Please bear in mind the fact that these studies are almost twenty years old, and there are going to be gaps. There are places where some great leaps occurred, frequently flowing out of the point of my pen during that actual writing, and I wasnt keeping a diary to report these bursts of inspired creativity. Ill candidly admit that probably no more than half of these strokes of genius actually worked. Some of them would have been disastrous. Fortunately, my collaborator was there to catch those blunders. Trial and error enters into any form of invention, I suppose. This book may help others to avoid some of the missteps we made along the way, and it may give the student of our genre some insights into the creative process something on the order of connect wire A to wire B. Warning! Do not connect wire A to wire C, because that will cause the whole thing to blow up in your face.
Now that Ive explained what Im up to here, lets get the lecture out of the way. (Did you really think Id let you get away without one?)
After I graduated from the US Army in 1956, one of my veterans benefits was the now famous GI Bill. My government had decided to pay me to go to graduate school. I worked for a year to save up enough for some incidentals (food, clothing, and shelter) and then enrolled in the graduate school of the University of Washington in Seattle. (A good day in Seattle is a day when it isnt raining up.) My area of concentration was supposed to be modern American fiction (Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck), but I had those Ph.D exams lurking out in the future, so I knew that Id better spend some time with Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton as well. Once Id mastered Middle English, I fell in love with Chaucer and somewhat by extension with Sir Thomas Malory.
Since what is called Epic Fantasy in the contemporary world descends in an almost direct line from medieval romance, my studies of Chaucer and Malory gave me a running head start in the field. Medieval Romance had a long and honorable history, stretching from about the eleventh century to the sixteenth, when Don Quixote finally put it to sleep. It was a genre that spoke of the dark ages in glowing terms, elevating a number of truly barbaric people to near sainthood. The group that is of most interest to the English-speaking world, of course, is King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. There may or may not have been a real King Arthur, but thats beside the point. We should never permit historical reality to get in the way of a good story, should we?
Since the issues come up, though, lets take a look at someone who was historically verifiable and who had a great deal of impact on the fledgling genre in its earliest of days. The lady in question was the infamous Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Eleanor was related to five (count em) different kings (or pseudo-kings) during the twelfth century. Her father was the Duke of Aquitaine (now known as Gascony) and, since he controlled more land than the King of France, he routinely signed official documents as the King of Aquitaine. In 1137, Louis of France arranged a marriage between his son, Prince Louis and princess Eleanor. Eleanor wasnt a good wife, since she had whats politely known as a roving eye. Evidently, it was more than her eye that roved. Her husband, who soon became Louis VII of France, was a pious man, and his wandering wife not only failed to produce an heir to his throne, but also became notorious as an adulteress. He finally managed to have their marriage annulled in 1152, and two months later Eleanor married Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, who incidentally also happened to be King Henry II of England. Eleanor, as it turned out, was not barren, and she bore Henry several sons. Aside from that, Henry and Eleanor didnt really get along together, so he took the easy way out and locked her up to keep her out of his hair. After he died, Eleanor stirred up trouble between her sons, Richard the Lionhearted and John the Incompetent, both of whom became kings of England. They also locked Mother away to keep her out of mischief.
Thus, Eleanor spent a lot of her time locked up. Embroidery didnt thrill her too much, so she read books. Books were very expensive in the twelfth century because they had to be copied by hand, but Eleanor didnt care. She had money, if not freedom, so she could afford to pay assorted indigents with literary pretensions to write the kind of books she liked. Given Eleanors background its understandable that she liked books about kings, knights in shining armor, pretty young fellows who played the lute and sang of love with throbbing emotion, and fair damsels cruelly imprisoned in towers. Her literary tastes gave rise to troubadour poetry, the courtly love tradition, and whole libraries of interminable French romances that concentrated heavily on The Matter of Britain (King Arthur et al) and The Matter of France (Charlemagne and Co.).
Now we jump forward three hundred years to the Wars of the Roses. There was a certain knight named Sir Thomas Malory (probably from Warwickshire) who sided with the Lancastrians. When the Yorkist faction gained the ascendancy, Sir Thomas was clapped into prison. He was not, strictly speaking, a political prisoner, however. He was in prison because he belonged there, since it appears that he was a career criminal more than a political partisan. There may have been some politics involved in the various charges leveled against him, of course, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a sort of medieval Jesse James, leading a gang of outlaws on a rampage through southern England. He was imprisoned for sedition, murder, the attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, cattle-rustling, horse theft, the looting of monasteries, jail-breaking and not infrequently of rape. Sir Thomas seems to have been a very bad boy.
He was still a nobleman, however, and a sometime member of parliament, so he was able to persuade his jailors to let him visit a nearby library (under guard, of course). Sir Thomas was quite proud of his facility in the French language, and he whiled away the hours of his incarceration translating the endless French romances dealing with (what else?) King Arthur. The end result was the work we now know as Le Morte d Arthur.
A technological breakthrough along about then ensured a wide distribution of Malorys work. William Caxton had a printing press, and he evidently grew tired of grinding out religious pamphlets, so, sensing a potential market, he took Malorys manuscript and edited it in preparation for a printing run. I think we underestimate Caxtons contribution to Le Morte d Arthur. If we can believe most scholars, Malorys original manuscript was pretty much a hodgepodge of disconnected tales, and Caxton organized them into a coherent whole, giving us a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Now we jump forward another four hundred years. Queen Victoria ascended the British throne at the age of seventeen. Queen Victoria had opinions. Queen Victoria didnt approve of naughty stuff. Queen Victoria had a resident poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and he cleaned up Malory for his queen to produce a work he called Idylls of the King. Idylls of the King is a fairly typical Victorian bowdlerization that accepted the prevailing attitude of the time that Le Morte d Arthur was little more than bold bawdry and open manslaughter. It glossed over such picky little details as the fact that Guinevere was an adulteress, that King Arthur did have an incestuous affair with his half-sister, Morgan le Fay, and other improprieties.