest for the Holy Grail is the subject of the following three essays. In article six, Fichte focuses on the choices which the knights seeking the Grail make during their quest in Malory's Tale of the Sankgreal and one of his sources, the French Queste del Saint Graal from the Vulgate Cycle. While these choices are informed by Cistercian spirituality in the Queste, the reasons for a particular road taken by the questers are far more unclear in Malory, because he leaves out most of the exhortatory passages found in his French source. Indeed, Malory does not endorse the Queste author's concept that the Christ-like hero, embodied by the three seekers who attain the Grail and most particularly by Galahad, should serve as a model of chivalric behaviour. Spotting an ultimate discrepancy between the chivalric and religious ideals, he turns to Lancelot and Arthur as viable alternatives and more practicable exemplars of the chivalric code.
The varied approaches to the figure of Galahad in medieval texts are carried on in modern Arthurian literature, the subject of the following essay. Focusing on Arthurian literature ranging from Victorian to post-World-War II literature, Fichte highlights the flexible nature of the most perfect seeker of the Grail. In Tennyson's "Sir Galahad" the Grail hero is "an ethereal creature on the borderline between physicality and spirituality" (108), but clear religious overtones are missing in the poem. These are present in William Morris's "Sir Galahad: A Christmas Mystery," yet here, the hero is "thoroughly humanized" (109) as opposed to the "sanctified hero" (109) in Tennyson and the medieval sources. Twentieth-century writers such as John Erskine and T. H. White demythologize Galahad, who is no longer seen as a model of perfect behaviour. In Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex, Galahad is virtually absent from the story as he faints at crucial moments or arrives too late at Camelot to save it. He is, however, resurrected in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon where he is represented as a spiritual figure again.
After an initial definition of the Grail as it is depicted in medieval texts, Fichte moves on, in essay eight, to a discussion of the sexualization and feminization of the Grail in Walker Percy's Lancelot and Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code respectively. In his novel Percy condemns unchecked sexual licentiousness, which he associates with a quest for the unholy Grail. In Brown's thriller, on the other hand, the Grail is a symbol for the sacred feminine. The three essays show how the idea of the quest is timeless and thoroughly human, no matter if it is a quest for the Holy Grail or simply the meaning of life.
Rather specific, perhaps too specific for this collection, is the focus on German modern adaptations of the Arthur material in essay nine, "The End of Utopia: The Treatment of Arthur and His Court in Contemporary German Drama." While the article, originally published in German in 1996, has here been made available in English, the plays under discussion, Tankred Dorst's Merlin oder das wüste Land and Christoph Hein's Die Ritter der Tafelrunde, are not particularly well-known beyond Germany. Moreover, Dorst's play is, to the best of my knowledge, not available in English translation. Readers interested in his play therefore need to be in good command of German. Nevertheless, the article shows how Arthur's court can be adapted to serve a modern political agenda (Hein's play is a critique of the leaders in the German Democratic Republic) or how the notion of the Waste Land can be reframed as a symbol for nuclear and natural catastrophes in Dorst's dramatic piece.
Essay ten examines utopian and dystopian elements in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and T. H. White's The Once and Future King. In the three works, King Arthur and his court serve as a model of an ideal society, which is ultimately bound to fail for various reasons. Depending on the political agenda of the authors, the king is conceived as a hero bringing the highest moral standards to Britain and its Empire (Tennyson) or as a "stout defender of democracy against totalitarianism" (7) in White's work. Finally, in Twain's novel, Arthur's society falls prey to "unbridled capitalism and destructive technology" (8). Tennyson's utopian vision for the British Empire as voiced in his Idylls is given closer scrutiny in the eleventh essay. Ultimately, the ideals of moral and religious perfection upheld by an impeccable Arthur are doomed because of the fallible nature of his wife and his knights. Utopian ideas are also the subject of essay twelve, which brings Fichte's examination of modern adaptations of the medieval Arthur material to a close. In this article, Fichte discusses how King Arthur serves as a model for the making of modern mythic heroes such as John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. Hailed by his supporters as a saviour figure after the presidency of George W. Bush, Obama, like Kennedy before him, is seen as a kind of second Arthur, who is, after all, the once and future king.
A bibliography at the end of each article would have been very welcome; as it is, suggestions for further reading must be laboriously gathered from the footnotes. A bibliographical reference to the original place of publication is given before the first footnote entry in each article, with the exception of the last one, where it is missing (it appears to be published in this collection for the first time, but this is not mentioned). Besides this omission, there are some inaccuracies in other references. "Burkhard" instead of "Burghard" (41); the main title of the book in which essay five was originally published, Impulse und Resonanzen, is left out and instead only the subtitle is mentioned (119); "Mediaevalitas" reads "Medievalitas" (135); "Artusroman" in lieu of "Artusliteratur" (153). Since these mistakes all occur in the references to the original publications, one gets the impression that they were added as a hasty afterthought. These flaws, however, are minor and do not diminish the overall quality of the collection, a worthy contribution to Arthurian studies that is appealing to both medievalists and modernists.
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Notes:
1. Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance. A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 6.
2. Ibid., 5.
3. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004).