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lotesseI forget how much I dislike reading historical!KingArthur scholarship until I try it out again, ugh. It's all that thing in "The Monsters and the Critics" - the questions that are being pursued in the research are overwhelmingly documentarian-historicist when what i want is mythopoetics and sacred/social anthropology, I don't care if Arthur was real or not I just want to talk about who was telling what stories when and with what meanings -
I was trying to find out about Arthur, land-magic, and British-Isles colonialism. I want to know if I can legitimately make the land of the Thames valley react to Bran Davies as the rightful king come again, being that he's not English but Welsh. I would be confident having the Welsh mountains react that way to Bran, and the Thames valley would absolutely react to say T.H. White's Arthur, who isn't Welsh at all - but I'm not entirely clear on how it works, having a Welsh king function as a unification figure for Britain, when Wales has had a subordinated position in the British Empire since basically forever.
T.H. White's is the version of the canon that I know the best, and it doesn't deal with that aspect, being pretty post-Tennysonian in its characterization of Arthur and the meaning of his reign; and I mean I've also got a bunch of MZB bouncing around in the back of my head, but that's not likely to help me much in terms of either clear politics or good history. I turned up a book by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whose work I've liked before, on the postcolonial Arthur that I mean to read, and I've had Graham Robb's book on sacral Britain on loan from my dad for about forever; but unless I turn up something explicit to prohibit it, I do think that Susan Cooper gives me enough in-text justification to cross British regional folklore traditions, if not to completely intermingle them. I feel like DiR very much lets particular traditions wash over each of the books in the series, leaving behind a series of overlapping residua. There's the never-explained Bran/Herne connection, for one thing, to justify the linkage; Herne is very solidly Thames-region-specific, and Bran Davies has his eyes.
I was trying to find out about Arthur, land-magic, and British-Isles colonialism. I want to know if I can legitimately make the land of the Thames valley react to Bran Davies as the rightful king come again, being that he's not English but Welsh. I would be confident having the Welsh mountains react that way to Bran, and the Thames valley would absolutely react to say T.H. White's Arthur, who isn't Welsh at all - but I'm not entirely clear on how it works, having a Welsh king function as a unification figure for Britain, when Wales has had a subordinated position in the British Empire since basically forever.
T.H. White's is the version of the canon that I know the best, and it doesn't deal with that aspect, being pretty post-Tennysonian in its characterization of Arthur and the meaning of his reign; and I mean I've also got a bunch of MZB bouncing around in the back of my head, but that's not likely to help me much in terms of either clear politics or good history. I turned up a book by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, whose work I've liked before, on the postcolonial Arthur that I mean to read, and I've had Graham Robb's book on sacral Britain on loan from my dad for about forever; but unless I turn up something explicit to prohibit it, I do think that Susan Cooper gives me enough in-text justification to cross British regional folklore traditions, if not to completely intermingle them. I feel like DiR very much lets particular traditions wash over each of the books in the series, leaving behind a series of overlapping residua. There's the never-explained Bran/Herne connection, for one thing, to justify the linkage; Herne is very solidly Thames-region-specific, and Bran Davies has his eyes.