zielenna:

Post-Vulgate is wild

Even for arthurian legends’ standards. I had to read its version of the Grail quest in about two days, so I need to compensate by making fun of it without attention to context or any attempt at nuance. Warnings for shaky theology & typical medieval romance ickiness.

• There are 4 suicides in the first 53 pages (out of 375).
• By page 70, there are 5: a princess kills herself out of love for Galahad, after which Galahad and Bors kill a room-ful of knights & joust with her father. After Bors wins the joust, they leave saying that ‘the encounter had ended well after a bad beginning.’
• A naked hag lives in a sepulchre in a chapel in the middle of nowhere.
• Miraculously, milk flows from a wound. Flowers grow on the ground where it spilled.
• Letters fall from Heaven on semi-regular basis.
• After Gawain kills Eric (Gawain kills about twenty knights here), Hector and Meraugis take his corpse & seat it at the Round Table. Then they complain on its/his behalf.
• It is casually revealed that King Arthur has raped a girl he met in a forest (while he was married to Guinevere). She had a son, which, as a childless king’s bastard, had to be kept secret, so naturally Arthur commanded her to call him Arthur the Less.
• Arthur the Less’s mother was killed by her father so she wouldn’t tell anybody that he had killed her brother first – which he did to sleep with his daughter-in-law.
• Actually, if the authors introduce a new character with unknown backstory, the backstory is almost always incest.
• For example, Meraugis, responsible for corpse-seating and later bff of Arthur’s, is a child King Mark had with his niece, whom he imprisoned while she was pregnant and left for the beasts to eat after Meraugis was born. The beasts did eat her. They did not eat baby Meraugis, whom Mark hanged (by his feet) from a tree, probably counting on a death from starvation.
• Later, Meraugis learns about all this from a letter that falls from Heaven.
• Pelles, a king keeping the Holy Grail, also keeps a casual magician. The magician loses all his power when Galahad arrives, because his magic comes from a demon, and the invisible circle of angels that surrounds Galahad at all times scared the demon away. When Galahad steps back so Pelles can see if it’s true, the demon returns and burns the magician alive.
• Galahad sleeps on the floor – when he does sleep, which is not very often because he spends most of the nights praying. Once, he falls asleep in the saddle while crossing a bridge guarded by a knight & sleeps through the knight challening him and knocking him off the horse. He wakes up in the water and tells the knight that he hasn’t heard him. Asked if he was asleep, he basically answers with a ‘maybe so.’
• King Mark is so evil that he actually invades Logres with some Saxons, and has to be defeated by Galahad himself. (Camlann whom.)
• Augustine has a cameo! He came to a castle kept by infidels, got badly mocked & compensated by calling the castle ‘The Castle of Treachery.’ By which name it’s known to this day.
• At some point, Arthur (the king, not the Less) is told by a voice in a dream, that the really Christian king to unify all of Logres won’t be him, but Charlemagne. Blatant Norman propaganda goes on for a page or so.

I can’t wait to read it! I am still slowly reading the Vulgate, haha, but this seems amazing.

GALAHAD “maybe so”. perfect.