The King's Evolution

What happened to King Arthur? One minute he's a young warrior king who can pull swords out of rocks and anvils, the next he's stuck shuffling papers in some keep while his wife dallies with his best friend. That is one serious midlife crisis.

And it happens very abruptly, too. The first quarter, at least, of any Arthurian cycle revolves around the once and future king himself: his conception, his fostering, his coming-of-age via sword trick, his defeat of the rival kings, his marriage to Guinevere, and his creation of the Round Table knights.

The Sword in the Stone, Rodney Matthews

Then all of a sudden it's about the knights, each one getting a day in the limelight. Gawain, Percival, Balin and Balan, Kay, Gareth, and of course Lancelot, each with his own quests, successes and failures, which they dutifully report on back at Camelot. Where Arthur's

King Arthur, Winchester
Round Table

sitting, presiding over feasts and refusing to eat until he sees marvels and all that jazz. Kind of a comedown for a vigorous young king whose early career puts everyone else's to shame.

There's a lot going on in the transition from fighter to lawgiver, from active participant to benevolent presence in the wings. The first factor in play was probably the difficulty legends have with making a legislator a warrior. The archetypal "wise leader" is rarely found making corpses on a battlefield. We remember Hammurabi as the first lawgiver in history, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was a Mesopotamian emperor, which by definition means he kicked ass like nobody's business. Nestor, spouting smart advice Agamemnon rarely heeds, is old and ill suited to hack up Trojans. Ptah, the Egyptian god of creation, also presides over handicrafts, products of peaceful times; Maat, who represents balance and justice, is a woman. Nobody wants their legal system in the hands of a berserker. So for Arthur to take the place he himself has prepared - that of lawgiver to the masses, bringer of peace to a troubled land - he has to become inactive. He can't represent good government while also taking the lead in all quests that come to Camelot. And once it becomes clear that Guinevere will never give him a son, it's all the more important that the king protect his life and not go gallivanting after every Questing Beast and white hart that turns up.

The White Hart, Arthur Rackham

There's also the nature of the mythos itself. Arthurian legend as we know it is a hodgepodge of individual stories collected under one great umbrella. That umbrella is Arthur and his law-forged peace, which wasn't even in some of the stories in their original forms. Latecomers to the mythos - Merlin, Lancelot, Galahad, Tristan and Isolde - are the active and heroic centers of their own stories. There's simply no way to inject Arthur into a tragic tale of star-crossed lovers, especially given its similarity to his own marriage, except to say, "Well, it was happening in Arthur's reign." Merlin's exploits become a prequel and a foreshadowing of Arthur's greater glory; Lancelot can fight for the honor of Queen Guinevere as easily as for any other woman. But their stories are their own. Arthur's peace can bring them all together and give us a tapestry of courtly life, possible only in peace. Without Arthur, they'd be disconnected and blurring together; but his inclusion, although important for the unification of the mythos, is in name only.

And then there's the whole question of courtly love. Let's face it: the husband never comes off well in those stories. It's actually a miracle that Arthur survives his bout with courtly love with an even greater reputation as a friend, lover and king. It would be so easy to turn him into a

Lancelot Brings Guenevere to Arthur, Henry Justice Ford

Mark of Cornwall, obsessed with proving his wife's guilt and stabbing his friend in the back. Instead, facing a scenario tailor-made to break a great man, Arthur proves his greatness of spirit by acknowledging Lancelot and Guinevere's pain at their betrayal of him. He may be the only cuckold in legend with depth. But he's never going to be the hero of this story. That part is always going to go to Lancelot, to the flashy young wooer in love with a woman above his station. The whole notion of courtly love was invented so that character could seem heroic rather than lecherous. Lancelot is a creation of courtly love; the structure of the story requires that he be the hero. It's a testament to the appeal of Arthur as benevolent ruler that the worst he suffers is passivity, rather than character assassination.

So in terms of the mythos' requirements, Arthur has to be deactivated. You could argue that his

time with Merlin is his apprenticeship in learning how to rule from a throne rather than a battlefield, and that Merlin only leaves when Arthur finally learns. But that doesn't mean we have to forget that teenage Arthur led an army against several northern kings and defeated them all to prove his right to the throne, or that his earliest appearances in Welsh legend are all as a great war-leader, or that in the twilight of his reign he still personally led troops to Brittany.

The Two Crowns, Frank Dicksee

We tend to simplify Arthur. He makes it easy for us; he takes so easily to the mantle of lawgiver that we give him no other plaudits. But he's a much more complicated figure than that. He's a gifted warrior who deliberately retreats from the field of glory to concentrate on day-to-day administration. He's a devoted husband and friend who sacrifices his peace of mind to protect the hearts and consciences of the people he loves. He steps back to give other people time to shine, becoming forgotten even in his own story cycle until the end. He's a leader, in every sense of the word. And he shouldn't be put in a neat little box. He's too interesting for that.

Not Like It's Important

Why does everyone ignore the prophet?

The Sabine Women, Jacques-Louis David

Plenty of legends come equipped with a voice of either doom or reason, laying out the future in five easy steps, free of charge. Soothsayers, hedge witches, fortune tellers: if you're living in a legend, there's almost always a prophet of some sort lurking around the next corner. What's better, their prophecy will come true.

But if you're living in a legend, it's all but required that you ignore it.

Cassandra wailed of doom for Troy for ten years, to no avail. Moses pulled off an astounding number of miracles while Pharaoh just scoffed. Merlin, taking it perhaps farther than any other prophet, foresaw the exact manner of his own death and still fell into Nimue's trap. Once, okay, you ignore portents of ruin and hope for the best. But when they come true, it would make sense to listen next time.

Moses and Aaron Before Pharaoh, Robert Leinweber

And these prophets in particular had excellent track records. Arthur has no excuse for ignoring Merlin's warning; when the brain behind your throne tells you something, you'd better pay attention. Moses turned the only source of water in a desert kingdom to blood on, essentially, a dare. That alone should have made Pharaoh sit up and take notice. Cassandra had been foreseeing all manner of unpleasant things for years, although her case is particularly cruel. Because she refused a randy god's booty call, no one was ever going to be able to believe her.

Ignoring the prophet creates not only a crushing loss in-story, but a particularly frustrating read. While characters blunder on down the plot road, the readers are left scowling and upset with their heroes, who just can't seem to clean the wax out of their ears long enough to hear the crucial tidbit. "Why didn't you just not marry Guinevere?" I've wanted to yell. "Why can't they just give Helen back? Why don't you let his freaking people go?" Like the prophets, we see it coming a mile away. Watching doom draw closer and closer is agonizing, especially when it's coming for people we've grown to care about.

King Arthur and Merlin at the Lake, W. Otway Cannell

And that's exactly the point of including a prophet. It's a fantastic writer's tool for creating narrative tension. We want to assume that Camelot would always stand; once Merlin tells us that it will fall through the illicit passion of the Queen and her champion, we're on the lookout for every hint the story lets fall. Lancelot's arrival is doubly portentous because we already know what he brings to Camelot. The ten plagues would be completely anticlimactic without Pharaoh ignoring the prophet; Moses would never truly prove his strength as an individual rather than a mouthpiece for God, and God wouldn't be able to demonstrate his complete dominance over the gods and people of Egypt. (Not to mention that if the story ran on common sense rather than escalating tension, there'd probably be only one plague and no Red Sea miracle.) Cassandra's prophecies of doom add even more poignancy to the fact that most of the major characters in the Iliad are vividly aware of what will happen when they die. Hector's speech to Andromache about how he most fears her falling into enemy hands as a slave is extra heartbreaking because we know, even if he doesn't, that his worst fear will come horribly true.

No one listens to the prophet because he's not in the story for the characters. He's there for us. The prophet exists to make us nervous, to remind us that happiness is transitory, to let us know what to watch out for. A prophet can't teach his or her fellow characters anything; it's too late for them, their story's already set in stone. The people who can learn from a prophet are the readers for whom he or she is the surrogate within the story, the more detached observer who can tell how things will play out.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Fair warning: Today's the day wherein I crush all your youthful ideals.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about Camelot.

Arthur's Camelot, Alan Lee

The name itself is a universal shorthand for perfection, for a time of ideals, for the realization of a few impossible dreams. It's about as rose-colored as you can get. And for good reason: the whole point of having a legend like Camelot is to believe that things can be better, that justice can win over brute force, that one brief shining moment of good is worth all the suffering it takes to win.

So all things considered, we've done a really good job at forgetting that every single one of Camelot's turning points is rooted in betrayal (at best) and rape (at worst).

Take five minutes. Make a list. The moments where everything changes. I'll bet it includes:
- the conception of Arthur
- the sword in the stone
- the conception of Mordred
- Merlin and Nimue
- Galahad
- Lancelot and Guinevere's affair
- the death of Arthur

Let's go through it one thing at a time.

Arthur's very existence is due to betrayal and rape, depending on who tells the story. After fighting the Saxons back to the shores, Uther and his kingdom figure they can settle in for some well-deserved peace. Instead, Uther falls wildly in lust with Igraine, the wife of his most stalwart supporter in the war that just ended five seconds ago, and provokes a whole new war against Gorlois because the man gets touchy at the thought that the king wants to sleep with his wife. Ultimately, unable to prevail against Gorlois' forces, Uther resorts to magic and trickery: he has Merlin enchant him to look like Gorlois, so he can pass through the defenses of invincible Tintagel and sleep with Igraine. While wearing her husband's face.

I don't care how you interpret that. It's messed up. And it's wrong.

To be fair, interpretations vary wildly, mostly in how they deal with Igraine's reaction to this whole mess. Malory casts her as loyal wife to Gorlois, who in fact proposes the flight to Tintagel herself. Mary Stewart has a proud but lovesick Igraine conspire with Uther and Merlin to trap Gorlois. Marion Zimmer Bradley's Igraine loves Uther, but refuses to betray her husband (up until he betrays her, that is). On the whole, people shy away from the notion of rape. But in Malory's version, that's what Arthur's conception is. Uther intentionally misleads Igraine to trick her into sex, when she already refused consent to his face.

The once and future king is a child of rape. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The sword in the stone is far less drastic, but treachery is still involved. Young Arthur, in search of a sword for his forgetful foster brother Kay, turns to the unclaimed sword stuck randomly through a stone in the churchyard. He pulls it out as easy as blinking and gives it to Kay. Problem solved! Go Arthur, savior of the day!

Until Kay recognizes the sword and what it means, and decides that the best possible option is to lie.

Granted, Kay is not the nicest guy, and certainly not nominated for brother awards in this or any century. But this is low, even for him. He knows Arthur pulled out the sword. He knows exactly what that makes Arthur. And instead of being a man about it, accepting that his annoying younger brother might actually be the long-awaited king (who, by the way, is supposed to SAVE THE KINGDOM), Kay's first instinctive move is to grab the glory for himself. You can argue that Camelot owes its existence more to Sir Ector's ability to smell a lie than to Arthur's go-getting nature; young Arthur certainly gives the impression of wanting to please, and it's not hard to imagine that he'd back Kay's lie in hopes of impressing his brother.

Nigel Terry and Helen Mirren as Arthur and Morgana, Excalibur, Warner Bros.

We don't even need to discuss why the conception of Mordred is betrayal and rape, right? It doesn't matter if the treacherous sister is Morgause or Morgan; if she wore Guinevere's face to fool Arthur; if Arthur was young and raw when it happened, or if he was already king. Mordred's mother does the exact same thing to Arthur that Uther did to Igraine: deliberately lies and distorts events for the sake of her own agenda, regardless of Arthur's consent or input.

The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones

Merlin and Nimue... yeah, I'm going to go ahead and skip the rape charge on that one. Merlin's consent is a weird issue here, since he knows from the start that he will fall for her and she will betray him, but he's an absurdly powerful magician: if he really wanted to avoid her, he would have. (Besides, I've seen versions where her final treachery comes by promising him sex if he'll just climb inside that tree for two seconds, in which case the rape question is a moot point.) Betrayal, on the other hand, is all over this. Merlin gives Nimue everything she asks for, teaching her all his most powerful magics, and in return she seals him alive inside a tree. (Or in a cave, as your preference may be. I like the tree, personally.) Despite the rather fantastic revisionist versions I've read over the years, this story has never really been about anything but betrayal. Even though Nimue takes her mentor's place at Arthur's right hand, and saves him as many times as Merlin had, you get the sense that she'd have to do it to make up for taking Merlin away.

Lancelot and Elaine, Henrietta Rae

Lancelot and Elaine's relationship is the most unhealthy in the whole damn mythos. Yes, that's a bold statement; yes, I stand by it completely. Elaine may be the first stalker fangirl on literary record. She willfully fails to realize that nursing Lancelot back to health does not entitle her to love-of-his-life status. She thrills to find that he wore her token to a tournament, and conveniently ignores the fact that he wore it (like a cad, I must admit) only to assist in fighting incognito. When he rejects her (again, not with the best grace), what's her gut impulse? Is it to get over him? Is it to find another love? Is it to plot bloody vengeance?

It's to force him to marry her by raping him.

Oh, yeah. Elaine-on-Lancelot action is the most straightforward case of rape in the stories. He doesn't want her; he doesn't like her; he's told her no multiple times. Sometimes she only uses magic to make herself look like Guinevere; sometimes she also roofies Lancelot. And then she just doesn't understand why he literally goes insane at the revelation of what's happened.

The irony of it all is that out of this appalling encounter is born Galahad, the perfect knight. But for Lancelot at least, the ends don't justify the means. He never returns to Elaine. He and Galahad have a nonexistant father-son relationship; Galahad saves Lancelot on the Grail Quest, but that's about it for bonding time. And it's hard not to imagine that Lancelot would be grateful that his unwanted son wasn't around after the Grail Quest to remind him of the absolute darkest chapter in his life.

Lancelot and Guinevere, Herbert Draper

Not to mention that Lancelot's got his own bit of betraying to do back home.

Again, no explanation needed. This might be the world's most famous love triangle. It's not supposed to happen, but it does, and the exploitation of Lancelot and Guinevere's affair destroys Camelot.

The Rescue of Guinevere, William Hatherell

The betrayal here is colossal: betrayal of a spouse, betrayal of a friend, betrayal of loyalty, betrayal of a lifetime of work, betrayal of a dream. I'm not saying that Lancelot and Guinevere are singlehandedly responsible for all this betrayal; a lot of it was done by Mordred and his cadre of jealous knights. But this was the fulcrum they used to move their world, and it worked so well because they didn't have to make anything up. They just had to enhance what was already there.

Which leads us to the most unkindest cut of all: Mordred's betrayal of Arthur.

How Mordred was Slain by Arthur, Arthur Rackham

To give Mordred his due, Arthur was an absentee dad who tried to have him killed at birth. But just destroying Arthur's kingdom, marriage, and closest friendship wasn't enough for Mordred; he had to go that extra mile and mess deeply with Arthur's head, winning his trust, appearing to support him, and then backstabbing him at the earliest opportunity. Arthur's last stand at Camlann is one of hopelessness. He's had everything stripped from him in a breathtakingly short amount of time, and all by the long-lost son he wanted to trust. To be honest, I tend to forgive him for the child-murder thing, if only because he suffers so much by the end that I feel like he's atoned and then some. Mordred, on the other hand... for his sheer cold-blooded viciousness, for his total dedication to making Arthur's life hell just because he can, Mordred can never suffer enough. (Yes, I'm biased. I love Arthur. Arthur the person does not get enough love.)

Could you argue that the incredibly depressing roots of the legend are the reason why its trappings are so bright and hopeful? Sure. All that agony and betrayal is ten times worse if it's pointless. If it's endured in the service of a higher ideal, that makes it a little easier to bear. And I don't think we'd still be telling these stories if their surrounding framework didn't provide more hope than they do on their own.

But it's still depressing. The heart of Camelot is very dark. And it makes the legend too simple if we forget that.