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Arthurian Romance
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The Arthurian Romance seems to have developed first in the British Isles, before being taken to the Continent by Bretons, who migrated to Brittany in the 6th and 7th centuries. The core of the legend about Arthur and his knights derives from lost Celtic mythology. Many of the incidents in the former parallel the deeds of such legendary Irish characters as Cú…
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Arthurian Romance is set in a mythic England. Arthur is supposedly the first King of All England, finishing the work of his ambitious father. His historical analogs lived in the 10th century. However, the stories themselves are laden with heathenism, faerie magic, and enormous savagery. The Dark Ages, from which Arthur led England, were historically from the 6th to 9th centuries, from the collapse of the outlying Roman Empire until the foundation of powerful monarchies. The ethos of chivalry espoused is that of the Crusades (from the 11th to 13th centuries); the knights of those times looked back in admiration on the Knights of the Round Table.
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Many modern novels have preceded Ondaatje in their use of Arthurian romance as a structuring device. From Bernard Malamud's The Natural to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, examples (even purely postmodern ones such as Donald Barthelme's The King) continue to appear regularly. A number of bibliographies, such as E. L. Smith's, have been compiled (see Works Cited; Smith excludes more straightforward retellings, for which see Goodman, Reimer, or Lacy). In many cases, fiction with Arthurian underpinnings follows the "mythic method" advocated by other early modernists such as T. S. Eliot: to make parallels between daily life and ancient myth in order to "give shape and significance to the im mense panorama of anarchy and futility which is contemporary history" (681, and cited in Smith 51). In Eliot's own practice of this method, particularly in his 1922 poem The Waste Land, he began a [End Page 20] tradition of incorporating Arthurian myth and legend as interpreted by Weston. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, which relies heavily on Frazer's mammoth Golden Bough, attempted to show continuity between the ancient cults of Tammuz-Adonis-Attis and the grail-romance period in twelfth-century Britain and France.
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Arthurian romance flourished in medieval Germany, but the pre-eminence of Wolfram von Eschenbach has perhaps overshadowed some of his successors. This book focuses on Wirnt von Gravenberg's Wigalois, the later thirteenth-century Arthurian romance. It argues that whereas authors such as Der Stricker and Der Pleier follow the example of Hartmann von Aue by limiting themselves to an exploration of the pragmatics of the [fictional] chivalric value-system, the lay ethicist Wirnt chooses to examine the spiritual dimension of knightly existence, a theme first broached in the German context by Wolfram in his Grail romance, Parzival.
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Verse romances continued to be produced throughout the 13th c. and into the 14th; Froissart's Meliador (1383-8) was the last Arthurian verse romance. But by the end of the 14th c. prose was the predominant form, as evidenced by the proliferation of new prose works and of mises en prose, which were adaptations of by-now archaic verse romances (Cligés, Erec, Tristan). The courts of Burgundy and of Anjou were important centres of late-medieval romance production. In the wake of disastrous losses during the Hundred Years War, chivalric exploits lost their transcendent ideological purpose. Critics speak of moral and aesthetic decline in some 14th- and early 15th-c. chivalric romances, where the episode or motif is presented as a pleasurable surface rather than as a meaningful element in a significant whole.
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A search for the significance of Ondaatje's use of grail romance elements should ... admit that the importance of romance to the novel is not unlimited, despite the number of characteristics shared between Arthurian romance and The English Patient. While romance illuminates some of the key turning points of the plot, its application requires the use of generalizations and loose definitions, and some comparisons require the acceptance of contra dictions. Elements from romance character types are used quite loosely and often applied to more than one character. It can be argued that all the characters have war wounds, perhaps like the fisher king's, and are on personal quests for healing. This problem [End Page 42] is inherent in Ondaatje's mythic method, which derives its strength from its allusions, its allusiveness, and the anthropological drive to discover similarities in human behaviour patterns. Ondaatje purposefully suggests similarities in various passages, such as one passage in which he writes of the "naive Catholic images from those hillside shrines.
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Arthurian Romance