Before there was the Round Table, and before the was a Grail, and before the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere, there were stories told about Arthur and his knights in medieval Wales. Heated debate surrounds some of the earliest texts of the Arthurian legends: which came first, Welsh stories or French stories? When were the Welsh stories composed and by whom? While scholars debate these matters, often basing their arguments on tiny details in the stories, the stories themselves remain relatively unknown, and certainly overshadowed by later versions of the legends, made famous by numerous films.
The multiverse of stories known as the Arthurian legend has a long and complicated history, particularly in its early days, in the Middle Ages. Much like modern franchises, it was full of parallel realities (with mutually exclusive adventures happening to the same person), prequels, sequels, and even fans and fan fiction.
This lecture will introduce some of the earliest forms that the Arthurian stories took in medieval Wales, and hint at some narratives which we might have since lost.
For example, the Welsh hero Peredur (known in other versions of the story, later, as Perceval) begins his journey towards knighthood as a young boy who had been brought up in the middle of nowhere by his mother (she was so afraid of losing him the way that she lost her husband and other sons, that she made sure he had never so much as heard of knights). One day, while hunting, he meets three knights on the road. The story doesn’t say anything about these knights except their names… and that they are following a knight who had distributed apples at Arthur’s court. The meeting with these knights is very important for Peredur’s story because it’s what makes him want to go and become one. We get to find about about his story.
But no story is told of the knight of the apples.
The lecture will introduce a number of stories from Medieval Wales, both stories that are preserved, and stories which are tantalisingly absent. The former, I hope, some of my listeners will then want to discover for themselves. The latter, perhaps, some of my listeners will be inspired to re-imagine.
This lecture is given by Dr. Natalia Petrovskaia, Assistent Professor Celtic Languages and Culture at Utrecht University and part of Stichting A. G. van Hamel voor Keltische Studies.
The picture comes from L'Istoire de Merlin by Robert De Borron in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
