the house where all sweetness dwells...

ostensibly an arthurian sideblog - kim (she/her) - my main's @lachrimae-pavane

[glatisants]

hey I think I’m gonna take a short break from tumblr. my enthusiasm for arthuriana's been kind of dimming lately and I’m finding it more difficult to Contribute Stuff to the fandom and stay as engaged as I’d like...I think I need some time to like. revive myself lol...maybe read some different texts, learn new things I can share, etc, bc I know this blog’s been very Tired & uninspired lately and idk I just think I can do better!! so anyway I won’t be on here much but I’ll probably check on messages/asks every now and then if anyone wants to get in touch for whatever reason 🌻💚

[wildbeewitch]

Writing Out of Doors / Dom-fharcai fidbaide fál

medieval Irish poem from the St Gall manuscript dated 904 AD

translation here by James Carney

[boykeats]

So many scholars have spent so much time trying to establish whether Arthur existed at all that they have lost track of the single truth that he exists over and over.

John Steinbeck (via lavncelot)

[nh2d-deactivated20220723]

Morgan le Fay and Sebile the enchantress, the best most almost slightly kind of canonical girlfriends from the Arthurian mythos!

[nh2d-deactivated20220723]

“In [nineteenth and early twentieth-century] source studies the anticlericalism of the age was pronounced. Scholars perused the verse narratives for a glimpse of the pure, pagan, oral literature from which they sprang. Because it was assumed that the texts originally had a meaning within a purely Celtic or Germanic, pre-Christian past, any evidence of Christian influence or meaning was perceived a priori as something added later. Thus the thirteenth-century prose narratives are excluded because Chenerie considers the clerical hand to be so strong that it obfuscates the original nature of the genre. For more than forty years German and English scholarship has demonstrated the palpable illusion of this position. It is far better to accept the texts as they are, to recognize that the prose and verse romances must be interpreted according to what they include not according to a shape we would give them. It is not helpful to imagine that Guenevere’s bad reputation is the result of clerical suspicion in the later prose tradition. After all, where does the general impression of the entirely good queen exist? Is it in the ambivalent Chevalier de la Charrete or in the Historia regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth? If she is without reproach in Chretien’s allegedly early Erec et Enide, she is nonetheless poorly presented in Marie’s Lanval, a text of the same era. The upholding of Chretien de Troyes as the only great writer of the age and the artificial separation of works written between 1150 and 1200 from those written shortly after the turn of the century obscure the essential homogeneity and yet varied texture of the period.”

— Reviewed Work: “Le chevalier errant dans les romans arthuriens en vers des XIIe et XIIIe siècles” by Marie-Luce Chênerie, by Emanuel Mickel

[brucklethings]

“Their fate: / fixed, fatal, / final. / Though we drank all night by candlelight / and the taste came sweet to the tongue / the bitterness left in our mouths / will stay long.”

— Y Gododdin, version by Desmond O'Grady

[violetcancerian]

Lines from Y Gododdin's first stanza that have ruined me

He was a man in mind, in years a youth,

And gallant in the din of war;...

...It will not be my part

To speak of thee reproachfully,

A more choice act of mine will be

To celebrate thy praise in song;

Thou hast gone to a bloody bier,...

...Alas, Owain! my beloved friend;

It is not meet that he should be devoured by ravens! 

There is swelling sorrow in the plain,

Where fell in death the only son of Marro.

[jokaigonzo]

I've been reading more Arthurian stories and one creature that stood out was the white doe with a golden collar - Leading knights to adventures.

I just had to draw it. I never drew deer before but I'm pleased of how it all turned out.

[oldshrewsburyian]

“So summer comes in season with its subtle airs, when the west wind sighs among shoots and seeds, and those plants which flower and flourish are a pleasure as their leaves let drip their drink of dew and they sparkle and glitter when glanced by sunlight.”

— Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Simon Armitage

[myimaginarybrooklyn]

Artemio Rodríguez illustration for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

[chechula]

sir Gawain and the Green Knight for my Monthly monster drawing ♥ I think I am going to use this one as Christmas postcard :3

[mighty-meerkat]

Everyone’s going on about having a ‘traditional, old-fashioned Christmas’, but when I burst into the house covered in green paint and demand a champion strike my head from my shoulders with my own axe so that I may return the blow next year, I’m ‘scaring Grandma’.

[ahermitforhire-deactivated20230]

[forthegothicheroine]

Sometimes reading Arthuriana feels like reading Alice in Wonderland.

“Well,” said Alice, “these are a dreadfully strange assortment of objects!”

“They all symbolize different aspects of Our Lord’s martyrdom,” said the Fisher King, casting a line into his teacup.

“Indeed. I am sure everything symbolizes something else, for if everything was only itself I should be very confused. Might I ask what the point of the bleeding lance is?”

Alice regretted asking the question as soon as she had done so, for she saw the pun that would likely be made about the word point. Instead, however, the room erupted in applause and shouts of “The Grail! She has achieved the Grail!”

The next castle she visited, Alice resolved to herself as the inhabitants of this one danced for joy, would be more sensible.

[forthegothicheroine]

Or I could do this with The Knight of the Cart.

“Which shall you choose?” asked the guardian. “The underwater bridge or the sword bridge?”

“Both sound dreadful,” said Alice. “I think I’ll just float the cart across.”

The guardian sputtered so hard his helmet broke.

“You cannot ride in a cart to rescue a queen!”

“I don’t see why not,” said Alice, growing cross. “It can’t be worse than abducting a queen.”

“Oh, much worse! For to abduct a Queen is wicked but heard of, while to save he on a cart is virtuous and unheard of.”

“Oh, tosh!” said Alice, floating the cart.

[forthegothicheroine]

“If you cut my head off,” said the Green Knight, “then in a year and a day, I shall cut off yours.”

“Certainly not!” said Alice.  “For if you can survive such a blow, it would be quite unfair to me, and if you cannot, then I will have killed a man over a silly game!”

“Silly games are the most important thing in the world,” said the Green Knight, “for it is after them that we judge honor.”

Alice thought to herself that if this was honor, adults could keep it.

[theclassicsreader]

and yesterday on yesterday the year dies away, and winter returns, as is the way of the world through time.

from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. by Simon Armitage (via theclassicsreader)

[beebalee]

Lady Knight illustration I did for my portfolio.

[prokopetz]

Concept: a Knights of the Round Table style tabletop game, based on the older, pre-Malory traditions where the Knights are attributed all sorts of wondrous powers… except. Well.

You know the guys with, like, solar-powered super strength, or mastery of every mortal weapon, or a hand so deft it can strike six blows in the time it takes a man to draw breath?

Those guys are NPCs. They’re the “A” team.

You get to play as the “B” team: the knights with the really weird, goofy abilities that were probably included in the tales as a joke.

The guy with a beard so long it could be thrown over fifty rafters of King Arthur’s hall?

The guy whose feet become red hot and strike sparks from the stones of the Earth when he runs?

The guy whose “power” is that he has a very large knife?

Those are your player characters.