I was reading King Arthur stuff, so I started in the 12th century. How many medieval documents have you read? Because I really haven't read very much, therefore what do I know about such a time? Well I was surprised to find out it's exactly like a renaissance fair, but everyone is mentally ill.All the knight and maiden stuff is real? You just showed up to a town and took maidens from their fathers and they blushed and helped you put on armour to fight other knights with maidens?You say, "Well it's a medieval romance story for King Arthur, it's not real." Oh, but isn't it? Is it? I wouldn't know because few people read medieval documents.And my main problem is, I don't know if this is all suppose to be funny. Is this suppose to be funny? Or is it suppose to be cool and noble?
The opening of Chretain's story is one of the funniest things I've ever read, it's like an actual RPG encounter with a level 99 Dwarf who just keeps whipping the party. But I don't know if it's suppose to be funny!They're trying to get passed him, and the Dwarf says literally "you shall not pass!", the queen sends out her handmaid and he whips her away, and then she sends one of the knights from the round table and he gets whipped in the face, and the Dwarf is on foot they're all on horses. And the text keeps talking about how evil and base-born and wicked the dwarf is. And I'm listening to this while reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvW5mjzT4WQBut there's this whole "leave the lady be!" culture, which is funny. But not to them, I guess. because girls were girls and men were men, Mr. we could use a man like King Arthur again. Anyways, that's all.
lmao
>>18405492A lot of ancient writing is surprisingly funny. I was expecting the Illiad to be an unbearable slog (and I think it is in some translations) but it opens with Achilles and Agamemnon insulting each other and is genuinely laugh out loud funny there
>>18406065We got greek niggas like Aristophanes (Father of the Comedy), and he made countless comedic plays that are still funny concepts today Lysistrata, a play about women going on sex strike to end the Peloponnesian warThe Clouds, to mock Socrates and his redditor debatingAssemblywomen, women impersonating men in order take control of Athenian democracy (both mocking soi men, and also joking that women would institute a communist distribution of sex)
>>18405486How does one properly start off with King Arthur lore? Is there an original basis to begin with? Some people say he was contemporary with the Roman Empire time period, and others say he was post-Roman, or even later Medieval, and many others still, say he was just folkloric.
Shonen is simply the most timeless and perfect form of fiction.
>>18405486I think there's a definite heightened sense of reality to a lot of those stories. Where realistically people wouldn't do that, but it would be idealized and super cool if they had. Kinda like reading a shonen manga today. No one would act like Goku or Naruto, but boys dream of being like them all the same.
>>18406108The Once and Future King is a solid starting point. It goes from kiddie to grimdark to pure lit, while keeping the basics
>>18406108The original is from a Welsh chronicle called the Historia Brittonum. Where Arthur is something like a Holy Paladin that kills hundreds of Saxons in battles while carrying around a giant symbol of the Virgin Mary. And he would one day return as a divine warrior to free Wales. The entire work is half history, half prophecy, half religious preaching. It is not an entertainment piece and appears to have taken Welsh folk tales about a Paul Bunyan like figure called Arthur whose giant dog left footprints in stone and stuff and ran with them. Then an English guy called Geoffrey of Monmouth got his hands on it and turned Arthur into a Alexander the Great figure that eventually invades Europe and battles the Roman Emperor in a great conquest of the continent in his half-history half-epic, the Historia Regum Britanniae. While by modern standards his stuff isn't written terribly interestingly, it was a real crowd pleaser back then. At a certain point the French got a hold of all of this and liked what they saw and started really reshaping Arthur. The French already had their own format for these types of stories in their tales about Charlemagne and his knights, and Arthur was contorted to fit this pattern. The stories become more about people and romance and drama over prophecy or Big Geoff's wargasms. Things like the Quest for the Grail or Avalon start to become a part of the structure and the set Roundtable as well. Finally it crosses the Channel again and the English start added back their own ideas and stories to the mix and expanding on places they liked or reducing the roles of characters they disliked. A thug-brigand-gangster turned contrite writer called Thomas Malory comes in here and writes what is kinda the definitive model for the Arthurian Canon today, in his The Death of Arthur. The Welsh themselves were also working on their own type of Arthur whose stories are referenced in their Triads type of poetry, but these were less influential.
>>18406206 Slight correction because I misremembered something.Geoffrey wasn't really English.He was a partially Anglicized Frenchman from a family that had just recently come over with William the Conqueror.As well, there were more Welsh stories about Arthur doing things like fighting monsters or engaging in political disputes or having children before and around the time of the Historia Brittonum's publishing, but these didn't really have a ton of influence outside of Wales, on the later canon. At least not to my knowledge right now.
>>18406188>>18406206>>18406212Thank you for suggestions. Was there a real King Arthur, or an original prototype figure that existed in history who inspired the tales? What would his time period have been?
>>18406218I don't really think there was an actual Arthur. The original folk tales are just vague hero tales. Like equivalent to visiting ancient Greece and some greybeard old geezer tells you that the big cracked boulder by his farmstead was actually split by Herakles back in the day when he wrestled a giant boar.Did he believe that Herakles actually did it? Is he just telling you a story to past the time and maybe get you to buy him a drink? It doesn't really matter. The Historia Brittonum is just totally untrustworthy as a historical source (and really should be understood as being some type of apocalyptic literature as much as history), despite usually being considered the first 'official' and non-controversial narrative about Arthur. But what makes it useful is that there is a list of 'miraculous things' that the author(s) appended to the document that summarize a bunch of weird things in Wales that were considered miracles and proof of God's power. Including a grave for Arthur's son that changes size every time someone tries to measure it. This is useful because it demonstrates that there were already folk tales about Arthur going around before this work was published and that they had a very traditional and unpretentious character as the types of camp fire folktales people would share for fun, rather than being pure historical information. So if that is what you're working from, I just don't see a reason to think he was a real guy. You can try to force him to be based on an individual or a composite of persons, but then you're just forcing it, imo. Imagination is strong enough to create Arthur.
>>18406228Some propose that Lucius Artorius Castus was the original prototype for the later King Arthur, but I don't know how that got understood to early Medieval people. A Roman military leader idea still fits if the figure is instead Ambrosius Aurelianus, from around the Anglo-Saxon invasion time period.
What a wonderful thread. I like imagining Arthur sounding very Welsh.
