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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

When the lockdown began last March, I was desperate to delve into the most pleasant escapist fantasy I could think of. And I found that place in Camelot. You probably know the story: As a boy, Arthur is tutored by Merlin. Then Arthur pull a sword out of a stone, which proves he is going to be king. At Camelot, he creates a round table of knights, including Lancelot – who has an affair with Queen Guinevere. And the knights go on a quest to find the Holy Grail. It’s all very glorious -- until the end.

I actually hadn’t read any Arthurian tales since I was a kid. But I did grow up in Massachusetts where the myth of JFK as Camelot was still alive and well. In fact, I was surprised to learn recently that the word Camelot wasn’t associated with Kennedy in his lifetime. It was something Jackie said to a reporter about the musical Camelot, after he died. In fact, that was a scene in the Natalie Portman movie Jackie.

JACKIE: And that last song, that last side of Camelot, is all that keeps running through my mind. “Don’t let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.”

Ingrid Nelson teaches Arthurian literature at Amherst College. She says Kennedy was not the first leader who was tied to Camelot. In fact, almost 700 years ago, King Edward the Third did everything he could to associated himself with King Arthur.

INGRID: In the 14th century Edward III actually claims to find Arthur’s lost castle. And he's instrumental in creating a culture in his court that is very much modeled on Arthurian-ism. He revives or revive slash creates a nightly order called the order of the garter in which his courtiers are encouraged to do certain kinds of chivalric acts. They take up jousting, he stages jousts.

I’ve been thinking about the nostalgic myth of Camelot because we’re about to start a new administration in the U.S. I don’t think anyone’s imagining we’re about to enter a new Camelot, although some people did think that when Obama was inaugurated. But with the vaccine coming, there is an added sense of hope. And where I live in New York, we will choose a new mayor this year. The local economy has cratered because of the pandemic, and there’s a hope that we can rebuild, maybe reimagine parts of the city, without making the same mistakes of the past. 2

But I’ve been wondering, why does Camelot always fall? Why does a kingdom built on high hopes and ideals always end in tragedy? And why does every generation feel the need to reinvent the myth of Camelot?

As I talked with Arthurian scholars, I discovered that the answer to those questions lie in the character of Arthur and why he’s endured for so long.

MARTHA: You always hear people saying, did Arthur really exist? But nobody says, did Lancelot really exist, or did Guinevere really exist?

Martha Bayless teaches Medieval Studies at The University of Oregon.

MARTHA: And of course, the standard scholarly response to was Arthur real is I'm sorry, but you know, he's just a legend. And if he was real, the real Arthur was so different from the Arthur from our stories. That is really not the same person.

The amazing thing about the Arthurian legends, is that there isn’t a single author. Over the centuries, each writer who retold the tale added something new, if that new element was popular, it just became part of the story.

In the earliest folk talks, Arthur was the first leader to emerge after the Roman Empire collapsed. He fought off the Saxon invaders and united Britain. And in some stories, Arthur actually conquers Europe. The wise and noble King Arthur we’re more familiar with comes about in the 12th century, when there’s more of a focus on chivalry over conquest.

Again, Ingrid Nelson.

INGRID: There is a deep struggle with ethical behavior in the Arthurian tradition, and that's something actually that medieval literature does very well is ask questions about ethics. They've really set a template for that because it was so central to Western European culture in the middle ages where those questions of ethics. Now, they were often framed in a Christian context. But what's so wonderful about the Arthurian tradition is that it's not always overtly Christian and sometimes doesn't feel Christian at all, even in its medieval tellings. So it's very portable

Martha says Arthur became the embodiment of those values.

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MARTHA: He just sort of leads because he's imbued with certain qualities that people always look up to. And it's sort of a fantasy leader. I think a leader who we know we can trust. Nothing's going to come up in the, his past about like, did he vote weirdly on a bill or did he do something weird in college? That's going to turn out to be scandalous or something You mean like having sex with his half-sister? MARTHA: Well, I mean, he was tricked into that. I mean, I don't think we can blame that on him.

If you’re not familiar with the legend, in many versions of the story, Arthur’s half- sister, Morgan le Fey is an evil witch who uses magic to trick him into fathering their illegitimate child Mordred, who eventually takes down his father-slash-uncle.

But why is magic a part of the story at all? You could easily have told the tale of Arthur in a more realistic setting.

Elizabeth Archibald is an Arthurian scholar at The University of Durham in the UK. And she says the early stories were actually more fantastical than the ones we’re familiar with.

ELIZABETH: He's more of a kind of legendary hero who does things like going to the underworld with a boat full of warriors to rescue someone from a glass tower. He has those sorts of adventures, which are more like folklore or more like classical hero's stories.

In fact, the character of Merlin had already been established in other legends around the same time, and Medieval readers loved the fact that Arthur and Merlin eventually crossed over into a single narrative.

And when the British monarchy was first being solidified, the establishment needed a reason to explain why one person should be king. Adding a character like Merlin helped seal the deal.

ELIZABETH: The good side of being associated with a magician is it's glamorous it knocked you out as a special kind of King. You've got these magical powers on your side, helping you bring in you into birth in the case of Arthur, and supporting you in various ways. So that is prestigious. In one sense, you just can't allow it to be too overshadowing, but you go through your whole reign and your whole career, always leaning on a magician who makes everything come, right, I think you do need to get rid of him at a certain point so that the King can make his own mistakes or make his, have 4 his own triumphs, be his own person and not be succeeding entirely through magic, which obviously has both a good and a bad side. It could be interpreted as slightly worrying in an age when magic has an ambiguous status. What do you mean by that? That magic has an ambiguous status, you mean back in the Middle Ages. ELIZABETH: Well, in a Christian world, magic is obviously problematic. Ah, right? ELIZABETH: So, you know, having the greatest Christian King succeeding in certain respects through the magic of a wizard.

As I mentioned in my 2018 episode about fairy folklore, it took a while for the British Isles to be fully Christianized, and pagan beliefs held on for a long time. That’s where some writers used Morgan le Fay to show that pagan magic is a double edged sword, that can be used good and evil, unlike the will of God.

Another reason why the Arthurian legends have been so durable is they’re what we would call an expanded universe today. You can have like an Avengers-style story with all the big heroes or tell the story from the point of view of two knights from the Round Table with Arthur making a cameo.

Again, Martha Bayless.

MARTHA: The wild thing is it's been that way for 1400 years. Because even in the very early centuries, if you had a hero, you would put him in Arthur's court. I mean, he might've started out in a completely different story, but people would say, how big a hero can you be? If he's not it wasn't in Arthur's court. So Arthur's court kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and the stories, and then you'd have spinoff stories and spinoffs of the spinoffs. And, you know, everybody would be tangentially connected to Arthur in some way.

Elizabeth agrees.

ELIZABETH: And it's very much the same as some modern series, like for instance, Star Trek where people's long-lost fathers or brothers can turn up from some other planet. There's another interesting parallel with Star Trek, which I used to talk about to my students when I was teaching in Canada and at a phase when I was watching a lot of Star Trek in the Patrick Stewart era that whereas Captain Kirk in the early series was the hero and used to go off on the expeditions, go to other planets, battle monsters, possibly have love entanglements, Captain Picard, much more stays on the ship. And that the Arthurian legend changes so that although the captain or the King is still central 5 and important, he's not necessarily having the adventures himself. I had a whole series of theories where Q was Morgan le Fey and Riker was a slightly feeble Lancelot. It all worked very neatly.

Now Arthur was not consistently popular in every century. In fact, he spent a long time in the cultural wilderness. During the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, Camelot was generally seen as a simplistic fairy tale from olden days. Elizabeth says Arthur didn’t really make a comeback until the mid 19th century, with the poet Alfred Tennyson.

ELIZABETH: Who is very much thinking about the British Empire and the way it operates and presents his Arthur as having a sort of grand design, but I wouldn't say that in, in many versions till probably the 19th and 20th century, we get much evidence on actually how he runs the kingdom. That's not really what it's about the world or chivalry isn't practical in that sense. Although justice certainly generally speaking as an idea, but justice for, for the rich, not justice for peasants, you know, we don't hear about ordinary people in office kingdom. We hear about Knights. And certainly, as I say, Tennyson, because he's interested in the empire because he dedicates his great Arthurian poem to the memory of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's recently dead husband. That's much more linking it to how people might actually rule in the present day.

And each Arthurian writer fed into the next until you have T.H. White’s book The Once and Future King which was the basis of the Broadway musical Camelot, and the myth of the Kennedy era as Camelot. And this was a time when American historians came up the term, The Imperial Presidency, to describe the growing of power around the executive branch. So, the myth of a leader who was incorruptible, and combined absolute power with absolute goodness was really appealing.

And Camelot is often presented as a perfectly designed system of government according to the values of whatever time the story is retold. And whenever I read a compelling version of Camelot, I have the experience as when I watch great production of Romeo and Juliet. I’m enchanted by these characters, a part of me irrationally wishes that maybe this time, it won’t fall apart. Maybe this time, they’re figure out how to have a happy ending. But Camelot always falls.

ELIZABETH: But there’s something so human about the way that it all goes wrong, unpredictably because of people's loves and hates and relationships and family bonds and jealousies. It's tremendously human that these aspirations to an idealized world just 6 don't work out in the end, for all kinds of reasons to do with human nature. And I think that's still a hugely appealing concept. The version that I'm most fond of, which is Mallory the late medieval English version, which has been hugely influential on the Anglo-Saxon tradition, makes it very clear that there's a multiplicity of possible causes of the collapse. So in Mallory's version and in some of the French versions, there's a moment when Arthur and modulator on the battlefield and they discuss a truce and they arrange it. And then suddenly a soldier sees just an ordinary soldier, unnamed sees a snake on the battlefield and draws his sword to kill it. And everybody else thinks this is the beginning of an attack and they all start fighting. And that's the final battle. So interesting. I love that detail about the snake. It just, it feels strangely realistic. It feels strangely. I don't know. It just adds to the, just the tragedy of it, all the randomness of it all. ELIZABETH: Yes. And the sense that it could perhaps have been avoided, even though given that when Mordred is conceived, Merlin says to us, so you've done a terrible thing and this child is going to destroy you and your kingdom, and this is probably an interesting reflection of the medieval interest in freewill and Providence. So, from one point of view, God knows everything. He knows what's going to happen, but from another point of view, you make the decision that makes it happen. So, he's not controlling your decision. He simply knows how it's going to turn out. And in a way, that's what we see. I think in many versions of the Arthurian legend, the end is inevitable, but the question is, how exactly does it come about? And which characters does the writer make more responsible for what happens?

I asked Martha Bayless, if Arthur has a fatal flaw that always brings about his downfall, what would that be?

MARTHA: Well, it’s interesting that he's not conquered by someone from abroad. It's always someone that he trusts someone that he should be able to trust an intimate associate. And it's interesting to think about why that is. It's almost as if he's too good to be suspicious of what might be going on in his kingdom. I mean, it's not a fatal flaw because I think being, you know, excessively good, isn't something that we have to worry about much in the real, but if he has a sort of Achilles' heel, it's trusting everyone around him. Yeah. That's a really interesting point, in a way that's the saddest part of Arthur is that, you know, as much as we fantasize about having a leader that good, you need a little bit of that darkness to survive. MARTHA: Another problem is that he doesn't seem to have children. He doesn't have an heir. It’s one of the, you know, there, there was some people earlier in the 20th century who made up a sort of list of heroic attributes that occur again and again, in stories of great heroes. One of them is that they don't have, uh, an obvious heir. 7

But you're you think that that's actually part of what makes him a legendary figure, a mysterious figure is that he doesn't have an air that that's actually not a, uh, that's a feature, not a bug? MARTHA: It's a feature as far as making him illustrious, because if he had, you know, an obvious heir, then it sort of takes away from him being in the limelight. Like, well, what about his son? What did his son do? Was his son good? You know, but we don't think about any of those things. It's like, it's just on Arthur. And then it stops.

With no one to carry on Arthur’s vision, England falls back into the Dark Ages. And Elizabeth says, a big part of Arthur’s appeal is the belief that he will rise again. And in some of the stories, after his final defeat in battle, he is whisked off to Avalon, to be possibly revived with magic.

ELIZABETH: So, we know for instance that in the 11th century, some French men were visiting Cornwall and they apparently said rather loudly and publicly that they didn't think Arthur was going to come back and there was a riot and people were killed. And the notion of Arthur’s possible return lasts for a long time. And it's there in Tennyson and teaching tennis. And recently I was very struck by the final lines of the poem where the one surviving night, what choose the ship carrying author to be healed disappearing over the horizon, to who knows where. And it's actually very reminiscent of the end of Tolkien, the last ship sailing from the gray havens. You can see that Tolkien probably took from Tennyson that notion of the ship sailing off to some hopes, other better world, where people will be healed who've been damaged in some way. Up in the North of England where I live there is that the wall that the Romans built Hadrian's Wall. And one the places that Arthur’s sleeping is under Hadrian’s Wall. But the theory is that they're waiting till England needs them and then they'll come back. I'd rather feel that might be now, but he hasn't come back yet.

So, where does Arthur fit in the 21st century? We’ll go on a quest to find that Grail, after the break.

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Like a lot of kids, my first introduction to Arthur was the Disney movie, The Sword in the Stone. And over the 100 years, there have been more movies and TV shows about Arthur than I could count. But they’ve had mixed success. Martha has a theory why.

MARTHA: One of the problems is that you can't copyright him. And so, uh, no big, you know, entertainment conglomerate is, is eager to kind of make a big splash with Arthur 8 because somebody else could do the same thing. You know, they want to invent things that they can kind of have the monopoly on. And how to do it in a new way. That's not too much of a departure is a big question. You know, about every 10 years, somebody comes out with an Arthur movie and they're generally pretty terrible.

It is amazing that no single actor has able to define role the way that Errol Flynn was the perfect embodiment of Robin Hood and every other Robin Hood gets compared to Errol Flynn. Weirdly enough, the most iconic cinematic version of King Arthur was a total farce.

ARTHUR: We have ridden the length and breadth of the land in search of knights who will join me in my court at Camelot. SOLDIER: What? Ridden on a horse? ARTHUR: Yes! SOLDIER: You're using coconuts! ARTHUR: What? SOLDIER: You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.

What surprised me when talking to these Arthurian scholars is that they all love Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

MARTHA: Oh, it has enormous respect. I mean, for one thing, they did an immense amount of research and I, I talked to Eric Idle once and he told me how much research they had done. And of course, Terry Jones, who was one of the Pythons was kind of a medievalist in his spare time and gave medieval talks and wrote a book on Chaucer and everything. So they were very serious about it. And the jokes go all the way down. I did not realize that there are what we call Easter eggs in there for, for Arthurian scholars. MARTHA: Right, I mean, a lot of Arthurian scholars can basically repeat all the dialogue by heart.

One of those Arthurian scholars is Ingrid Nelson, who teaches the movie in her college courses. She thinks it is not a coincident that Monty Python and The Holy Grail came out in 1975, the same year that Margaret Thatcher became the head of the Conservative party and was queued up to be next prime minster while Britain was going through turbulent times.

INGRID: So, what's so fascinating. I mean, there's so many great things about Monty Python, of course, but what's so fascinating about it is that it's quite nihilistic about all forms of government. So, on the one hand, while you have Arthur, this sort of glorious 9 central Monarch, you also have the famous scene with Dennis, the peasant, uh, who is part of an autonomous collective.

DENNIS: I told you! We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune! We're taking turns to act as a sort of executive-officer-for-the-week-- ARTHUR: Yes... DENNIS: But all the decisions of that officer 'ave to be ratified at special bi-weekly meeting-- ARTHUR: Yes, I see! DENNIS: By a simple majority, in the case of purely internal affairs-- ARTHUR: Be quiet! DENNIS: But by a two-thirds majority, in the case of more major-- ARTHUR: BE QUIET! I order you to be quiet! PEASANT WOMAN: "Order", eh, 'oo does 'e think 'e is? ARTHUR: I am your king! PEASANT WOMAN: Well, I didn't vote for you! ARTHUR: You don't vote for kings! PEASANT WOMAN: Well, how'd you become king, then? ARTHUR: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. That is why I am your king. DENNIS: Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.

INGRID: But we're not necessarily thinking that the peasants in their proto-communist society have a more ideal system of government. Every system of government in that movie is made laughable. Arthur and his Knights arrive at Camelot in the, actually in the early part of the movie. And you cut away to this musical scene and Camelot where the Knights were all dancing on the tables.

SINGING: We’re knights of the round table….! ARTHUR: On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It’s a silly place.

INGRID: So, Camelot itself, which is supposed to be this glorious center of culture is just, you know, a bunch of sort of idiotic, you know, dancing men.

These days, I think the most interesting Arthurian legends are coming from novelists who want to go around Arthur and explore the side characters. Many of these writers have been inspired by Marion Zimmer Bradley’s 1983 novel, The Mists of Avalon, which presents Morgan le Fey as a misunderstood anti-hero. 10

And when Arthur does come up in these novels, his portrayal is sometimes more damning than Monty Python.

Ingrid was fascinated by a 2015 novel called The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro, which takes place after the fall of Arthur. He’s remembered as a great hero, but we learn a spell has been cast on the kingdom, so everyone has forgotten the war crimes Arthur committed.

INGRID: And in that novel, Arthur is actually a figure who started a genocide. It emerges in the novel that that was, that was how Arthur subdued the Saxons.

On a lighter note, Elizabeth Archibald likes to teach a 2007 novel called Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reef.

ELIZABETH: In which Arthur is a deeply unpleasant, thuggish, minor war warlord. And Merlin is an amazing spin doctor. And he takes rather banal things that are, that does and spins them into the stories we know from the middle ages and says, that's what people want to hear. And you rather wonder is that really how the story began? It's a very clever take on the whole legend.

Clearly, we live in cynical times where the idea of a wise and noble King feels like a fantasy that’s too good to be true. But Arthur has fallen out of favor before. Martha thinks his longevity as a character never had much to do with him anyway. It was more about us and our deepest desires for a leader to believe in.

MARTHA: Yeah, it’s that do we dare to hope feeling that it, it is very inspiring, and I've been around some politicians, you know, when you see some politicians speak, you can see how they galvanized people like that. Where when they're speaking, you're like, yes, it is possible. We can do it. Oh, great. And then you go home and you're like, ah, yeah, but is it likely, you know, but at the time you just feel so great. You feel like those things are possible that we really want, I mean, no wonder that's an appealing emotion.

Arthur will rise again as a popular hero because after a thousand years of Arthurian legends, it’s clearly human nature for people to believe in him. Voltaire once said, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. The same could be said about Arthur.

CLIP: CAMELOT MUSICAL

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That’s it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Elizabeth Archibald, Ingrid Nelson, Andrew Lynch and Martha Bayless who says there’s a secret among Arthurian scholars. Some of them believe that they are the reincarnation of Arthur – like for real.

MARTHA: You know, it's pretty clear if you quote somebody or other, somebody will say, well, you know, he actually thinks he's Arthur and you say no. And he said, yeah, he's another one. These people who give talks and you asked them, you know, what's your evidence for this? And he says, well, I just know it from experience. You're like, Oh, okay. I got it. You know? So, it is a thing that happens.

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