Arthurian Legends

takaraphoenix:

As you may or may not be aware at this point, I’m majoring in German.

And in my medieval literature seminar – which is really highly interesting in general – we’re talking about King Arthur. Because a big part of German literature culture are Arthurian fanfiction books.

And I just?? I love it so much?

I love that eight hundred years ago, humans were basically where we are right now.

Someone created a cool character and everyone wrote fanfiction about him.

Arthur, the hunter and warrior.

Getting his first big Royalty AU in 1136 and really taking off after that.

Seriously, the fact that writing Arthur fanfiction was basically the thing to do in medieval Germany is hilarious. That one of the bigger German authors of that time is literally just so popular because he wrote really great fanfics.

And one by one, other people added their OCs to the story and some people then wrote fanfiction to that and said OCs got really established and beloved (like, ya know, Merlin).

I don’t know. This is just an appreciation post for the fact that an inherently human instinct is to write fanfiction and that literally the first ever proper books my ancestors worte were fanfiction and I am just in a long tradition of doing that.

A lot of other European places wrote fics as well!

girlwithouthands:

where should i start with reading about arthurian legend? what are the essential texts/translations/etc?

Depends on which kind of books and characters you’re interested in!

I’m (sadly) on mobile but on the left menu of my blog you can find old texts to download (in bold the essential ones in my opinion) and a list of books recced and tagged per theme and character