In his essays, too, Lewis is more interested in Launcelot than Arthur. The rest of the poem follows this quest from Launcelot’s perspective. The poem begins in Arthur’s hall, but the first speech is given by Lucan, one of Arthur’s stewards, and Arthur himself only says one short utterance, being “daily less / Of speech,” out of worry for his knights who have gone on the Grail quest. He does not use the example of Arthur.Īrthur is also notable for his absence in Lewis’s poem “Launcelot” (written early 1930s, published posthumously as a fragment in 1969).

Lewis had previously used the words “fine” and “vulgar” in relation to the Arthurian legend in his essay “The English Prose Morte” (1959), when talking about the actions of Malory’s heroes: they promote “the civilisation of the heart a fineness and sensitivity, a voluntary rejection of all the uglier and more vulgar impulses.” Lewis gives examples of Gawaine, Launcelot, and Pelleas acting charitably and courteously. Brook’s Selections from Laȝamon’s Brut (1963), Lewis writes of “the tasteless fiction of Arthur’s foreign conquests,” a detail he supposes is a “vulgar invention” of Geoffrey of Monmouth. 4.And “the name” that was against the legend was not just Arthur Greeves’s, but King Arthur’s. From King Arthur’s Castle Hotel (London: Alex Matthews, ), p. The lounge of the King Arthur hotel, photographed fourteen years before Lewis visited. stamped,” crass commercialism pushing against the Arthurian subject. Similarly, Lewis was “infuriated” by the King Arthur Hotel in Tintagel, Cornwall, with its “interior walls made of cement with lines on them to represent stone” and its “antique chairs – on which very naturally we find the monogram K.A. “All through Tennyson’s Idylls the Arthurian story is pulling against nearly everything that Tennyson wants to say,” he wrote in his commentary on Charles Williams‘ poetry (1948), suggesting that Tennyson’s moralistic agenda discorded with other parts of the established story. “I had no idea that the Arthurian legends were so fine (The name is against them isn’t it?)”Īlthough Lewis was probably joking about the name – the comments were made to his close friend Arthur Greeves – there may be some truth behind that last remark for Lewis, something was often working against the legend. Lewis declared Malory’s Morte Darthur “the greatest thing I’ve ever read.” He was surprised by how much he’d liked it: British Library MS Additional 59678, fol.

Prince caspian by cs lewis