Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Legends of King Arthur: from medieval literature to modern myth"

Podcast Information:

• Title: You're Dead to Me
• Host: Greg Jenner
• Guests: Dr. Mary Bateman (Historian, University of Bristol) and Mike Wozniak (Comedian)
• Release Date: March 7, 2025

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1. Introduction to King Arthur's Legends

Greg Jenner opens the episode by setting the stage for an exploration of King Arthur's enduring legacy. Joined by Dr. Mary Bateman, a lecturer specializing in late medieval and early modern English literature, and comedian Mike Wozniak, they embark on a quest to unravel the historical and literary threads that have woven Arthurian legends into modern myth.

2. Historical Origins of King Arthur

Dr. Bateman begins by tracing Arthur's origins to post-Roman Britain, a period often labeled the "Dark Ages." She explains that the earliest mentions of Arthur appear in texts from around 450 to 550 CE, depicting him as a military leader amidst invasions by various groups such as the Picts, Scots, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

Dr. Mary Bateman [05:53]: "In post-Roman Britain, Arthur emerges as a potential military leader during a tumultuous period of invasions and societal upheaval."

3. Early Texts and the Enigmatic Arthur

The conversation delves into early Welsh poems like the Y Gododdin by Aneirin, which mention a figure with an Arthur-like name, Gwarthur, though he is explicitly stated not to be Arthur. This indicates Arthur's prominent reputation even in fragmentary and enigmatic early sources.

Mike Wozniak [06:50]: "It suggests that Arthur is well-known enough to be used offhand as a point of comparison."

4. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Influence

Greg Jenner highlights Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) from around 1136-1137 as a pivotal work that significantly expands Arthur's story. Geoffrey portrays Arthur not just as a local leader but as a unifying monarch who conquers vast territories, blending history with myth.

Greg Jenner [07:48]: "Geoffrey's account is where Arthur transitions from a possible historical figure to a legendary king with grandiose exploits."

5. The Mabinogion and Arthurian Tales

Dr. Bateman discusses the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh tales with oral origins dating back to the 11th or 12th centuries. Stories like "How Cullach Won Olwen" present Arthur and his knights undertaking seemingly impossible tasks, showcasing the blend of heroism and fantastical elements in Arthurian literature.

Greg Jenner [12:08]: "Stories like 'How Cullach Won Olwen' demonstrate the early incorporation of supernatural and challenging quests in Arthurian narratives."

6. Chretien de Troyes and the Romantic Expansion

Chretien de Troyes, a 12th-century French poet, introduced romantic elements to Arthurian legends, including the character of Lancelot and the quest for the Holy Grail. These additions shifted Arthur’s role from a primarily martial leader to a central figure in knightly romance and chivalric quests.

Greg Jenner [28:42]: "Chretien's contributions, such as Lancelot and the Holy Grail, transformed Arthurian legends into rich romantic and mystical tales."

7. The Round Table: Myth vs. Reality

The number of knights at the Round Table varies dramatically across sources, from as few as 12 to as many as 1,600. Dr. Bateman explains that Geoffrey of Monmouth may have exaggerated the number to emphasize equality and unity among Arthur's knights.

Greg Jenner [16:36]: "The Round Table's varying size underscores different thematic focuses, from intimacy to grandeur, in Arthurian storytelling."

8. Thomas Malory's "Le Morte d'Arthur"

Thomas Malory's 15th-century work, Le Morte d'Arthur, synthesized numerous Arthurian tales into a comprehensive narrative. Written during his imprisonment, Malory's version reinforced key themes like the tragic romance of Lancelot and Guinevere, the quest for the Holy Grail, and Arthur's eventual downfall at Camlann.

Greg Jenner [40:18]: "Malory's compilation not only preserved but also standardized Arthurian legends, making them accessible to future generations despite his tumultuous life."

9. Arthurian Artifacts and Medieval Propaganda

The episode explores how medieval rulers appropriated Arthurian symbols as propaganda tools. Items like Arthur's crown and sword were claimed by various monarchs to legitimize their rule and unify their realms under the legendary king's legacy.

Dr. Mary Bateman [45:47]: "Arthurian artifacts served as powerful symbols for medieval monarchs, blending myth with political legitimacy."

10. Victorian Revival of Arthurian Legends

The Victorian era saw a resurgence of interest in Arthurian legends, aligning them with the values of the British Empire. Figures like Alfred Lord Tennyson and artists such as Julia Margaret Cameron reimagined Arthurian stories, emphasizing themes of nobility, chivalry, and empire-building.

Greg Jenner [47:35]: "During the Victorian revival, Arthur served as an idealized symbol of British morality and imperial ambition, adapted to suit contemporary values."

11. Modern Interpretations and Landmarks

Modern Arthurian myths are celebrated through landmarks like Tintagel and Glastonbury, which attract tourists seeking connections to the legendary king. Additionally, the enduring presence of Arthurian symbols in British cultural institutions and literature continues to reinforce his mythic status.

Mike Wozniak [52:02]: "Landmarks like Tintagel and modern reimaginations keep the Arthurian legend alive, bridging ancient tales with contemporary culture."

12. Conclusion: The Enduring Legacy of King Arthur

The episode wraps up by acknowledging King Arthur's transformation from a potential historical figure to a timeless myth. Through centuries of literary evolution, cultural adaptation, and symbolic appropriation, Arthur remains a potent symbol of leadership, honor, and the complexities of heroism.

Greg Jenner [56:19]: "Despite the ebb and flow of his popularity, King Arthur's legend adapts and endures, reflecting the values and aspirations of each new era."

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Notable Quotes:

• Mike Wozniak [09:14]: "We don't know if there was a real King Arthur. Maybe he's just the friends we made along the way."

• Greg Jenner [28:42]: "Chretien's contributions, such as Lancelot and the Holy Grail, transformed Arthurian legends into rich romantic and mystical tales."

• Greg Jenner [56:19]: "Despite the ebb and flow of his popularity, King Arthur's legend adapts and endures, reflecting the values and aspirations of each new era."

---

Key Takeaways:

• Historical Ambiguity: King Arthur's existence remains debated, with early sources providing fragmented and conflicting accounts.
• Literary Evolution: Arthurian legends have been significantly shaped by medieval romances, particularly through the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, and Thomas Malory.
• Cultural Symbolism: Arthur serves as a versatile symbol, appropriated for various political and cultural purposes over the centuries.
• Enduring Appeal: The legends of King Arthur continue to resonate, adapting to contemporary contexts while preserving their mythical essence.

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This summary encapsulates the rich discussion from the episode, highlighting the transformation of King Arthur from a potential historical figure to a central mythic archetype in Western literature and culture.

Transcript

[Greg Jenner]

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[Greg Jenner]

BBC Sounds music radio Podcasts.

[Mike Wozniak]

Hello and welcome to youo're Dead To Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are saddling our noble steeds and galloping back to the Middle Ages in search of the legendary King Arthur. And to help us on our quest, we have two chivalrous companions at arms in History Corner. She's a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where her research focuses on the literature of late medieval and early modern England. Luckily for us, she's also the author of the prize winning book Local Places and the Arthurian Tradition in England and Wales, 1400-1700. It's Dr. Mary Bateman. Welcome, Mary.

[Greg Jenner]

Hi. Thank you so much. What a joy to be here.

[Mike Wozniak]

And in Comedy Corner, making a triumphant return to the show. He's a comedian, an actor, a podcaster. You'll have seen him in Taskmaster man down and again in Taskmaster as Rose Mattefeo's assistant on the wonderful Junior Taskmaster, which is lovely. Plus you'd have heard his dulcet tones on many podcasts, including my absolute fave comedy podcast, Three Bean Salad. Check it out. But you'll know him best from our previous episodes, including our festive special about Charles Dickens himself. It's Mike Wozniak. Welcome back, Mike.

[Unknown]

Thank you very much for having me back. I'm very excited. I'm particularly excited about the topic.

[Mike Wozniak]

Interesting. I mean, you're a total legend, but King Arthur, total legend. What do you know?

[Unknown]

I think it's the sort of thing you carry through your life if you've grown up in Britain. Oh yeah, I know about that. But do I know about it? I don't know. That's partly why I'm so excited to be here.

[Mike Wozniak]

I think it's a huge subject. There's quite a lot you can know without knowing the details.

[Unknown]

And is it just because I'm familiar with it? Is it just because of some sort of Osborne book as a kid or because I played a King Arthur battle as a 10 year old? It's so familiar, but I doubt there's any detail. So I'm very excited about getting into it Hard.

[Mike Wozniak]

We'll find out if there's any detail. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I think, like Mike, you definitely would have heard of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin. Most people will have seen an Arthurian screen adaptation. I think that's your Disney sword in the stone, your boisterous King Arthur with Qiera Knightley and Clive Owen. You're John Boorman's weird and wonderful Excalibur. You've got the kid who Would be king. You've got the Sing Along Camelot, you've got the BBC series Merlin. There's Dev Patel in the Swoon, Worthy Sir Gawain in the Green Knight. Quite weird, but good. Obviously the best Arthurian movie ever is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a film I love so much. I wrote my master's thesis about it. I am on home turf today.

[Unknown]

Amazing.

[Mike Wozniak]

Finally something I know about. And that's not mentioning all the operas, plays, poems, video games, paintings and books about King Arthur. But where do these stories come from? Was the medieval Arthur the same as our Arthur today? And just how big was a roundtable anyway? Ooh, let's find out. Right. Dr. Mary Hollywood's vision of Arthur, or Arthuriana, I think, is what we call it. The collective world of King Arthur. Hollywood makes it all sort of shiny armor, knights riding around, ladies in pointy hats, dangerous forests. It's very 14th century. Is that where we start our quest for King Arthur?

[Greg Jenner]

No, absolutely not. And actually the first mentions that we really get of a possible Arthur figure are a lot earlier than this and they say suggest Arthur is a lot earlier than this. They place him in Kind of post Roman Britain. Okay. So just after Emperor Honorius has withdrawn troops in 410, there's that couple of hundred years that we often hear called the Dark Ages. Yeah, I know, I feel the same. This is when some of the earliest texts place Arthur's rule as having happened. Which makes sense because the province of Britannia is being invaded and raided by a series of different groups. You have the Picts and the Scots from the north, and you've also got Angles, Saxons, Jutes coming in those Germanic groups who would form the first kingdoms in England. Britain needs a hero. And so there are lots of bits of poetry written about heroes. And this is where we see the first mention of Arthur. So the earliest texts we have about him seem to suggest he might have been a military leader of some sort. In post Roman Britain, we're talking sort of 450 to 550 CE, so about a thousand years earlier than your pointy hats.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

And they're written at the time or they're written later, these areas.

[Mike Wozniak]

Key question. They're a bit later. They're sort of set at the time, aren't they?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, they are quite a bit later. Yeah. So the earliest references to Arthur are very enigmatic and fragmentary, which just add to his appeal, really. There is a very early Welsh poem. Now, I say Welsh, but we think it was written in the very, very north, kind of south of Scotland, north of England, called a Godawn. It's part of a big. A bigger text by a poet called Aneirin. It's a series of laments about fallen soldiers who've been involved in great battles. And in a Godarden, which is about this battle that we think happened somewhere near Catterick in modern day Yorkshire, there are lots of men who fall and one of them has a very Arthur Y sounding name, but he's not Arthur. And we're told he's not Arthur because the poet says that his name was Gwarthur, but he was no Arthur.

[Unknown]

Oh.

[Greg Jenner]

Which is really interesting because it suggests that Arthur is well known enough that he can just be used offhand like that as a point of comparison.

[Unknown]

So he likes the poet, likes this guy.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, he's commemorating him.

[Unknown]

He's good, but he's not like.

[Greg Jenner]

But no Arthur. It's a bit of a backhanded.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's a bit mean, isn't it?

[Unknown]

What's a guy got to do?

[Greg Jenner]

And the thing about this poem is we don't know how old it really is because as with a lot of these early Welsh Texts that we'll talk about today, they're not written down until quite a long time, we think after they were originally being circulated and composed orally. And to make matters more confusing, there's two versions of a good iden as well and one of them does not mention Arthur. So that makes it even more enigmatic.

[Mike Wozniak]

So King Arthur. Not necessarily a king, possibly a Roman.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Might be a Briton or a Romano. British. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

Just to return to these early texts, the really important mention, the first detailed mention we get of Arthur comes quite a bit later in around 830 and it's in this text called the History of the Britons. For a long time we thought the author with this guy called Nennius. Now we're not sure.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh really?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, we're not sure anymore.

[Mike Wozniak]

I learned it was Nennius when I was in university.

[Greg Jenner]

I do. Well, people call him Pseudo Nennius.

[Mike Wozniak]

Pseudo Neus.

[Unknown]

Pseudo Neus. I know people like that.

[Greg Jenner]

And it's an attempted history that traces the origins of Britain right back to this hero called Brutus.

[Unknown]

The Trojan dude.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, the Trojan dude. Yes. Okay.

[Unknown]

Yes. All I know about him is that he, he left Troy, had a few adventures and then came here and in a classic sort of conqueror style killed some indigenous giants or something and then.

[Greg Jenner]

Said this is mine by exactly that. And yet you see him in the Middle Ages being called the founder of Britain. And there seems to be a kind of oversight of these giants who were originally there.

[Unknown]

Poor sweet giants.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. There is a prequel that comes up later about some giant sisters who.

[Unknown]

The giants even live near me. I think they're from Totnes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

I live in Exeter, I think top Totnes based. So if they were, they're probably quite nice. They're probably quite into sort of building their own guitars.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. Provincial giants.

[Unknown]

Yeah, you know, wearing woolens and going.

[Mike Wozniak]

To a farmer's market on a Sunday. Exactly.

[Unknown]

They've been looking after the cultured giants. Yeah, Cultured and genuine.

[Mike Wozniak]

And then Brutus shows up.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

With his Greek ways and trashes them.

[Unknown]

Exactly. Swinging it about.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

I think Totnes is the place where Brutus's right hand man chucked one of the giants over the edge of the cliff.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's right.

[Greg Jenner]

It's not very nice.

[Mike Wozniak]

No. So this document, Historia Brittonum or the History of the Britons.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

We're not sure who writes it. Maybe Nennius. Pseudo Nennius. He doesn't call Arthur King Arthur.

[Greg Jenner]

No. Crucially he describes the, these 12 battles that Arthur has led people In. But he's not described as a king, he's described as a dux bellorum, which means a leader of battles in Latin.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, Dux bellorum.

[Unknown]

Lovely.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's nice, isn't it?

[Unknown]

That's a really lovely phrase.

[Mike Wozniak]

So I have to ask the big question. Is he real?

[Greg Jenner]

Well, I mean, the big problem for all of the Arthur truthers is that there is really only, because it is Dark Ages scare quotes, there is really only one piece of writing, piece of writing about what's going on in Britain that is roughly contemporaneous with Arthur. And it's written by a British monk called Gildas, who, again, we don't know much about. And for a Briton, he's not really. He doesn't really big up his own team very much. The text is called on the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. De excidio et conquest du Britannier. It basically describes Britain as being kind of a muddled mess at this time.

[Unknown]

He's a classic columnist, sort of broken Britain.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, it is.

[Greg Jenner]

He thinks that Britain's downfall is due to a series of just not very nice, very ungodly, immoral rulers. He does say that there is a British victory at the Battle of Baden, which sounds exciting and, oh, you know, it could match up. But he doesn't connect it with Arthur. He connects it with another victor, another figure called Ambrosius Aurelianus, which is another wonderful title. It means the Golden Immortal in Latin. Ambrosius Aurelian.

[Unknown]

Who is he? Is he.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's a Roman, we think a Romano Britain.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

But he's. He's there after the Romans have left. He's hanging about.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, There are still. There are still military commanders we think are in Britain after the Romans have left, because they've. They've left lots of, you know, skills and training and things.

[Mike Wozniak]

Grandson of a Roman. Yeah.

[Unknown]

Utility bells are coming to their address and they're accepted. They've got friends and family and hobbies and. And they've managed to let people know that their name is the Golden Immortal.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Which is the.

[Unknown]

You don't want to move on from a place where people are calling you that, do you?

[Mike Wozniak]

No, you don't. So we don't know if there was a real King Arthur.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Not to say that there wasn't, but, you know, I'm not convinced. Maybe. Maybe King Arthur is just the friends we made along the way. He's just an idea. It brings us together. So the next text we have to talk about would be a Welsh classic. My pronunciation is Going to be dreadful. But Mabinogion, that's great.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, Mabinogion. And actually that's a collection of texts of Mabinogion. Within this collection of tales, there are some interesting Arthurian examples. The Mabinogion, it doesn't appear, as with my other example, until quite late in manuscript form. So we're talking sort of 14th, 15th century manuscripts. But we think the texts contained within them were actually probably first written down as a collection much earlier, in the 11th or 12th century. And here's the kicker, they probably have oral origins, some of them that are even earlier than that.

[Mike Wozniak]

They're written maybe sort of post Norman Conquest, but possibly even older stories.

[Greg Jenner]

I would say so, yeah. The stories themselves seem to have much earlier roots. A bit like a Godarden, really. There's a few of them that mention Arthur, but one of my favourites, and one of the earliest is a tale called Cullach Olwen. You sometimes hear it in English called How Cullach Won Olwen. This seems to have really quite early roots. It doesn't bear any resemblance to the other kind of big Geoffrey of Monmouth tradition, Arthur texts. And Arthur is most definitely a king in this story at last. Yes, he's got there and it's just a fantastic story. So basically, Arthur has a cousin called Culluch, or Cilluch, who is a young man, and he's fallen in love, potentially through a curse, but never mind, with a young woman called Olwen. And her father is a terrible giant called Isabad Arden, chief of all giants. In order to win Olwen's hand, Killoch is given a series of tasks, impossible tasks, 40 of them, that he has to complete. He can't do this on his own, you know, he's just a weedy young guy. So he goes off to King Arthur's court and enlists the help of Arthur and his kind of almost superhuman knights, his superhuman retinue.

[Mike Wozniak]

All I'm hearing here, Mary, is he invented taskmaster. That's what I'm hearing, Mike. 40 tasks, off you go. That's a series of taskmasters.

[Unknown]

Here's a bunch of guys around a roundtable who might be up for it. Up for a challenge. The Mabinogulan I'm vaguely familiar with. It's incredibly weird. Yeah, Wonderful.

[Greg Jenner]

It's really complex, wonderfully weird.

[Unknown]

Yeah, but it's brilliant.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's amazing. But it's quite studio. It's quite studio Ghibli. It's quite like talking animals and weird forests.

[Unknown]

There's lots of people turning into boars. And people sort of seem to change form quite regularly.

[Mike Wozniak]

It feels quite. I don't know.

[Unknown]

I assume at that point, someone's got to kill a boar. Right. Normally these things. Someone's got to kill a magical boar.

[Greg Jenner]

How did you know? That's just kicked into my memory.

[Unknown]

It's just dragged up from the back.

[Mike Wozniak]

He is King Arthur. It's coming at him.

[Greg Jenner]

It's you. Yeah. No, that's the climax point, really, of the talk. So these 40 tasks are very varied and they involve some quite scary things, from kind of impossible husbandry, agricultural tasks, to retrieving a magic cauldron and the blood of a black witch who lives at the uplands of hell. And the climax is this hunt for this boar called Turch Truth. And the interesting thing is about half. Like a large number of the tasks relate in some way to preparing for this great boar hunt that happens at the kind of climax of the story. And the reason why they need to hunt Tuk Truyth is that this giant, scary boar has between his ears on his hairy little head.

[Unknown]

He's got a male grooming set.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

You do know this story.

[Greg Jenner]

Is that what you were thinking when you were thinking it's quite out there?

[Unknown]

Maybe.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Yeah. So there's this sort of Miyagi style kind of training, secret training going on. And then. Yeah. He wants to trim his beard and.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Unknown]

And get his dream curls going for.

[Greg Jenner]

The wedding day, it seems.

[Unknown]

All the bounce and no frizz.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's it, exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. But this is not the Arthurian map that we know. Okay. So first off, there's no Camelot here and it's nowhere near Kilion, which is where it is for much of the Middle Ages after later writers get involved. Arthur's court is called Kellywig and it's in Cornwall, so in quite a different place.

[Unknown]

Is it the tantagial thing, is it. Or is that.

[Greg Jenner]

No.

[Unknown]

Is that imposed later?

[Greg Jenner]

That. I think that's a later. That's a later development which comes with Geoffrey of Monmouth. There are other candidates put forward all the time for Kettleywig and where it might have been based on the place name and things like that.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Oh, you can't go anywhere rural in England and parts of Wales without someone claiming this has got. This is. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Arthurian. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There was an early time because otherwise.

[Unknown]

How are you going to shift. Pencil sharpness.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly.

[Mike Wozniak]

Gift shop needs.

[Unknown]

It's all about merch.

[Greg Jenner]

Arthurian. Yeah. I mean, there was an early 20th century scholar who said that there is no name more Ubiquitous in the British landscape. Other than the devil, than Arthur. So, yeah, he really is everywhere. He gets absolutely everywhere.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. What's Excalibur called? Because it's not called Excalibur, the sword.

[Greg Jenner]

No, it's not. It's called Caledwell, which means hard cleaving. So it's a serious sword. But there are some recognizable characters here. So amongst Arthur's superhero knights, there is K or Kai. When the author is describing all of the superhuman qualities that these. This massive list of names from Arthur's court has, Kai has lots. He's kind of. I don't really know much about superheroes, but he would be the superhero that has all of the superpowers. Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Multi powered. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

There are familiar names. So we have Bedvir or Bedwyr Gwalchmai, which doesn't sound very familiar, but it's the Welsh name for Gawain.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Greg Jenner]

And Arthur's wife here is Gwynvar, which sounds very familiar.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's good, isn't it? So we're definitely edging towards Gwynevere. We're getting towards Gawain. So it's starting to feel Arthurian.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Beginning to feel familiar. Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

But it's not. It's not quite there yet.

[Greg Jenner]

And there's lots of weird names in Arthur's court as well.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

And, you know, I mean, according to the tale of it. Is it. How do you pronounce it? Cilluch?

[Greg Jenner]

Killuch.

[Mike Wozniak]

Or according to the tale of Cilloch and Olan, we've got King Arthur and a host of 260 warriors.

[Unknown]

Oh, blimey.

[Mike Wozniak]

Quite. Quite a lot of people. He's sort of gathered around his table. They've got some special talents. Some of them are quite weird. Special talents, Mary? I mean.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Sight, son of Seer.

[Greg Jenner]

Sight, son of Seer, who has amazing eyesight.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's good.

[Greg Jenner]

Which sounds useful. But then you also have Penpingyan, who walks on his head to save his feet.

[Mike Wozniak]

Amazing.

[Greg Jenner]

Less useful.

[Unknown]

Can you describe how he. How he does that exactly?

[Greg Jenner]

I assume he's just walking around upside down on his hands all the time. But surely that's a superpower. Not a very helpful one. I don't think his nightly peak years are gonna last him long, to be honest.

[Unknown]

He's more of the show pony, end of things.

[Mike Wozniak]

Perhaps you don't want to trust him in a fight, do you really?

[Unknown]

He's pratting about his hands, sticks on.

[Mike Wozniak]

His head, showing off to the local peasants. We've got Ear, son of Hera. He's Got fantastic hearing.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

I feel like the guy who stands in his head didn't get the memo.

[Dr. Mary Bateman]

No.

[Greg Jenner]

Maybe they left him behind. They don't all go on the quest, just the useful ones.

[Unknown]

Gotta stay behind and go. The castle.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. Upside down on his head, slowly shuffling around the moat. Mike, what talent do you think Lip, son of Placid, possesses?

[Unknown]

Lip?

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Is he a polyglot? Is he a man of many tongues?

[Mike Wozniak]

No, that's a very, very good guess.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Too useful. Too useful.

[Unknown]

I mean, magical kisses.

[Mike Wozniak]

Can he kiss it all better? That'd be. What a wonderful thing.

[Unknown]

Knights.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, that'd be so good.

[Greg Jenner]

Rogue figure.

[Mike Wozniak]

No, no, his sk. Well, I'll read you the quote. On days when he was sad, he would let his bottom lip drop down to his navel. And on the other day, it would be a hood over his head. Yeah. So the party trick he does with his bottom lip is it goes down to the navel. But I should clarify, actually, the top lip goes up over the head like a hood. How do you see?

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Mike Wozniak]

I don't see how that's particularly useful.

[Unknown]

It seems to measure the emotional temperature of the squat.

[Mike Wozniak]

Maybe. That's right.

[Unknown]

Is that right? Like a morale barometer.

[Mike Wozniak]

Y.

[Unknown]

Quite useful for leaders.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. How is morale today? Well, Lip is currently wearing his lip like a hat.

[Unknown]

Knights will just say that they're fine, but are you really? Let's have a look at what Lip's doing.

[Mike Wozniak]

And after this charmingly weird Mabinogion, we get our first English source. Mary. And it's not entirely English, because Geoffrey of Monmouth is a bit Welsh.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a very. It's a really complicated question. Monmouth. Yeah. We all. Monmouthshire is in what is now modern day Wales, but for much of the Middle Ages, it was in what we call the Welsh March. So that kind of border between Wales and England. And we don't really know the extent to which Geoffrey had familial Welsh connections or whether he came from the kind of Anglo Norman elite who were ruling or kind of. Yeah. Who were the leaders in the marches at that time. He's kind of extremely famous in the Arthurian tradition because around 1136, 1137, he produces this book called the Historia Regan Britanniae, or the History of the Kings of Britain. You're not. I think you probably have heard of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unknown]

This is the one that starts with Brutus.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Unknown]

Ends with the Saxons coming and.

[Greg Jenner]

Exactly. Giving everyone a wallop. And you might notice an overlap there with the history of Bretonum and That is a major source for Geoffrey, but he's a lot more elaborate on Arthur's life than what has come before. So much so that people think, did he make all of this up? Is it completely his own invention?

[Mike Wozniak]

Because he claims to be. He says he found a very ancient book of an ancient tongue in the.

[Greg Jenner]

Ancient Welsh, the British language.

[Mike Wozniak]

But then obviously he doesn't name it and we don't have it.

[Greg Jenner]

And you're like, did. Well, I think. I think people are overly keen to be really, really skeptical about Geoffrey. I would imagine that if you've grown up in Monmouthshire, and if he did indeed have Welsh family, he would have been familiar with oral stories that we know were circulating about Arthur. But I think a lot of the detail is his own biographical elaborations, if you like. And it is so, so popular. So there's, I think, something like 215 copies that survive from the Middle Ages.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, that's incredible.

[Greg Jenner]

And not even just in Latin, which it was written in.

[Mike Wozniak]

I've got.

[Unknown]

No, that. Is that best.

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, that's.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes, that's astonishing. Like, you know, for most of our text we've got like 20, 25, 30 sometimes.

[Greg Jenner]

And that's big. Like, that's big, you know, like Bevis of Hampton, one of the other really popular romances in the Middle Ages. There are far fewer copies than that in English. So it's really.

[Unknown]

He's the Grisham of his.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, he's the John grisham of the 13th century. It's just.

[Greg Jenner]

It's a huge. It's just like a huge, huge change in terms of the record of the history of Britain.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's hugely important, inspiring European intellectuals to think about history in a new way. So you suddenly get this sort of splitting of history into three categories. Matter of Rome, ancient history, the matter of France, Charlemagne's empire and the matter of Britain. Because in Geoffrey of Monmouth's text, King Arthur unifies England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And then he's like, that's not enough, I'm gonna go conquer some stuff. And he adds to that Brittany, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Norway, France and Romania. He's basically a one man Eurovision.

[Greg Jenner]

Wow.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

I mean, that's quite a schlep. The Romania. How's he managed the sort of supply line thing? There's a bit of a gap.

[Mike Wozniak]

There is a gap, isn't there? So this King Arthur is a conqueror and king of half of Europe as well as king of Britain, a unified Britain, which is an interesting political idea, obviously. And of course you've Mentioned, he's important. But Geoffrey of Monmouth, we would call him a chronicler, we would call him a historian, but he's hugely important for the literature aspects of what becomes Arthuriana. So do you want to talk us through that?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, massively so. Because that. We don't have much of a biography of Arthur before. What Geoffrey adds in terms of details is incredibly important for the romances. And even though Geoffrey is much more interested in what Arthur is doing during wartime than during peacetime, which is what the romancers are interested in, the details added are a great starting point. We find out about Arthur's conception, which is not a very nice story. He's the son of a king called Uther Pendragon. His mother was married to someone else, and then Merlin helps Uther to trick her by disguising him as her husband. And it's all not very consensual. Yeah. What else is familiar here? He has a wife called Gwanhamara, who's essentially, again, Guinevere. He's betrayed by his nephew Mordred, which becomes a very crucial part of Arthur's story. He has a relative called Morgan le Fay, who's not a baddie. No, she's not.

[Mike Wozniak]

Because I think most people will hear the name and go, morgan le Fay, baddy sorceress, evil queen witch.

[Greg Jenner]

Maybe she's really done dirty by later authors. But here she's mum. No, that. Nonsense. That's. Well, so that. We'll come to that later. But not here. No. So Morgan le Fay, I think, is Arthur's half sister here, and she's a healer and a sorceress, essentially. And so white magic.

[Mike Wozniak]

Healing magic, yeah. Good magic.

[Unknown]

Because she's the one behind the Green Knight, isn't she?

[Greg Jenner]

Oh, yes, she is mentioned in the Green Knight story. And by that point, she's not very nice by that point, because she wants to frighten Guinevere to death, which is horrible.

[Unknown]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

So in this early in Geoffrey of Monmouth, she is a positive figure. She heals Arthur when he's injured. Later on, she will be turned into a villain.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

We do get. We sort of get Excalibur. Ish.

[Greg Jenner]

Caliburnus. Which makes sense. You can see how the Latin could become Excalibur very easily because X means from.

[Mike Wozniak]

So ex caliburnus. From caliburnus.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, funnily enough, it's supposed to have been forged at Avalon.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Which is I find super interesting because I know that at Glastonbury Tour they found traces of early metalworking on the Tor it's real. I mean, it's not. It's not. But it's just. I like it when there's funny little circumstances like that that line up. And Merlin is the other important addition here.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Is that where he first appears?

[Greg Jenner]

There's an earlier figure in the Welsh tradition called Mirddin, and he's a poet and he's a prophet. But Geoffrey takes him and gives him a much more detailed story. He's not limited to the reign of Arthur, so he's a sort of royal advisor from Arthur's forebears right through down to Arthur. Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

He advises Uther Pendragon.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. He's also supposedly responsible, according to Geoffrey, for bringing Stonehenge over to Britain. So he's got some interesting stories connected with him.

[Mike Wozniak]

Now, why do you think Merthyn was renamed to Merlin by Geoffrey of Monmouth? This is just a theory. This is a possibility. We're not sure this is true. But why might that be. Be the case?

[Unknown]

Interesting. Mervyn. I don't know. What would be the problem with the word Mervyn in the.

[Greg Jenner]

I could give you a clue.

[Unknown]

Give us. Have a clue, please.

[Greg Jenner]

The th sound in Welsh is produced with letters that look like two. Double. Like a double D. So it looks like Merdin.

[Unknown]

Oh, look. So it looks like murder. Looks like sort of devilry business.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, you're thinking murder?

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

No, in French, merde means shit, of course.

[Unknown]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. That's the running theory, anyway. And you know, you want.

[Unknown]

This is the same. It's the same reason as the. They can't. The Toyota can't sell the. The Mr. Two.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's right.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Famously.

[Greg Jenner]

I didn't know that. That's great.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes. That's it. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Wow. It's shitty. The profit doesn't really, unfortunately.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's a beautiful name in Welsh, but when you translate to the French, it's literally a crap name.

[Unknown]

Earliest examples of rebranding, is it?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, essentially.

[Mike Wozniak]

So Merlin, or Merlin in French, I suppose, but Merlin in English. The other thing that Geoffrey of Monmouth brings in is something you've already mentioned, the idea of Arthur as the once and future King as well, doesn't he? The idea of his return.

[Greg Jenner]

I think Geoffrey leaves it open to question.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

And that becomes a lot more prominent later. So a lot of Geoffrey's other kings, we're told they died in this state. They were buried here quite often with Arthur, we're told that he's taken off to Avalon for healing after this terrible final battle at Camlun. And then the crown passes to the successor. But we're not actually given that information about whether he dies or how he dies. And people love to elaborate on that later on.

[Unknown]

Oh, yeah, that's lush, that stuff. Owen Glyndor, all that kind of like, he will come again type stuff.

[Mike Wozniak]

Exactly that.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

And that then kick starts what we might charmingly cheekily call fan fiction. It's not necessarily fan fiction, but it's a sudden surge of other writers going, oh, I can run with this, I can add to this. And it starts straight away.

[Greg Jenner]

I think fanfiction is an excellent way of describing it, actually, Greg. I've heard it called that in my lectures, particularly as it really snowballs. So what Greg's referring to here is the romance tradition that starts in Europe, which is very hard to summarise because it just explodes so quickly. Geoffrey's text is translated, so it's originally in Latin, a handi lingua franca for the period, and it's translated very, very quickly into French by a Channel Islander called Was. Into English translations of it all across Europe and into Welsh as actually. So, yeah, from the 12th century, we start to see Arthurian literature being composed. The lion's share of Arthurian romance, really most innovative Arthurian romance that we see at the earliest day is in French, which is, of course, it's a prestige language in much of Europe.

[Mike Wozniak]

Do you know why they're called romances, Mike?

[Unknown]

Ooh, I don't know why they're called romances, no.

[Mike Wozniak]

Because we now use the word romance to mean, you know, love stuff, a bouquet of flowers and all that, that. But it's a linguistic history. Right.

[Unknown]

It's just the romance language thing.

[Mike Wozniak]

Right.

[Unknown]

Is that it?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, it's essentially, yeah. So in French, these texts are called Roman, which is still the word for novel today in modern French.

[Unknown]

And Deutsch as well.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah. And then in England, when you start seeing these texts called romance, it's clear that they are. It's actually used for any text that's written in French originally. Not. It doesn't even have to have, like, knights and everything else. Yeah. So we think it's to do with romance, like literature originally being written kind of in Latin. Some of these authors in particular, I'm thinking here of Marie de France, who I'll talk about in a sec. And also Chretienne of Troyes, Chretien de Troyes. They really are interested in these big questions about how a knight balances his chivalric, his martial obligations with, you know, being courtly and refined and being a lover.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's a Lover and a fighter, ladies.

[Greg Jenner]

And Arthur is, in these texts, becomes a. We call him a Rapha nant, a do nothing king. He's a lot less important than his knights and all of their affairs and adventures and things like that. And Lancelot is actually. He isn't even in the Arthurian tradition prior to romance.

[Mike Wozniak]

Well, let's do a mini quiz for you, actually, Mike. So Chritie Intertwire is probably the most important writer of this period. Writing in sort of the 1170s, 1190s adds quite a lot of iconic elements to the Arthurian canon. So which of these five iconic elements was not Chretien's invention? So I'm gonna give you five. One of them's not from Chretien. One, Camelot. Two, Lancelot. Three, Lancelot's tragic romance with Guinevere. Four, the Round Table. Five, the quest for the Holy Grail, which was not Chrissy Anne's invention.

[Unknown]

I'm gonna say the quest for the Holy Grail.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's a good guess, but it's the Round Table.

[Unknown]

Is it really?

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, the Round Table comes not.

[Unknown]

That's the first.

[Mike Wozniak]

Chretien didn't come up with ideas. Chretien came up with the other. So who invented the Round Table?

[Greg Jenner]

The Round Table is first mentioned. Do you remember earlier I mentioned Wass, the Channel Islander who translates Geoffrey and adapts. It makes it more interesting. Yes. And one of the additional details that he includes is that a circular table is produced that can seat knights all the way around it with no hierarchy. So it's to get rid of squabbling about seniority. In the Grail text, this is developed a bit. So there's always a seat that's left vacant called the Siege Perilous, or the Dangerous Chair. The Dangerous Seat.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. Siege means chair in French.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And the idea being that it's deadly to sit in. The only person who can sit in it has to be the most pure knight going. And that's the only one who can achieve the quest for the Grail.

[Mike Wozniak]

Robert Wass. That's the Romain de Brut. So that's the story of Brutus, is that. That's 1155. So that's 15 years before criticism. But Chretien de Trois describes something that he does invent, which is the Holy Grail.

[Unknown]

Right.

[Mike Wozniak]

Now, what do you think of when you think of a Holy Grail beyond.

[Unknown]

The Monty Python film?

[Mike Wozniak]

Well, okay, beyond. What do you think of when you. In terms of what it looks like, what it is?

[Unknown]

Well, I'm a follower of Indiana Jones. So it's going to be a basic cup, you know, perhaps wooden. Yeah. That Jesus drank from at the Last Supper. And I think the legend was that if it could be restored to Britain, that that would heal the nation. I think that is also involved in this kind of Joseph of Arimathea.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Did he come to Britain? If so, did he bring Jesus as, you know, as his apprentice? Did he buy a cup from a gift shop in Glastonbury while he was here? Did he take it back? And then is it like nicking a hoe garden glass from a pub? Was it not actually his glass? And he was supposed to return it to the bar, but he didn't. He didn't know any better. He's not from this neck of the woods. Do you know What I mean?

[Mike Wozniak]

Is that Chretien says.

[Greg Jenner]

Chretien says that it is a flat surface dish for presenting the Eucharist wafer. And there's moments where they see this vision of it being brought out in a sort of parade. And it's actually gained a lot more importance since the romance. It's kind of become this huge object that people are looking for. But actually the original Grail romance is it's part of a collection of mystical objects, really, if you like.

[Mike Wozniak]

I need to ask also, we've mentioned the Round Table.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

How many knights are sitting around the Round Table?

[Unknown]

I always imagine it was like a baker's dozen.

[Mike Wozniak]

You're thinking 13.

[Unknown]

I was thinking King Arthur and then a dozen knights.

[Mike Wozniak]

You're bang on for one of the sources. But we also get, I mean, various numbers, right?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So it ranges from 12 nights up to a lot more than that. Sometimes 150. The. In the Welsh tradition, 24, sometimes 225, sometimes 300, if you want to know how crazy it gets. Lachemann, who is the English translator of Geoffrey Geoffrey's text in Lachemann's Brute, he says that a carpenter builds this fold out portable table that can be carried around that can seat as many as 1600 knights.

[Mike Wozniak]

1600.

[Unknown]

This thing is portable, we're saying.

[Mike Wozniak]

So the Round table can seat 13 or 1600.

[Unknown]

Or somewhere in between.

[Mike Wozniak]

Or somewhere in between. It really depends. So each Arthurian text was changing core elements. Mary, we're seeing here writers coming in, adding bits, tweaking bits, taking a name, running with it. You know, we get Morgan le Fay being transformed from helpful healer into traitorous sister to Arthur becoming the incestuous mother of their child, Mordred. And then we've also got the kind of the knights who become the prominent, the famous Knights of the Round. How many can you name off top of your head?

[Unknown]

Oh, blimey, here we go. So, Lancelot.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, of course.

[Unknown]

G. We mentioned Galahad, Percival K. Bors.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Unknown]

Oh, I don't know if that's it.

[Greg Jenner]

That's a lot.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's pretty good.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

There's hundreds.

[Greg Jenner]

There's so many.

[Unknown]

There's loads.

[Greg Jenner]

Other mainstays include Gaheris Agravain, Ser Mordred.

[Mike Wozniak]

Sir Gaheris, Ser Gareth, Tristan.

[Unknown]

Of course.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We also. We need to mention Marie de France.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. So she's a really important figure because, first of all, there aren't many female Arthurian authors, to be honest, at this early date that we know of. And Marie de France translates this group of stories that she says are Breton lays, which were kind of sung to a harp in Brittany.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

Which is very intriguing because that might suggest a route into the French tradition.

[Mike Wozniak]

But also rooting perhaps the British tradition, the Briton. Briton. Brittany, that sort of link.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, potentially. And some of these lays are Arthurian in nature, and some of them are quite typical. Some of them are a bit more unusual. There's one called L'Enval, about a knight who is overlooked by Arthur and Gwynevere and just not treated very well. And he ends up being rescued by a fairy lover who he has a very good time with in a meadow, in a tent somewhere. And she rides in to rescue him and he leaps on the back of her horse and rides off just as he's about to be given this terrible trial at Arthur's court.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Lovely stuff right in there.

[Greg Jenner]

So she's great. I love Married France. And they're a good length as well. You can just kind of dip in.

[Mike Wozniak]

She was writing in the late 1100s.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

There's also Robert de Bouron, who invents another motif. Do you want to guess what Arthurian motif he adds to the canon?

[Unknown]

Sword in the Stone.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes.

[Unknown]

Is it.

[Mike Wozniak]

You're doing very well at this.

[Unknown]

That was a guess, but I was trying to think what's missing from the classics.

[Greg Jenner]

That's amazing.

[Mike Wozniak]

And what's interesting after that is we get what's called the Vulgate Cycle.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Slight pivot in the direction of the themes.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, a little bit. It's also really the first time that we start to see a lot of these disparate stories being brought together into a kind of very epic, coherent whole. But, yeah, the Vulgate Cycle, we're not sure exactly who wrote it, but we think it may have been written by someone, possibly a secular author, who had spent time in Cistercian circles. And they were all about contrast of mystical things. Which explains why.

[Mike Wozniak]

So they were monks.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. Which explains why the Grail is such an important part of that part.

[Unknown]

When is this? When is this?

[Mike Wozniak]

Early 1200s.

[Unknown]

Okay.

[Mike Wozniak]

So we start to see a slight pivot away from the kind of the adventures of knights, and it's becoming a little bit more about, like, Christian purity and the idea of the ideal knight. And that's. This is the time of Crusades. Right. So.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And so it really is answering to that image of the ideal knight as a Christianized kind of a knight. And it also raises the question as to whether there are forms of knighthood that are not so ideal, that shouldn't be idealized so much. And I think by drawing that connection between the Grail quest and the death of Arthur the Mor Tattou, which is kind of the end point in the story in the Vulgate collection, if you like, it's really reinforcing the potential for the failure to achieve something as being potentially something that could lead to the downfall of somebody great like Arthur.

[Mike Wozniak]

Have you heard of Le Morte d Arthur as a book by Thomas Mallory? Have you read it?

[Unknown]

I don't. No, I haven't read it. I have heard of it. It's sort of rapscallion figure, isn't he? Yeah, sort of. It's a prison book.

[Mike Wozniak]

You know your stuff, don't you?

[Unknown]

I. I have to confess it. I think it's one of those things that I've intended to read for a long time. I've never jod.

[Mike Wozniak]

I mean, it's on the list behind all the pressures.

[Unknown]

I may have even owned it at some point, you know, and it's been put on the bookshelf in front of the Grishams. But then you reach for a Grisham.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, you're spot on. Yeah. So, okay, you haven't read it, but you know that he's a bit of a. Bit of a character.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

I mean, Mary, this is the very much the Marvel Cinematic universe of the 15th century. Here is someone trying to grapple with an enormous, sprawling collection of stories where people are rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, and he's gone, oh, we need to standardize this. We need to bring this all into one coherent narrative. A beginning, middle, and end about King Arthur. And he dies at the end. So what is. What is the mess that he tries to cohere?

[Greg Jenner]

I mean, it's really Massive. We think Malory was using sources written in French and sources written in English. But there is at least one book in the book. It's a book split into books, confusingly. And there is at least one book in there where we don't know what his source was, which is very intriguing. It's an amazing fate of being able to synthesize a huge amount of stories and weave them together into a master narrative.

[Mike Wozniak]

We call it Le Morte d'arthur.

[Greg Jenner]

Right.

[Mike Wozniak]

Which sounds pretty sexy.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. No, it wasn't.

[Unknown]

And it was a major spoiler.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, you're right, actually. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

It does massively give the game away. The original title in English was different. It was the whole book of King Arthur and His Noble Knights of the Round Table. Which I think is more leaves you to guess what the ending's gonna be.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, the Morte d'artilleur. You're right, it's a real.

[Unknown]

But it's less easy to put in. It's not such a sort of front of the bookshop type title.

[Greg Jenner]

So it's written in 1469. 1470. So we're talking quite late at this point in the Middle Ages. Quite a bit later than the other romances we've been talking about.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's just before the Tudor era. It's. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

Wars of the Roses.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

And it's 1485. It's actually printed and it's printed by this printer called William Caxton. And Caxton retitles it Le Morte d'arthur, presumably because it sounds kind of classier. Yeah, I don't know.

[Unknown]

I've heard that name before. Is he. What's he famous?

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, he's the master printer. We have an episode on it.

[Mike Wozniak]

We did an episode on him earlier. You can check out with Rob. He was the sort of first great printer in English. English language. And so La Morte d'arthur is his sort of rebrand of this great text. Malory is a politician, he's a sort of sheriff. He does some bad stuff, he ends up in prison. So tell us, who was he?

[Greg Jenner]

Well, we had three candidates. We weren't sure which Thomas Malory Knight who was imprisoned. It was, as it turns out, there were three candidates, but the one who looks most likely, he was from Warwickshire. And, yeah, he had a very colorful career, shall we say. He was a sheriff. He was a justice of the peace five times. He was an mp.

[Mike Wozniak]

Wow.

[Greg Jenner]

But he was also accused of some pretty terrible crimes and spent time in prison for them. And these range from cattle rustling and things like that, to robbing a local abbey, all the way up to attempted murder of the Duke of Buckingham, theft, rape and extortion. So all in all, not. Not known as being a particularly nice. Particularly nice guy.

[Unknown]

He's still as old as time. Right. The guy seeking office to gotta get in office again just in case the law catches up with him.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's the Donald Trump strategy, isn't it?

[Unknown]

Yeah, it's effective.

[Greg Jenner]

And yet he's accused of all these terrible things. And actually we think that he may have written Le Morte d'arthur, which I don't know if you've ever seen a copy, but it is massive, it's huge. It's one of those books that people say that they've read sometimes when they haven't read all of it because it's so, so long. And we think that he wrote it during a period of imprisonment, possibly Newgate Prison or possibly Tower of Lond. So maybe somewhere where he would have had access to manuscripts that contained enough of his source material that he could use.

[Unknown]

What's the thing that he didn't where there's no source. What's the story?

[Greg Jenner]

It's the book of Sir Gareth.

[Dr. Mary Bateman]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

So the Morte d'arthur is a sort of compendium of stories. We break it down into eight tales.

[Greg Jenner]

So it takes you right from Arthur's conception through his rise to the throne. You've got the Sword and the Stone story in there about him pulling the sword from the stone throne and becoming king. He goes over to Europe and conquers the Roman Empire after a nasty challenge from a Roman emperor. We're introduced to all of his round table knights, as in some of the other romances.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's got 150, hasn't it?

[Greg Jenner]

150 of them.

[Mike Wozniak]

A good round number.

[Greg Jenner]

Quite a lot. Lancelot is more important than in other English romances in Malory because of his French sources. And this is where you get the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, that great love triangle. Malory's kind of squeamish about the sex stuff. So they don't have sex with a mass market, right? Yeah, well. And possibly a slightly more prudish audience, I don't know until quite late in the text. And then after everything goes wrong for Arthur and he's betrayed by Mordred and the knights fall into kind of infighting and factions, partly because of what happens with Lancelot and Guinevere, it all goes very wrong. Arthur is mortally wounded and is taken. Taken off to Avalon. This is one of those texts where we are told some people think he doesn't live anymore. And this is where we first hear Arthur called the once and future king. And then there's a funny postscript with Lancelot and Guinevere where they become a monk and a nun respectively, which is. That's greatly elaborated upon by Malory.

[Mike Wozniak]

And it's worth just saying also that Galahad sits on the Siege Perilous, the sort of the scary chair.

[Unknown]

Yes. He's the dude, isn't he?

[Greg Jenner]

The Grail quest is very much in there in the middle.

[Mike Wozniak]

And he does it. He does a grail. He's like bosh does a grail. Nailed it.

[Greg Jenner]

Gets made a king dies. Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. So this is the kind of classic text that students read. Well, try and read and then very quickly give up. So it's a romance, but it's not that romantic as everyone dies at the end.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Every day our world gets a little more connected, but a little further apart.

[Unknown]

Heart.

[Greg Jenner]

But then there are moments that remind us to be more human.

[Dr. Mary Bateman]

Thank you for calling Amica Insurance.

[Mike Wozniak]

Hey, I was just in an accident. Don't worry, we'll get you taken care of. At Amica, we understand that looking out.

[Greg Jenner]

For each other isn't new or groundbreaking.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's human.

[Greg Jenner]

Amica empathy is our best policy.

[Dr. Mary Bateman]

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[Greg Jenner]

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[Mike Wozniak]

So we've discussed literature. We should talk quickly about Arthurian artifacts or Arthur facts, if you will. Which is to say that in the Middle Ages, people started finding proof.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Question mark.

[Greg Jenner]

I think we think of Arthurian tourism as a kind of post Victorian thing, but absolutely not, you know, like people were going to pilgrimage. So sites and churches and things like that that claim to have objects connected with Arthur and all of the people who populated his world, some of these were kind of clearly propaganda objects as well. Right. So when Edward I defeats Llewelyn at Griffith, he seizes a crown from him that is supposed to have been Arthur's crown, that then gets stored quite safely in Westminster for a while. Arthur's sword.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, that's Richard the Lionheart. Richard the Lionheart gives Arthur's sword.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes, he does. He gives it to, I think. Is it King Tancred? I think he gives it to the King of Sicily.

[Mike Wozniak]

We've got King John, he's got Ser Tristram's sword.

[Greg Jenner]

Yep.

[Mike Wozniak]

Some say it's still used in royal coronations.

[Greg Jenner]

And so they say it's not.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's not, no. Dover had Gawain's head.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes. And we know this based on people who visited and tell us that they were shown Arthur and Guinevere's chamber, Gawain's skull and his bones, because he dies in Dover.

[Mike Wozniak]

According to Geoffrey Winchester built a round table.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

Edward III built it, I think.

[Greg Jenner]

Edward I, we think, possibly to do with a grand tournament. And it's still hanging there. You can go and see it. Clearly not, you know, authentic in any way. Henry VIII had it repainted as well. So it's been continually an object of royal propaganda.

[Mike Wozniak]

And my favourite one of all, Cambridge university in the 1400s, claims that King Arthur had given them a tax exemption and it was hand delivered by Sir Gawain himself.

[Greg Jenner]

Yes.

[Mike Wozniak]

But the real Arthur aficionados, you know, the medieval world were big on it, but the Victorians, they loved a bit of Arthuriana Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

This is kind of of a period that we call the Arthurian revival, when interest in Arthur just explodes again. And there's various reasons for this. Arthur is, you know, powerful Christian, imperial symbol. You can see how he might be appealing to certain Victorians.

[Mike Wozniak]

He's a conqueror. He unifies Britain. Helpful.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, all of that. He's a morally upright figure at a time when people are being more thoughtful about morals, and particularly morals among the upper classes as well.

[Unknown]

He's got big muscles, but he will hold the door. Door open for a lady. Right.

[Greg Jenner]

Some of the more dodgy bits of the medieval Arthur, like things like the incest story where Arthur kills a load of babies because he doesn't want Mordred to come and overthrow him, his incest child. The Victorians don't like that very much.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's very King Herod. It's very.

[Greg Jenner]

It's very King Herod. Yeah.

[Unknown]

It's covered. Right. Don't do that, please.

[Greg Jenner]

Malory is actually republished, it's censored, like some of the nasty Abetza tweaked for Victorian tastes. And then Tennyson. So Tennyson actually kind of rediscovers a lot of the Arthurian stories, partly through Malory, but also partly through the Welsh tales that by that point had been translated by Lady Charlotte Guest and by other people that he knew. And he's really well known for his rewrites of the Arthurian story. You've got his poem the Lady Of Shalott, which is very, very famous, and also his Grand Arthuriad, which is called the Idols of the King.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. We also get. Course, Victorian print books have beautiful illustrations. That's another big appeal. You see these gorgeous art. And in a previous episode, we've talked about the Arts and Crafts movement and they were obsessed with Arthur as well.

[Greg Jenner]

Paintings.

[Mike Wozniak]

Paintings and all sorts of things. So we've got kind of really rich sort of Arthurian poetry and so on. But there's also. There's women involved here, too. We've got more important figures here.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And actually, I would suggest that we can partly thank women for the Arthurian Bible. You know, like they. They were interested in the Arthurian stories even when people were passing them off as kind of frivolous and not valuable. I mentioned already Lady Charlotte Guest, you have poets like Louisa Stewart Costello, whose Funeral Boat probably influenced Tennyson with his lady of Shalott, which is interesting. One of my favourites is Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. So she's actually writing in America. She's American, but she's writing in the Same sort of time period as Tennyson. And she's an early thing, feminist, so she paints these amazing reimagined stories featuring Arthurian characters, but very much set in kind of contemporary lower and middle class America. So you'll get a vision of kind of Guinevere with a toothache, sat on her little cricket stool by the fire, lusting over their. Their lodger and like opium fever dreams and everything. Like it really is.

[Unknown]

I've never heard of that.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah, a lot of people haven't, but actually some of the most important innovators, I think, in Arthurian literature at this time were not Tennyson and that lot. It was actually some of the female artists.

[Unknown]

Fan fiction unleashed.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. So Gawain out on the porch with a shotgun. Yeah, Cool box.

[Greg Jenner]

Interesting stuff. And then also in the art world as well. So there's a photographer called Julia Margaret Cameron and she's a very famous photographer.

[Mike Wozniak]

Really impressive, very well known and often we'll see lots of exhibitions about her these days. You know, she's sort of back in vogue.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. And her Arthurian portrait series that she is asked to do for Tennyson for an 1874 edition of his Idols is very, very famous. It contains these kind of photo portraits of people from the Arthurian world.

[Mike Wozniak]

These are people who also were using Arthuriana to justify the British Empire.

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah. Julia Cameron was born in Calcutta and she owned coffee plantations in Sri Lanka. And her and Tennyson were both very, very pro empire. And they saw the Arthur story as a story about a king who's a civilizing force. I mean, Tennyson's poems describe. Yeah, it really is. I mean, Tennyson describes Arthur taming people like wild beasts. It's all very uncomfortable. There's a famous painting actually by George Frederick Wyatts of Sir Galahad that is hung not just in Eton, the original, but all over schools and nurseries across the British Empire as a kind of propaganda tool, really.

[Unknown]

Like this is the Platonic idea of.

[Greg Jenner]

A man, ideal, upright, civilized masculinity.

[Unknown]

Do a quest, grab a treasure from.

[Mike Wozniak]

Somewhere, stick a flag in it.

[Unknown]

Home for neighbours.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, I think it might be your mustache, Mike. But there feels like a slight 19th century leadership quality to you. I feel like I want to follow you into battle. But you won't be invading Brittany anytime soon, I'm assuming.

[Unknown]

Well, I'll try not to. I'm fighting the urge every day.

[Mike Wozniak]

Good. Good learning. There are lots of landmarks. I know we've talked about some already. Just very quickly, what are sort of the real classic landmarks, Tintagel. Mike's mentioned.

[Greg Jenner]

Tintagel is still a massive tourist hotspot. One of English Heritage's most successful, obviously. Glastonbury. People still flock to Glastonbury.

[Mike Wozniak]

And the grave of Arthur and Guinevere.

[Greg Jenner]

Was found by some glastonbury monks in.

[Mike Wozniak]

1191 when they needed some funding.

[Greg Jenner]

And it's been visited.

[Mike Wozniak]

Oh, right.

[Unknown]

So it's genuine. To get a bit of brisk tourist.

[Mike Wozniak]

It was a very useful discovery.

[Unknown]

Why not upgrade to annual membership, all that kind of stuff, Potentially.

[Greg Jenner]

They had a disastrous fire.

[Mike Wozniak]

They had a fire and they needed to rebuild. And suddenly, out of nowhere, King Arthur.

[Greg Jenner]

What are the chances six years later? I fancy that there's all sorts of stories, even today, about Arthur sleeping beneath a hill or in a cave somewhere, ready to come back.

[Unknown]

Everywhere's got one of those.

[Greg Jenner]

Everywhere.

[Unknown]

The Poles have got one of those.

[Greg Jenner]

Well, Mount Etna in the Middle Ages. Yeah. Is theorized as. This is where Avalon was in. In a medieval text. Yeah.

[Unknown]

Poles have got them. The Sleeping Knights of Givant.

[Mike Wozniak]

I think your Polish heritage is coming out there.

[Unknown]

I'm aware of this.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Yes, yeah. It's one of those like the. The knights or the king who will rise again.

[Mike Wozniak]

That's it. They're sleeping.

[Unknown]

They're in a cave.

[Greg Jenner]

Sleeping King, Yeah. You've got Snowdon, Alderley Edge in Cheshire.

[Mike Wozniak]

Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, of course.

[Greg Jenner]

Arthur's Oven in Scotland as well. There's all sorts of landmarks with Arthurian.

[Mike Wozniak]

Mike, do you know which British city has Arthur's seal? Arthur's coat of arms on their modern civic seal?

[Unknown]

I want to say Winchester.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's a good guess. They've got the Round Table. Right.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

I would guess Bath, because, you know, we talked about Bath. Barton. It's. It's none of those.

[Unknown]

Aberystwyth.

[Mike Wozniak]

No, it's.

[Greg Jenner]

It's Hull.

[Unknown]

Is it really?

[Greg Jenner]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

Viking.

[Mike Wozniak]

Hull places Hull up in the northeast. Why Hull?

[Greg Jenner]

It's a very long story that I don't have much time to get into today, but basically, can you do it quickly? I can do it really quickly. This particular coat of arms with the three crowns on blue was used by other figures as well. Hull was the Kingstown founded in 1299.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yes. Kingston upon Hull.

[Greg Jenner]

Kingston upon Hull. I don't think that the arms date to that early, but they were used later on and continue to be used. And they happen to be Arthur's coat of arms that you see most commonly as well.

[Mike Wozniak]

Hull. Hull is the great King Arthur.

[Unknown]

Greece wouldn't have guessed it.

[Mike Wozniak]

Maybe that's where the round table is. Could be the Nuance window. So it's time now for the Nuance window. This is where Mike and I sit quietly at the Round table for two minutes with our many, many, many other knights. And we give Dr. Mary two minutes to tell us something we need to know. So my stopwatch is ready. Without much further ado, the new ENS window, please.

[Greg Jenner]

Okay, so we haven't spoken much today about the period between the 16th and 19th centuries and that's because a lot of people think of this as an Arthurian nadir. No one is interested in Arthur, no one is writing about Arthur. And actually this is the time when you see some of the weirdest and funniest texts being written about Arthur. I'm going to give two examples today, but there are tons of others. Two of my favourites. The first is a little pamphlet published by a famous balladeer called Martin, A Famous History of King Arthur, 1660. So just on the cusp of monarchic restoration and it seems fairly normal until you delve into his massive list of Arthur's knights, which alongside Gawain Lancelot, includes names like Sir Doggery, Sir Bawd, Sir Frisky and Sir Bigot. And I love this because people talk about Parker and this particular text as examples of royalist propaganda and it just goes to show how even the more sober Arthurian genres at this time are becoming becoming playful. There's some tongue in cheek stuff going on here. It's not attempting to be history anymore and because of that things get a lot more diverse and interesting. Because we mentioned Hull earlier, did you know that there is a Merlinic prophecy, a prophecy supposedly attributed to Merlin about Kingston upon Hull and its invasion by parliamentary forces? Lots of people don't, and I don't know why you would, but I find it really funny that Merlin, who is a royal advisor, is co opted as a prognosticator, as a prophet for parliamentarianism, you know, around the Civil War period. I just find that completely wonderful and a great testament to how even in this nadir things can continue to be reinvented.

[Mike Wozniak]

Amazing. Thank you so much. There you go to King Arthur. He's the once and future king because actually he keeps coming back, but with a new.

[Unknown]

Yeah, whatever's needed at the time.

[Mike Wozniak]

Right, so there we go. How do you feel about King Arthur now, Mike?

[Unknown]

I thoroughly enjoy. I love that it's been an absolute feast.

[Mike Wozniak]

You knew way more than you let on. You said early on that you had like rough outlines.

[Unknown]

I Wasn't sure. Yeah, I'd loved it as a kid, I think in particular. And there's so many brilliant movies and things remind you.

[Mike Wozniak]

There are so many movies.

[Unknown]

Excalibur in particular. I mean, I'm gonna have to go back and watch that.

[Mike Wozniak]

Excalibur is a great one. First night not so good. Yeah.

[Greg Jenner]

We seem to share the knowledge between us, which I love. Everyone has something a bit different.

[Mike Wozniak]

Exactly.

[Greg Jenner]

You know?

[Mike Wozniak]

Exactly. So what do you know now? Well, it's time now for the so what do you know now? This is our quickfire quiz for Mike to see how much he has learned. Are you feeling confident?

[Unknown]

I don't think I am feeling confident. Yeah. There's been a lot of detail names that I probably haven't grasped, but let's.

[Mike Wozniak]

I feel like you contributed very well to the overall conversation. So I'm not going to hold it against you if this is where you fall down. So, 10 questions. Here we go. Question one. Which English chronicler wrote a history of the kings of Britain, inspiring others to create Arthurian romance literature?

[Unknown]

Your friend of mine, Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[Mike Wozniak]

It was. Question 2. The round table seated as few as 12 knights or as many as. How many?

[Unknown]

1600.

[Mike Wozniak]

It was way too many knights. Question 3. In the story of Colic and Alwyn, what weird talent did Lip, son of Placid possess?

[Unknown]

Oh, when he was blue and he was feeling low, his lip could go down to his navel or he could also put it over his head backwards.

[Mike Wozniak]

Hood skill. Okay. Question four. Why might Geoffrey of Monmouth have changed Merlin's name from Mervyn so it didn't.

[Unknown]

Sound like the word for Tads to a French audience.

[Mike Wozniak]

Beautifully done. Question 5. How did Morgan le Fay's character arc change over the medieval period?

[Unknown]

She was originally a healer and sort of magic positive creature and then became villainous.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah. Treacherous half sister. An incestuous mother of Mordred. Yes. Question 6. A name one Arthurian artifact that allegedly medieval king kings claim to own.

[Unknown]

There's, for example, Richard Braveheart claiming to have the Excalibur itself and giving it to the.

[Mike Wozniak]

Richard the Lionheart.

[Unknown]

The Lionheart, sorry, yeah. Giving it to the king of Sicily or some Duke of Sicily.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, yeah. Tancred.

[Unknown]

Yeah.

[Mike Wozniak]

Well remembered. Very good. You could have also had the sword of Saint Tristan. Arthur's crown as well. And Gawain's head was in Dover for some reason. Who wrote Le Morte d'arthur while in prison?

[Unknown]

Thomas Malory.

[Mike Wozniak]

He was. He was the Geoffrey Archer of his age. Question 8. According to Chretien de trois. What was the Holy Grail?

[Unknown]

Oh, it was a serving platter. It was a cup, after all.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, it was a serving platter for the Eucharist. Question nine, Juliet. Margaret Cameron's photographs illustrated the ideals of the king, written by which famous poet laureate?

[Unknown]

Tennyson.

[Mike Wozniak]

This for a perfect 10, Mike. Which British city has King Arthur's supposed coat of arms in its crest? Oh, good old 10 out of 10, Mike Wozniak. You are King Arthur after all. You're back.

[Unknown]

Pluck a sword out of his stone, my rightly. Yeah, Kingdom. Can't wait. I think I would try to be your sort of benevolent dictator.

[Mike Wozniak]

Right, Okay.

[Unknown]

I think it's worth giving that a go.

[Mike Wozniak]

Sure.

[Unknown]

Even for a couple of years, and then if I.

[Mike Wozniak]

And how big is your round table gonna be?

[Unknown]

Oh, I think. Oh, God, this is. This is like wedding invites. Because there'd be so many people that would be offended if I didn't. You gotta think about colleagues. You've gotta be old friends from school you're not being in touch with. I'm gonna say. I'm say 240. Because then people can have a kind of like, bring. Bring a friend, that kind of stuff.

[Mike Wozniak]

Okay.

[Greg Jenner]

Plus ones.

[Mike Wozniak]

Yeah, plus ones.

[Unknown]

I'll say 240. You're both invited, obviously.

[Mike Wozniak]

Thank you. Thank you. There you go. All right. Well, thank you so much, listener. If you crave more Wozniak in your life, of course you do. Check out our episodes on Stone Age cattle. Hayek. Do you remember that? Yeah. Or, of course, Dickens at Christmas. A very festive episode. And for more lovely legends, we've got an episode on Atlantis which was not real, but very interesting. And remember, if you enjoy the podcast, please, please leave us a review. Share the show with friends. Subscribe to youo're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But just want to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the brilliant Dr. Mary Bateman from the University of Bristol. Thank you, Mary.

[Greg Jenner]

Thank you so much. This has been great.

[Mike Wozniak]

It's been lovely. And in Comedy Corner, we have the marvelous king himself, Mike Wozniak, the once and future Arthur. Thank you, Mike. It's lovely.

[Unknown]

I've loved it. Thank you so much.

[Mike Wozniak]

Fabulous. And to you, lovely listener. Join me next time as we ride off on another historical quest. But for now, I'm off to go and trim my beard. First, I just need to find a wild boar. Bye. This episode of youf're Dead to Me was researched by John Norman Mason and Hannah Cusworth. It was written by John Norman Mason, Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagus and me. The audio producer was Steve Hanke and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Nagoose and our executive editor was James Cook. Your Dead to me is a BBC studio's audio production for BBC Radio 4.

[Greg Jenner]

Strong message here from BBC Radio 4. I'm Amanda Iannucci.

[Mike Wozniak]

And I'm Helen Lewis, a comedy writer.

[Greg Jenner]

And a journalist teaming up like a.

[Mike Wozniak]

Pair of unkempt and unlikely superheroes.

[Greg Jenner]

Our mission is to decipher political language.

[Mike Wozniak]

Stress testing to destruction those used and.

[Greg Jenner]

Abused buzzwords and phrases, finding out what.

[Mike Wozniak]

They really mean and looking at whether they're meant to deceive us or to.

[Greg Jenner]

Distract us or to disturb us. And our pledge is to help you spot the tricks of the verbal trade.

[Mike Wozniak]

But be warned, this series does feature.

[Greg Jenner]

Strong political language that some listeners may find an inverted pyramid of piffle. Strong message here from BBC Radio 4.

[Mike Wozniak]

Listen now on BBC Sounds.

[Dr. Mary Bateman]

The battlefield is set, the stakes are high. The only thing standing between you and Victor Nothing. Ascend to the pinnacle of gaming greatness with Lenovo Legion Laptops, Towers and the new award winning Legion Go, the world's first officially licensed handheld. Powered by SteamOS. Legion relentlessly pushes gaming technology forward with towers built for raw untamed power laptops with best in class AI tuning that sharpen your reflexes. And the Legion Goes, a handheld for serious gaming on the go. Stay ahead with lightning fast responsiveness on a stunning 16 inch PureSight display. Keep your cool with cold front thermal technology engineered for marathon sessions and with all day battery life, the game never stops until you say so. So check out lenovo.com legion Lenovo Lenovo empowering creators everywhere.

[Greg Jenner]

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