The Fractal Hall Journal

Before we carry on with today’s post, I just want to direct you good folks to the new blog of a dear friend, Paul C’s More Fun Comics. Please head on over and share your comments, and also the love. As for the Journal, fingers crossed but regular updating should resume on Monday.

Tim Burton’s Batman was marketed as a return to Batman’s darker roots as a sinister, pulpy vigilante. The last Bond film was a heck of a lot closer to the literature than any of the others, and I’ve written before about how much I like the original Golden Age Superman. But it’s actually a different kind of superhero that I really get fandementalist about, and a uniquely Welsh one: King Arthur.

Health and safety warning: This post has come out a little angrier than intended, so feel free to step around the thoroughly misdirected anguish.

I have bored my nearest and dearest rigid over the years while ranting about the common perception of the character versus his earliest roots. The bits that authors and screenwriters have picked up and run with over the years all seem to be later additions (Camelot, chivalry, stoned swords, knights in armour, fucking Lancelot), with the really interesting Celtic backstory largely buried. Good grief, you should have heard me whine when the last Hollywood outing decided Arthur was a Russian. First Knight? Scottish. Or John Boorman’s Excalibur: why of course Arthur was from the West Country! Anything at all, as long as he’s not a Welshman.

I used to get het up about it. Not so much, anymore, because five minutes on any given superhero message board is enough to pull me back from the edge. It’s all about interpretation, after all, and some stories become too big just for one world view.

That said, it would be great if the original legends were recognised once in a while. After all, Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote Arthur as a Brythonic war leader, propaganda that was almost a plea to preserve Celtic history in the face of cultural colonisation by Saxons, Norsemen, and whoever else took a fancy to Geoffrey’s island. The tragedy is that so much of this early culture, the language, myths and tradition of this group of people, were lost, through deliberate suppression and a lack of a coherent written language. What fragments we have, of poetry in Old Welsh, the four branches of the Mabinogi, Arthurian tales that predate Geoffrey, all seem to point to a richer vein of stories we will never be able to retrieve.

There is so much great stuff in the early stories. Arthur’s army was jam packed full of people with super-powers, for a start. Seriously, they were like the fucking Justice League. One guy ran faster than anyone else in the kingdom, another guy could see further than anyone else, one of them was a superb marksman. And instead, what we get is an endless retread of fucking Lancelot banging the king’s wife. Want to know how that part of the story came about? The bit about Lancelot, a French knight, stealing away the wife of the man perceived at the time as the greatest English king of them all, was cut-and-pasted into the legend by a Frenchman. Well, I know which film I’d rather see, and it doesn’t have Richard bloody Gere in it.

But the two characters who get the biggest shaft are the two original ‘knights’, Cai and Bedwyr. Through the various mutations of the story, they go from being Arthur’s closest companions and greatest warriors to the treacherous, obnoxious and ineffectual Sir Kay and Bedevere, the weak-willed buffoon who can’t bring himself to fulfil Arthur’s dying wish. Who do we get instead? Fucking Lancelot.

Anyway, this post should be enough to convince you that not even the passage of a thousand-odd years can quell the flame of fanboy outrage. But my final point is that some things really are better when taken back to their roots, when the accumulated bullcrap of successive iterations are scraped away, and that maybe the original Welsh superhero should get the second chance that reinvigorated so many of his 20th Century descendents.