1 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. 3 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.