On All Things Arthur

The Celtic King, Not the Cartoon Aardvark

Feb 21, 2025

Growing up, I never really gave much thought to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

Maybe it’s an American bias—the kids in my country played Cowboys & Indians while across the Atlantic they were playing…Knights & Saracens? (If only!)

In my mind, King Arthur was just one of many cultural characters, like Robin Hood or Hercules, available to pick up and play with inside my imagination if I ever felt so inclined, but mostly left ignored and forgotten in favor of my more favored heroes.

On those rare occasions when my thoughts did turn toward Camelot, the mental image of Arthur that popped into my head was never in the form of a king, but a kid: a forever young Wart, scrappy sidekick of Merlin the Wizard, the happy ending of his tale having occurred shortly after he triumphantly pulled that legendary sword from the stone.1

This was mostly because the main source of my Arthurian intel came courtesy of Disney’s classic animated musical The Sword in the Stone, which featured less courtly melodrama and more comic mischief, dealing primarily with Arthur’s childhood and saving his coronation for right before the credits rolled.

As for the Knights of the Round Table, I only ever heard of their deeds from the smattering of winks and nods to Arthurian legend found in various other cartoons and movies. And as far as I could tell, nothing set them apart from any of the other medieval cliches of lords, ladies, and lances that populated pop culture.

That’s the thing about Arthur: his influence is everywhere, the references are endless, and there’s so many different interpretations of his story that you can’t get too upset when a particular adaptation doesn’t match your vision.

Like the endless superheroes whose actors get recast and origin stories retold every few years, King Arthur continues to inspire constant adaptations and reimaginings, while the core concept—whether seen from a mythological, historical , or literary lens—remains.

Indeed, the comic book movie comparison is especially apt—despite how much audiences suffering from superhero fatigue may roll their eyes.

As the summary for the Spoken Realms audiobook of Le Morte D’Arthur put it:

To the modern eye, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have many similarities to our own contemporary super-heroes. Equipped with magical powers, enchanted swords, super-strength, and countless villains to take on, they protect the weak and innocent and adhere to their own code of honor. Comparing Batman, Superman, and Captain America to Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram, and Sir Galahad isn’t a huge leap of the imagination.
Perhaps, for the 15th century reader, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table were the equivalent of our modern day Justice League or Avengers.

What modern man calls highbrow literature, medieval man called popular entertainment!

Having imbibed Arthur’s various outings with various degrees of mild amusement over the years, it ultimately wasn't from a literary perspective, but a (pseudo?) historical one that my interest in the King of Camelot really started to pick up steam.

Just who exactly was King Arthur?

Surely the man, the myth, the legend didn’t pop up out of thin air, no matter how much modern historians—with their neurotic need to call into question the existence of every historical personage that doesn’t arrive on the record intact with notarized birth certificate, social security number, and comprehensive coroner’s report—may object.

And so, the deeper I delved into Arthurian arcana to discover the truth,2 I found myself visiting and revisiting some of Arthur’s greatest hits, gaining a newfound appreciation for the fiction in the process.

It’s shameful to admit, especially as a practicing Catholic, but usually when I hear “Holy Grail,” it’s not the Last Supper that springs to mind.

It’s a bunch of British atheists.

Much like many people who think the Ark of the Covenant is just that one prop from the Indiana Jones movie, the popularity of Monty Python and the Holy Grail has had the unfortunate side effect of making the titular chalice less synonymous with the Blood of Christ than with British snark.

Truth be told, I never cared much for Monty Python, or British humor in general (yes, I’m one of those guys)—though I will admit to being amused by that one “just a flesh wound” scene.

Rewatching the comedy troupe’s most famous film as a Catholic revert has only hardened my stance due to its overt irreverence (in both senses of the word).

That said, I certainly respect the Monty Python crew for what they’ve accomplished, and can appreciate the craft behind their comedy even if it doesn’t make me chuckle.

I also think it’s cool that one of the troupe members, Terry Gilliam, has gone on to have a successful solo career as a film director.

One of his films, The Fisher King, is itself an Arthurian adaptation of sorts, replacing a character from the mythos and retelling his story within a modern context. I haven’t seen it but I appreciate the premise (disgraced shock jock seeks redemption by way of Robin Williams) and would be interested to see how it all plays out.3

A couple of other King Arthur spinoff characters got the spotlight in the 2006 romdram Tristan & Isolde, which starred Hollywood heartthrob turned #MeToo casualty James Franco opposite Claire Danes, an actress perhaps best known for playing a postmodern Juliet in the Gen X adaptation of that other great tale of doomed lovers, Romeo + Juliet.

I’m always surprised when I remember that certain famous characters—like Tristan and Isolde or Frasier from Cheers—originally belonged to a separate story before becoming legendary in their own right.

I’m also surprised when I remember that the aforementioned Sword in the Stone isn’t just Walt Disney’s take on Arthur as a stock character, but an actual adaptation (at least of the first part) of T.H. White’s (epically titled) classic The Once and Future King.

Published in 1958, this is one of those perennial favorites that invariably lands on any list of greatest fantasy books. But if you go in expecting a Tolkienian-style saga, you might be shocked to find instead a borderline postmodern, self-aware, fourth wall-breaking piece of comic fantasy.

Indeed, things get so weird that an edition published by Penguin Random House even went so far as to place it alongside science fiction!

The other most famous attempted adaption of White’s masterwork is probably Camelot—a movie based on a musical based on a book based on a legend—notable for its associations with Catholic President John F. Kennedy’s dynastic administration.

I’m not against musicals in principle, so it’s definitely on my watchlist—the all-star cast of prestigious actors like Richard Burton and Vanessa Redgrave is just icing on the cake.

Speaking of watchlists—or in this case reading lists—here are a few works of Arthuriana that I plan to tackle in the future as I work my way through my endlessly growing pile of unread books:

Idylls of the King (I’m very interested to see what the Poet Laureate of Victorian England’s take on a classic of pre-Anglo Britannia is like)
The Fall of Arthur (despite remaining unfinished at the time of his death, the fact that its written by a Brit almost as legendary as Arthur himself, J.R.R. Tolkien, is all the reason I need!)
The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights (as with Tennyson, I’m equally interested see what Steinbeck—an American author known for his down-and-dirty realism—will bring to a tale of mythic fantasy)

Conversely, highest (or lowest) on my “won’t read” list is the proto-woke Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley—published in 1983 but with a girlboss, subvert-the-patriarchy’s-expectations premise that would feel right at home alongside a million other feminist YA power fantasies polluting Barnes & Noble bookshelves across the country.

As that rare breed of reader who doesn’t mind separating the art from the artist, it’s not actually the author’s sullied reputation that has influenced my disinterest (though it definitely doesn’t help!)—it’s the eye-rolling elevator pitch of “what if we retold a story you THINK you know but this time from a WOMAN’S perspective?!” that’s become such old hat in the 30+ years since this thing was first published.4

Another ahead-of-its-time bit of you-go-girl cringe putting its nose in King Arthur’s business is the titular 2004 action-packed atrocity, King Arthur.

The poster in particular features a front-and-center Lady Guinevere (played by otherwise excellent actress Keira Knightley) ready for battle with bow and arrow in hand, while Clive Owen’s Arthur sheepishly swings his sword in the background—an ominous foreshadowing of the slew of feminist flops that would come to plague Hollywood a decade later.

But I will give director Antoine Fuqua kudos for his commendable (if failed—at least according to the critics) attempt at gritty historicity, changing things up by setting the story in Sub-Roman Britain rather than the usual (and ahistorical) Late Medieval (or even borderline-Renaissance!) England.

A renaissance of another sort occurred during the 1980s—that of testosterone-fueled sword-and-sorcery cinema. Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s Conan the Barbarian tends to get the credit for spearheading that era of musclebound swordswingers like Beastmaster and He-Man, but the path was paved for fantasy films in 1981 via the John Boorman epic Excalibur.

Often cited as one of, if not the best King Arthur flick, I went into this one with the unhealthy combination of high expectations and low (that is, zero) nostalgia, having missed the movie in my youth…which perhaps explains why I was less than impressed.

I certainly found all the hyperbolic shouting and self-serious ham acting endearing, especially when so much of modern art is self-conscious and soaked in irony—and I liked the spooky, ethereal score, which served as a fitting soundtrack for all the fantastical elements—but honestly, I should probably give it another chance at a later date, now that my preconceived notions have been thoroughly cleaved in twain.

Not to be confused that other Twain, the great American novelist of Huck Finn fame who took his own swing at the king with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Having already lampooned medievalism in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn via the con artist characters the King and the Duke, here Twain doubles down on the disdain and goes straight for the throat of all things courtly and chivalrous—so much so that it makes the playful jokes and ribs at medieval expense in Finn seem much more meanspirited in retrospect.

What stood out most is that the usually sharp Twain, in his attempt to the satirize the so-called Dark Ages, actually ends up unwittingly mocking modernity and all the arrogant progressivism of the so-called Enlightenment. The sneering “look at these backwards buffoons!” snobbery of the narrator comes across as crass rather than comedic.

If this is intentional and the joke is actually on the modern main character (as seems to be posited in this article on The Imaginative Conservative) then bravo to Mr. Twain. If not, then it’s probably one of the greatest self-owns in literary history.

Speaking of imaginative conservatives, I haven’t read Stephen R. Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle, but the fact that rightwing media outlet Daily Wire has committed to a multimillion dollar adaptation has definitely put it on my radar. Its future success (or failure) will serve as a good litmus test for the once and future of conservative art.

The right’s attempt to regain ground on the creative landscape will be an uphill battle to say the least, and not just because of the territory ruled by notoriously left-leaning mainstream movie studios. They also have to contend with the fellow independent outlets on their left flank, and nothing says “artsy fartsy lefty” quite like indie darling film studio A24.

Truth be told, I like A24. I particularly like their horror movies, with cult classics like The Witch and Hereditary serving as prime examples of the studio’s commitment to aesthetics and auteurism. To be sure, a lot of their filmography can be eyerollingly pretentious at best and malignantly Marxist at worst, but as a whole the studio serves as a breath of fresh air amidst the current miasma of corporate Hollywood slop.

All of which is to say that the results of the A24 arthousing of Arthur in the form of director David Lowery’s The Green Knight were exactly what I expected them to be: a visually impressive, artistically authentic, morally ambiguous bit of cinematic deconstructionism.5

And therein lies the rub: the film—with its sickly king, air of eerie paganism, unchivalrous degeneracy, hipster antiheroics, and contra-Celtic casting6—applies a pristine coat of artisanal paint over a faulty interpretation of the Matter of Britain.

While that adaptation of the anonymously-authored Middle Age romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—famously translated by none other than the aforementioned J.R.R. Tolkien, who put his linguistic skills to use not only in creating the languages of Middle-earth but also in translating poems of Middle English for modern readers—did its subversive deconstruction with style, the same can’t be said for the (idiotically titled) King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

A box office bomb of unsubtle CGI sound and fury, silly Anglophobic casting choices, and the overly optimistic (failed) idea to make this the first of a six-part franchise—here we have a case study of cultural vandalism that exposed director Guy Ritchie as having all the artistic tact of a woke soccer hooligan.

While some of the movies may be comically bad, there are nonetheless some good comics on King Arthur’s resume, most notable of which is probably Prince Valiant, a household name of bowl cut fame that has earned the knightly renown of being one of the world’s longest running pieces of serialized fiction.

I tended to skip the strip as a kid when browsing through the funny pages (I was more of a Garfield guy) but the storyteller in me is curious to find out just what kind of adventure the Prince could possibly be having that warrants a near century-long runtime.

If not the Sunday papers, then most people—if they think of comics at all—think of Marvel and DC. I was a big weekly reader until the industry went woke, and while both superhero universes have mined the Arthurian mythos to varying degrees over the years, what always stood out to me the most was both companies’ usage of Camelot’s resident femme fatale, Morgan le Fay.

In DC’s continuity (home to heroes like Batman and Superman) the supervillainess (stylized as Morgaine le Fey) is reimagined by the industry’s greatest imagination, Jack Kirby, as a foil for his demonic antihero Etrigan; while in the Marvel multiverse (of Spider-Man and Captain America fame) Morgan le Fay dated Doctor Doom!

But perhaps the most prestigious comic book contribution is Camelot 3000, which was ahead of its time both in terms of quality and, unfortunately, queerity, by way of a transexual subplot involving a body-swapped and gender-bent Sir Tristan coming to terms with his…condition. Mind you, this series—in which the legendary Knights of the Round Table are reincarnated into the far future to fight off alien invaders—was published in the early eighties to an audience not yet desensitized to such degeneracy.

The graphic novel also leans into the weird love triangle between Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot that has continually popped up in various iterations of the legend over the years, making the otherwise dignified king just as synonymous with cuckoldry as chivalry.

On the eastern side of the comics industry is the multimillion dollar manga hit (and its Netflix anime adaptation) Seven Deadly Sins, which remixes elements of the Arthurian canon to create a colorful playground in which superpowered characters with medieval flair duke it out in Dragon Ball Z-style battles.

Like its American counterpart, it has its own share of gender confusion, and while I find the franchise entertaining for its popcorn appeal, there’s an unfortunate air of unwholesomeness that permeates throughout.

This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the “heroes” are—as the title suggests—named after inversions of the cardinal and theological virtues, a subversive trend that continues in the sequel series, Four Knights of the Apocalypse (where the protagonists are given the titles of Death, Pestilence, Famine, and War).

The holy grail of Arthurian literature is the middle English masterpiece Le Morte D'arthur, a canonical classic which I read (or rather listened to) in audiobook form.

I’m a big advocate of audiobooks in general, but I do think old works like this one require a bit more careful reading (footnotes, exegesis, attention to archaic language, etc.) than is possible aurally.

Indeed, my experience of Sir Thomas Malory’s must-read magnum opus didn’t leave much of an impression other than the feeling that there was a lot less magic and dragons than I was promised. (But it’s possible I missed them while I had the narration playing in the background while I, I don’t know, cleaned my cat’s litterbox or something.)

Such is the downside of delegating written words to decibels…

Your mileage may vary with an author like Stephen King (mine certainly does—I tend to find his prose overwritten and his endings underwhelming) but it’s near-undeniable that his magnum opus is and always will be The Dark Tower.

It manages to accomplish the monumental task of recapitulating King’s multitudinous bibliography into a coherent multiverse, from Maine to Mid-World, and to that I tip my black hat. I loved this series as a teenager, but at the time I underestimated just how much of a debt it owes to Arthur.

The main character, Roland—whose namesake descends from the great literary lineages of Robert Browning and William Shakespeare—is a literal descendant of the King of Camelot (albeit from a parallel universe) with Knights of the Round Table replaced with Gunslingers of the Wild West.7

There are straight adaptions, there are remixes, and then there are Arthur-adjacent works like Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness, which (not unlike Monty Python) uses the usual Camelot cliches for the purposes of slapstick comedy.

As much as I enjoy the groovy antics of a chainsaw-wielding Bruce Campbell making mincemeat out of the evil dead alongside knights in shining armor, my favorite piece of Arthurian art is even more adjacent (though less comedic) than than Evil Dead threequel—but it is a threequel nonetheless: That Hideous Strength, the third and final installment of C.S. Lewis’s epic Ransom Trilogy.

While the first two books, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, feature angels and aliens, this one goes full-on Avalon, with the main character claiming the regal title of Pendragon and joining forces with a resurrected Merlin, who acts as pinch hitter in a war between the forces of heaven and hell on earth.

What’s not to love?

It has been prophesied that King Arthur will one day return to reclaim his crown when the people of Britain need him most.

England is certainly in dire straits these days, but the Brits might need to wait a while longer before the once and future king makes his triumphant return to Albion from Avalon.

In the meantime, let’s continue to enjoy those tales already told of his epic adventures, and look forward to many more!

LAYMAN OF LETTERS

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