2, 5, 17, 25, 26
2: Favorite knight?
(Me.) But actually either Gawain or Lancelot, I can’t be made to choose between them really because both easily can be interpreted as gay/not straight, they also loved each other so much, and I would resurrect and fight Thomas Malory over the both of them. SGGK Gawain got me into Arthuriana, though, so if I had to choose probably…… the sun child. But it’s close.
5: Cinnamon roll, looks like a cinnamon roll (but could actually kill you), looks like they could kill you (but is actually a cinnamon roll), looks like they could kill you and would actually kill you, sinnamon roll?
Gawain, Lancelot (his whole thing is thinking about Guenevere so hard he loses track of what he’s doing, like slaughtering people) but probably also Nimue, V…ort….igern??? or one of the many many many terrible opponent knights or my forever fave the Green Knight (but Sir Bertilak dampens the effect tbh), and. Mordred is my first thought for sinnamon roll but he never captured my fancy to a high degree (I never read much Mordred lit?) so I’ll go with Parsifal, because, well, the futility of the Grail quest.
17- Characters you wish interacted more?
I’m going to not put Lancelot/Gawain for every single question and go with Guinevere/any other lady ever basically. An good Guenevere will sell me on just about any adaptation in spite of other flaws or personal dislikes, and an easy way to make a good Guenevere is (imo) to have her have lady friends, for a start. Is there anything with Guenevere & the Lady of the Lake bc that’d be so neat.
25: What do you think makes the legend so compelling across the centuries?
I think, aside from the inherent power of an Arthur mythos, Arthuriana has always served as an excellent tool for social deconstruction. The histories initially went a long way to establishing that tradition (Monmouth, cough) but the neatest things I discovered studying the older texts academically were the ways in which most every story used the Camelot utopia and its principles as embodied by various characters to deconstruct those same utopian ideals and principles. The Welsh stories I recall were fairly anti-Camelot (Arthur sitting on the invisibility cloak playing chess while ravens attacked his men for one) in a way that was more social critique than Camelot-critique. The one where what’s-his-name meets the fairy lady and they leave the eternal partyland of Camelot for other lands (Launval by Marie de France? it was for sure Marie). SGGK is exploring the contradictory obligations of chivalric romance and knightly loyalty. Countless struggles between pagan cultures and Christianization, sometimes even at the scribing level.Somehow, Arthuriana always ends up being more than what it is materially, and despite the very Englishness of a lot of the stories (though not all!) it managed to get an international foothold very early on in our recorded traditions.
26: Why did you first become interested in Arthurian legends?
I have always and forever loved king narratives in all their forms as far as I can recall, and I loved the Fisher King/Grail Quest stuff in The Waste Land when I got into Eliot in high school. But my first year of college I took a particularly memorable early Brit Lit class and fell in love with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which led to a spiralling out of “I am concentrating in Modern/Contemporary Poetry & Lit” to “I’m going to take Old English and an Arthuriana class and a medieval culture class and…” now I have translated Arthurian lit in Old English and in Old French and am working myself to professional literacy in the latter mostly for the sake of Arthuriana (and librarianship, eventually, but you know). In fact, Arthuriana leading me to medieval studies led me to archival work in a lot of respects, so I owe my future career to it in a funny way.
