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Mar 13, 2025
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2013-2014 Academic Catalog [Archived Catalog]
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ENGL 218H - KING ARTHUR LEGENDS
Credits: Four
Prerequisite: ENGL 101 and Honors Status
This course follows King Arthur and his Knights
of the Round Table on their adventures for glory,
fierce battles for passion and quests for holy
treasure. We will explore aspects of the legends
as various of the ideas of kingship and the
historicity of Arthur, the courtly love culture
in the Lancelot and Guinevere affair, the purpose
of adventure in the lives of Arthur’s knights,
the role of supernaturalism and the Christian or
pagan associations of the Holy Grail. We will
follow the evolution of the legends through
translated early- and late-medieval texts
(Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of
Britain, the Welsh Mabinogion, Chrétien de
Troyes’s French Arthurian Romances and Thomas
Malory’s English Morte Darthur) and modern
transformations (Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the
King and T. H. White’s The Once and Future King).
We will even view the adaptation of the legends
for the big screen in films like Excalibur, Monty
Python and the Holy Grail and The Fisher King.
We will quest for the answer to this question:
why, after nearly nine centuries, do these
legends remain popular and even continue to
evolve?
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