|
| shakna wrote:
| This article brought some serious ragebait for anyone with an
| inkling of the myth and history of that particular figure.
| Stating outright "He's the mythical Celtic warlord who held out
| against the Anglo Saxon invasion of what would come to be called
| England" ignores about half of the possible stories. One of the
| more popular threads is that he was a Roman general. Neither
| Saxon nor Norman, and certainly not Celtic.
|
| The stories around King Arthur are not confined in that way.
| Heck, Lancelot was a self-insert hero, that came during a
| renaissance around the myths. He came a few hundred years after
| the mythos was established.
|
| The historians try to point out that things are as about in-flux
| as possible, but the author misses it. They do end on a line
| reflecting the meaning, and explore some of the various aspects,
| but... they tend to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the
| fanfic of the world since Medieval times, over and over, and over
| again. You can be certain of exactly nothing when it comes to
| those myths.
|
| Excalibur? Not in the earliest stories. No sword in stone, no
| Lady in the Lake. Caliburnus and Excalibur might be the same
| sword, in which case Caliburn is noted in an early piece of
| Celtic origin, but just as a sword belonging to a warlord (Bram).
| Nothing much special about it. (Wikipedia's page on the sword
| is... Painful. Most of the focus is on the latter adaptions, of
| course. But the origin is not clearly Welsh. There is... Debate.)
|
| Merlin? There's a possibility that Merlin and Arthur were the
| same person at one point. Artr Myrrdin Gwyls is one of the
| earlier mythical names for the magical bard. (Where Robert Jordan
| pulled a lot of his inspiration for Artur Hawkwing, rather than
| more modern tales.)
|
| Guinevere? Didn't exist until seven hundred years after the
| original tales became widespread. Part of the romantic movement.
|
| Arthur fought the Saxons, right? Sometimes it's the Saxons.
| Sometimes the Romans. Sometimes the French. Whoever the writer
| felt it in-vogue to fight, pretty much.
|
| Rant over... They got close to the point, but missed it. Arthur
| is a story without grounding. It's supposed to be something you
| can take, shape, and tell a moral about your own culture. And we
| do. The TV shows, movies, and constant reinventions, are what the
| character has been for most of its existence. A tale, waiting to
| be told.
|
| A tale that many of us will read, and watch, and listen to, time
| and time again, for when the next author finds something to be
| inspired for.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| What's your favorite film or book on the topic?
| emmelaich wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Once_and_Future_King
|
| is funny and serious in the right moments.
| billfruit wrote:
| Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex is even more wittier.
| shakna wrote:
| If I have a comfy chair, nice music, and an afternoon to
| relax, probably Le Morte d'Arthur. Or if I'm looking to
| forget the world, Mists of Avalon.
|
| For more historical diving, Oxford maintains a list of books
| and papers written on the matter.
| rwmj wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai.
| ..
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Now with extra oppression of the masses by supreme
| executive power derived from a farcical electoral ceremony.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| Given the usual vainglorious soup of mythical names, claims,
| swains and dames, I think the one film to recommend
| remains... Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
|
| "I mean, if I went 'round saying I was an emperor, just
| because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me,
| they'd put me away!"
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071853/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai.
| ..
| Steko wrote:
| I thought the article was fine, historically, as a pop travel
| article. You seem to have hate-read it because it wasn't
| encyoclopedic enough and left out some of your favorite bits of
| Arthurian trivia.
| shakna wrote:
| You seem to have missed my final point - it isn't about the
| trivia. The reason that Arthurian legend is so broad and
| encompassing, is because it's all fiction. That people should
| write new stories with it.
|
| It isn't about what my favourite trivia is. It's that
| everyone can have their favourite bits.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Change the Wikipedia page for Excalibur if you have better
| info.
| shakna wrote:
| That was rejected a few years back for using written
| references that weren't digitised as they're hundreds of
| years old. Wiki couldn't validate them.
| card_zero wrote:
| Hmm? Nah, you can do that, references that only exist on
| paper and have to be sought in physical libraries are
| perfectly fine. What edit do you refer to that was
| rejected?
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Yeah sadly you need an academic paper on the written
| reference and then a WP:RS on the paper to make a
| definitive statement on Wikipedia survive.
| card_zero wrote:
| "Definitive statement", what? If an old manuscript says
| something about excalibur (or _Caliburc_ or whatever),
| you can say the old manuscript says it. This is not a
| problem. If instead you want to say "Excalibur
| definitely was of Irish origin because this old
| manuscript said so", you're using Wikipedia to promote
| your own original research, which will conflict with the
| next wingnut's original research about how Excalibur was
| in the Old Testament ... and doing _that_ would obviously
| be a problem. There 's no "sadly" about this. "Sadly,
| guidelines discourage the cranks from fighting over
| fringe theories in article space".
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| I guess your main reference is Historia Brittonum, the oldest
| source about Arthur's myth:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> they tend to use "is", forgetting that Arthur has been the
| fanfic of the world since Medieval times, over and over, and
| over again. You can be certain of exactly nothing when it comes
| to those myths._
|
| This is super important to emphasize. In its first hundred
| years, the printing industry made much (if not most) of its
| profit off of what were essentially trashy paperbacks, pumped
| out as fast as they could acquire them because there was no
| concept of copyright yet. The authors tasked with writing that
| content took all the old history books - most of dubious
| historicity to begin with - and wrote wild fantasies based
| around them. The King Arthur legend is one of the most popular
| ones, probably as widely read as the flood of translations of
| the classics.
|
| Since this coincided with a large increase in literacy, these
| fiction books calcified the fiction into legend and pop
| culture.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's a sobering thought right there: that one people's
| mythos, the foundations of their culture, could trace back
| to... a bunch of randos in the early printing era, who
| figured out they can get rich quick by flooding the world
| with slop.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| I wouldn't expect any mythos to be perfect, because they
| have often been constructed quickly and hastily due to
| external pressures for national unity. Various countries
| that saw a surge for independence during the 19th century
| age of nationalism, often based their mythos on Romantic-
| era poetry that sometimes has aged well (e.g. the
| _Kalevala_ ), and sometimes has aged quite badly (a few
| Eastern European countries).
| globalnode wrote:
| change "printing era" to "ai era" and you might be onto
| something!
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not really. "AI era" is adding a flood of new crap to the
| world _already drowned in slop_. The last couple decades
| marked the time where everyone could publish books,
| videos and music, and _a lot of people did_ , creating
| more content every day than any human could consume in a
| lifetime. And that's discounting the orders of magnitude
| more useless garbage that advertising industry has been
| mass-producing for like a century now.
|
| Adding AI to the mix makes _zero actual difference_ at
| this point.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >Heck, Lancelot was a self-insert hero, that came during a
| renaissance around the myths.
|
| The way I understand it, the French also loved the tale(s) of
| King Arthur but _hated_ that they didn 't have a role in it
| because Anglo/French rivalry is like that. So they wrote
| fanfiction (Lancelot), which eventually became part of canon.
| jajko wrote:
| You can say that about literally any mythos/origin story,
| including bible and probably old hebraic stuff too.
|
| The problem is when... maybe not so smart or experienced in
| life people come, and desperately need things to be clear and
| simple for them. Clear yes and no, good and evil, good wins,
| just tell me what to think and what is the right way. People
| don't want to hear about boring life facts or how life is
| infinitely complex and everything and everybody is some form of
| shade of grey. I can see it well and alive these times too so
| additional education ain't gonna save us.
|
| The only difference with say bible is that nobody sat for a
| while few centuries after (if anything actually happened at
| all, pretty skeptical here) and wrote it down clearly enough so
| that major deviations from that point were hard to justify.
| Until of course new canon is written and everything old is
| thrown out of window... would love to see how original biblical
| verses read compared to over-translation that happened 1500
| years later, given what was left in mostly old testament I'd
| say it would read pretty horribly and be completely
| incompatible with our modern values and ways of life. I'd even
| say Vatican would rather destroy such evidence, no sense
| keeping such an atomic bomb around in vaults.
|
| Maybe archaeology will eventually shed some objective light on
| this.
| pfdietz wrote:
| What seems like a good video about this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGcuqGczjs
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| If you're interested in tracing the origin of the Arthurian
| legends I recommend you watch this video[1] by Cambrian
| Chronicles.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUGcuqGczjs
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-11-17 14:00 UTC) |