Desperate to find a weapon so that his older brother can participate in a tournament, the young Arthur secretly pulls a sword from a stone and is thus recognised as the King of Britain. This story is ubiquitous today, but in medieval England it was only one of several narratives of how the young king came to the throne. The story is first told around 1200 in the French prose Merlin and this romance, along with the other parts of the Vulgate Cycle, was popular throughout late-medieval Britain. It is perhaps best known through its inclusion in Thomas Malory's late fifteenth-century Morte Darthur, but it is also found in other texts which translate the French Merlin, including Of Arthour and of Merlin (late thirteenth century), Henry Lovelich's verse Merlin (1420s or 1430s) and the Middle English prose Merlin (mid-fifteenth century).

One other translation of this scene merits attention. It is found in London, College of Arms MS Arundel 58, a mid-fifteenth-century copy of Robert of Gloucester's Metrical Chronicle. Inserted as an interpolation in its Arthurian narrative, the Arundel Coronacio Arthuri amounts to 398 lines of original Middle English verse and it reveals the complex relationship between the chronicle tradition of King Arthur's reign and the French romance tradition which complemented and, at times, contradicted the historical narrative. The poem also shares features with its fellow English versions of the story, and thus gives us some insight into the circulation of the French prose Merlin in England and the reading habits of the scribe of Arundel 58.

Not used extensively by either of the two editors of Robert of Gloucester's Metrical Chronicle, Arundel 58 begins with ‘The tabile offe cronycil offe Engelonde’ and the claim that ‘Thys boke with hys antecedens and consequens was ful ended the vj day offe Auguste the ʒere of oure lorde a Ml CCC. xlviij’ (i.e. 1448). This date may refer to when the text of Robert's Chronicle was brought together with a summarising prologue (i.e. ‘hys antecedens’) and a concluding pedigree of Henry VI (i.e. the ‘consequens’), but the Chronicle could not have been copied much earlier. The text of Robert's verse has been extensively expanded with prose excerpts from a variety of sources including the Middle English Brut, and translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, John of Glastonbury and others.

On his deathbed, Malory's Sir Gawain writes to Lancelot ‘but two owrys and a halff afore my dethe’. How does Gawain know when he will die, and what are the implications of this knowledge? The deathbed scene occurs shortly before Arthur has an apparently prophetic dream about Gawain. For many readers, Gawain's accurate prediction of the hour of his death reinforces the sense that the dream is prophetic. Broadly speaking, to accept both episodes as prophetic corresponds to assigning the Morte Darthur to the genre of romance, and to seeing Malory as invested in romance values.

The conjunction of Gawain's death and Arthur's dream appears to be a neat example of Malory's paratactic construction on the narrative level, as elucidated by Bonnie Wheeler, in this case to reinforce Gawain's authority as a prophet. Closer attention to Gawain's apparent foreknowledge, however, complicates interpretation of both the deathbed and the dream. I argue that common sense, rather than a sudden prophetic gift, tells Gawain that he will expire at noon, and that the absence of supernatural elements in the deathbed scene should prompt reconsideration of Arthur's dream: it reflects Arthur's anxieties, rather than being truly prophetic. I concur with critics such as Wheeler and Whetter that Malory's Gawain is a more consistent (and virtuous) character than some scholars give him credit for being. His virtues, however, are secular and pragmatic rather than spiritual. That his final appearances in Malory correspond to his earlier character development, rather than introducing an unexpected supernatural side to Gawain, supports the case for consistency in Gawain's character. This sceptical view of Gawain's predictions on his deathbed and in Arthur's dream corresponds to a view of Malory as a writer for whom romance is mingled with realism derived from his own experiences with battlefields and politics.

Despite its pathos, Gawain's death receives only glancing references in the critical literature, crowded out by all the other ironies and tragedies of Malory's final book. On the timing of Gawain's death, Vinaver himself observes only that ‘Gawain's foreknowledge is taken for granted’, while other critics comment on the way Gawain's short remaining span of life increases the sense of tragedy, and on the irony of Gawain's last hours being those in which he normally was strongest.

Appendix

Volume 34 of Arthurian Literature presents essays that revisit the familiar and introduce the unfamiliar, ranging from Chrétien's Erec et Enide, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Malory to a hitherto unpublished Middle English poem on Arthur's drawing of the sword from the stone and a little-known Irish Arthurian text, plus a re-evaluation of the cross supposedly found in Arthur's grave at Glastonbury.

Rebecca Newby's examination of the ending of Chrétien's Erec et Enide constitutes a case study in which she explores the extent to which Chrétien's endings conform to medieval theories of poetic composition, with an eye to discovering whether ‘they do in fact contain a nucleus of poetic truth or not’. She studies the structure of Chrétien's poem, paying special attention to endings – both ‘illusory’ and ‘actual’ – and argues that Erec and Enide are also ‘symbolic figures’, or ‘allegorical apotheoses of chivalric matière and beautiful poetic, form respectively’. Neil Cartlidge asks several questions of the opening frame of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, most notably regarding the identity of the knight who is said by the narrator to have committed an act of treason. Can he be identified? The poem's earliest editors decided on either Aeneas or Antenor, but Cartlidge argues for a new approach to this question, and comes to the striking conclusion that the person who best fits the profile within the context of the Fall of Troy narrative is in fact Paris. Nicole Clifton reads Sir Gawain's deathbed scene in Malory's Morte Darthur, offering an answer to the question of how Gawain knows the exact hour of his death. His prediction, according to Clifton, is neither prophetic nor symbolic, as other critics have argued, but simply a matter of factual observation. Furthermore, she argues that Arthur's subsequent dream of Gawain need not necessarily amount to prophecy on Gawain's part either, as some would have it, but has instead a pragmatic explanation as well. Clifton concludes that such passages point to Malory being ‘a hard-headed knight-prisoner whose real-life experience inflects his reading of assorted French books’, rather than ‘a nostalgic writer in love with “olde romaunce” ’.

Appendix

Unlike medieval Wales, the birthplace of the legend of King Arthur, medieval Ireland – according to conventional wisdom – paid little attention to Arthurian tales. The native Irish Arthurian material that survives is late and limited. It consists largely of a group of five late medieval and early modern Irish Gaelic prose Arthurian romances, of which the tale known as Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil (‘The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog’), composed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, is the oldest. Yet Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil is preserved in sixty-seven known manuscripts, indicating that it was of great interest to an Irish audience. Bernadette Smelik has recently explored the popularity of the Irish Arthurian romances as a group, concluding that their blend of ‘foreign and native elements’ suggests likely circulation among the Gaelicised English in Ireland. This article offers a more specific explanation for the popularity of Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil by treating the learned Ó Maoil Chonaire family, who produced the earliest surviving manuscript containing this tale (London, British Library, Egerton 1782, written in 1517), as a case study of its audience during the Gaelic resurgence. I argue first that the mutilations of the crop-eared dog and the tale's portrayal of Arthur are related to medieval Irish traditions about legitimate kingship which still possessed cultural currency in the sixteenth century, and second, that the broader contents of Egerton 1782 indicate the Ó Maoil Chonaire family's interest in this topic, which may have had contemporary political resonance. The Ó Maoil Chonaire family deliberately cultivated a backward look as they compiled Egerton 1782, and Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil's concern with native Irish kingship demonstrates that the world of narrative could sustain this ideology and its concomitant symbolism even when they no longer found a place in the world contemporary with the manuscript, its creators and the composition of the Eachtra itself. Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil's Arthurian framework allows the tale to engage with these concerns at a time when they may have been culturally, but not historically, relevant.

This article moves from the centre of Eachtra an Mhadra Mhaoil outwards.

The lead cross supposedly found in the grave of King Arthur at Glastonbury Abbey is an icon of Arthurian studies (Figure 1). Its likeness, first published in William Camden's Britannia in 1607, reappeared in all subsequent editions of that widely read and influential survey, in derivative works including John Speed's History of Great Britaine (1611) and Jan Jansson's Novus Atlas (1646), in manuscripts such as Thomas Dineley's report of the 1684 progress of the Duke of Beaufort through Wales, and in countless publications, scholarly and popular, since. Only a minority of commentators would now champion the cross as a genuine relic of the historical Arthur, but even as a pious – or not so pious – medieval fake it may still have much to tell us about his cult. However, although it has been the subject of considerable speculation and debate, few firm conclusions have been drawn, and pertinent points have sometimes been buried within broader considerations of Arthurianism or Glastonbury. Moreover, in the absence of either the artefact itself or any alternative graphic source, the accuracy and authority of Camden's woodcut have been subject to relatively little critical scrutiny.

The present investigation sets out to reassess what we know and do not know about the object, its ‘discovery’, its purpose and its fate, to consider more closely the status of the woodcut and to take account of an important new piece of evidence, a hitherto overlooked variant drawing. It argues that both woodcut and drawing were based (not entirely reliably) on a sketch made by John Leland in the 1530s, now lost; and lends some support to the view that the cross itself was a monastic forgery of the late twelfth century. It also raises the possibility, however, that there was more than one cross, and that the item recorded by Leland and Camden may have been a late medieval replacement for the ‘original’.

The Discovery

The lead cross lay at the heart of what James Carley has highlighted as ‘perhaps the single most important event’ in Glastonbury's history: the recovery by the monks of Arthur's remains from their burial place next to the abbey church.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with a catastrophe: the destruction of a city so terrifyingly complete that there is nothing left but charred wood and ashes (‘brondes and askes’). It is in the context of this allusion to the ‘sege and the assaut’ of Troy that the poet then refers to a certain knight (a ‘tulk’), who he says committed an act of treason somehow so profound or archetypical as to be ‘the truest [treachery] on erthe’. The implication seems to be that the knight's treason is in some important way the cause of the disaster. But who is this traitor? How exactly does his treason relate to the spectacular destruction of the city? And how is either Troy's fate or the traitor's role in it relevant to themes of the story that the Gawain-poet goes on to tell?

These are questions that have troubled scholarship on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ever since it was first printed by Sir Frederic Madden in 1839. Indeed, the interpretation of the problem that Madden offered in this editio princeps of the poem seems to have largely determined the direction of the debate ever since. Most modern editors of the poem accept Madden's identification of the traitor as Aeneas, although some prefer the alternative candidate championed by Sir Israel Gollancz in his edition of 1940: i.e. Antenor, who in several late-classical and medieval versions of the story conspires with Aeneas (and others) in acts of treachery against the city. In either case, commentators often acknowledge at least a degree of doubt or uncertainty, but they virtually always conclude in the end that either Madden or Gollancz must have been right. In this essay, I argue that there is room for a fresh approach to the problem, and that such an approach might be illuminating for an understanding of the poem as a whole.

There have been countless attempts to theorise une mout bele conjointure, the formulation used by Chrétien de Troyes to describe his compositional technique in the prologue to Erec et Enide. Yet the term bele conjointure perhaps more accurately defines the ideal result of this distinctively medieval poetic practice: that is, an elegant sequence consisting of skilfully conjoined but diverse elements. Whatever the exact significations of this phrase – and it has long been an issue of contention for Chrétien scholars from Wendelin Foerster and W. A. Nitze to Eugène Vinaver and Douglas Kelly – most agree that it describes the construction of a pleasing and composite cortex that includes even the smallest units of poetry, an intricate surface that conceals a nucleus of truth beneath it. Those readers familiar with the prescriptions of medieval treatises on poetic composition, such as those of Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendôme, will recall that the end of a medieval poem is vital in establishing its significance, in making it whole, complete and meaningful, and might therefore expect to find this nucleus in the concluding portion of the romance. It is curious then that Chrétien, so accustomed to directing his readers as to the origins of his compositions in the prologues and preambles to his romances, does not once comment on his approach to the construction of endings and their significance. In the absence of such direction, it is important to scrutinise the endings of Chrétien de Troyes’ romances to understand how he brought his literary compositions to closure, and to ascertain whether they do in fact contain a nucleus of poetic truth or not. As the first of Chrétien's romances, and the origin of bele conjointure, Erec et Enide seems a sensible place to begin.

In the closing verses of Erec et Enide, the ‘chevalier plus loé’ (line 85) and ‘la plus bele’ (line 297) are formally reconciled with one another and with the ‘mainte diverse contree’ of the Arthurian world (line 6644), crowned in a great crescendo of harmony, optimism and beauty:

FEAR HAD BEEN THE CONTROLLING EMOTION of his life,” concluded Hamlin Hill in his biography Mark Twain: God's Fool (1973), “fear of poverty, fear of offending and alienating his family and friends, fear of being mistaken by his audience” (269). Hill drew his title from Twain's 1877 letter to William Dean Howells in the aftermath of the Whittier Birthday fiasco: “I am a great & sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, & all His works must be contemplated with respect” (MTHL 1: 215). Hill oversimplified Twain's meaning, for it offers contrition while demanding respect, with the image of the fool as court jester: buffoon and truthteller. Hill depicted Twain as a mere clown just as many had during his lifetime. Charging Twain with insecurities, poor literary craftsmanship, abusive treatment of family and employees, impotence, and pedophilia, Hill's work might seem to hearken back to the bad old days of Van Wyck Brooks. Hill was a real scholar, however, having had Walter Blair as his dissertation director and Franklin Meine as a mentor, and though one questions his conclusions, he based his ideas on material in the Mark Twain Papers, most notably the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript, in which Twain disparaged his former secretary Isabel Lyon and business manager Ralph Ashcroft (Hill “Forty” 7–8). Hill practiced the kind of primary research DeVoto favored, but reached conclusions more typical of Brooks. In an era busily shedding the restrictive husk of New Criticism, his claims and methods were highly influential. This marked a new phase in Twain criticism; Twain had said in Following the Equator that “everyone is a moon, and has a dark side” (654). With Hill's work, new light was cast on Twain's dark side.

This newness was recognized immediately by Robert Bray's reviewessay “Mark Twain Biography: Entering a New Phase” (1974), but so, too, was the connection to the old Brooksian phase. Minus socialist revolution, Hill achieved something like what Brooks had aimed for: a reading of Twain's later years and an assessment of his literary achievement. Bray praised the book as “revisionist” history that set straight the record that Paine had deliberately distorted (299). Bray noted that Hill's careful scholarship revealed truths that Brooks had arrived at through “an incisive intuition” (300).