Edited by Alloe Mak

arthuriana is a colloquial term referring to the vast body of work about king arthur, a figure known generally for his knights, his adulterous queen guenevere, and his round table. it’s a tradition, not a series or a saga—a composite creature, patched together by an incoherent and inconsistent string of largely unrelated storytellers across a period of over a thousand years. there is no one “true version” of events or a “most accurate” text; arthur is less of a character than he is an idea, and arthuriana is more about his loved ones than it is about him. 

this semester, a beloved professor of mine described the historia regum britanniae (the first text to name arthur a king) as “the second most popular work of fiction in the medieval period after the bible.” arthuriana has been a wildly popular subject of stories—books, plays, and more recently, blockbusters—for most of its existence. even if most people don’t know about its welsh origins or the details of its texts, the name of arthur and the image of the sword in the stone are ubiquitous. it is striking to me, then, that one of the most famous stories in the world is best suited to queer readings. 

on the surface, arthuriana seems to chronicle an exceptionally heterosexual and prototypically masculine series of fictitious affairs. by the high medieval period, one of its central conflicts is the betrayal of arthur’s wife and best knight (guenevere and lancelot, respectively), who have fallen in love and are courting behind his back. knights wander through the countryside saving helpless maidens, with a central tenet of chivalry involving the honour of noblewomen. somewhere along the way, arthur becomes a bold and violent conqueror.  

as arthuriana shifted from being the content of welsh legends and chronicles, to the focus of chivalric romances brought to britain by the normans, the public world of celtic heroism was replaced by the private world of french courts. this “version” of arthuriana is perhaps the most famous. it’s here that we see characters like lancelot emerge, as well as excalibur, camelot, the round table, and the most well-known exploits of arthur’s knights. this is a world of castles, quests, and jousts. more importantly, it’s a world of secrets. 

the most characteristic arthurian loves are bound by this privacy, and the fabric of the arthurian world is threatened when they are made public (in the words of a friend, when they “become a family matter”). lancelot and guenevere’s secret brings arthur’s empire to its knees as it’s discovered by two of arthur’s nephews (who belong to a tumultuous family i will henceforth refer to as “the orkneys”). guenevere is set to be executed as a consequence, lancelot rescues her (accidentally killing two other orkney brothers), and kicks off a feud that snowballs into the cataclysmic “final battle” of this period’s arthuriana. in le morte d’arthur, arthur confesses to gawain (one of the remaining orkneys who is, or at least talks like he is, in love with lancelot) that he knew about the affair, but that it wasn’t a problem until it was discovered. he is also far more grieved to lose his best knight than he is his wife now that the affair is public, and he is being forced to bring them both to justice. 

lancelot is known widely in arthuriana as the best of worldly knights, whose only flaw is his sin, and who is hated by god for putting his love for guenevere above Him (come on, now). t.h. white, a twentieth-century author, connected these dots. he is the only author i can think of who dared to characterize the most beautiful and beloved knight of arthurian literature as an ugly, self-hating, and queer-coded man, and it remains the single most interesting thing anyone has ever done with the tradition. it was broadly speculated by friends and other writers that t.h. white was himself a deeply closeted and internally-homophobic gay man, and he grappled with lancelot’s bisexuality in his character notes (“homosexual? can a person be ambi-sexual—bisexual or whatever? his treatment of young boys […] is very tender and his feeling for arthur profound”). these character notes also read: “he firmly believes that for him it is a choice between god and guenever, and he takes guenever. he says: this is wrong and against my will, but i can’t help it.”

it’s not just lancelot, either. lancelot’s son, galahad, bests him by achieving the holy grail (a godly object which the sinful lancelot cannot obtain or even see, as god quite literally strikes him with fire rather than let him approach it) and ascending to heaven. galahad’s freedom from sin quite crucially necessitates that he is a virgin, only this holy virginity is often explained in-text by a complete lack of attraction to anyone whatsoever. some scholars have chosen to read this as a “proto-asexuality,” and it is interesting that the best of arthur’s courtly world is marked by his inability to fully participate in it. 

by this, i’m referring to fin’amor (or courtly love), which is the ability of a knight to serve a noblewoman. this knight-servitor relationship is repeatedly emphasized as a core aspect of the knightly code of conduct, but, in my opinion, is drastically undercut both by galahad and the nature of arthurian court. the world of knights is, of course, a homosocial one, but the misogyny inherent in these medieval texts also results in little meaningful interaction with the ladies of the court. the most fruitful relationships lie between the knights themselves.

like the women, arthur and his desires take a back seat in most chivalric romances, and he is largely left behind to tend to his secretive court (or the “private space” of arthuriana) while his knights embark on various quests. he has been understood by medieval scholarship and my aforementioned professor as “womanlike,” or at the very least incongruous with medieval models of masculine kingship. 

another instance of a feminine character who contributes to the queer-coding of arthurian men is the trope of the sovereignty goddess. in celtic myth, this figure personifies the land and confers its ownership onto men with whom she sleeps, but once again, their relationship is necessarily a secret one. lanval, a poem pre-chivalric romance which acted as a prototype for the genre, prominently features a sovereignty goddess. the knight lanval is shunned by arthurian court until he meets a mysterious fairy woman who sleeps with him and grants him both material wealth and social currency at court. the caveat is that he is forbidden from revealing the identity of his lover (in other words, an ostracized man must keep his lover a secret in order to gain status and hold onto his power). when lanval refuses to tell the queen about the woman he loves, she openly accuses him of homosexuality.  

i could go on. when you take a story so often about love and you make that love a necessary secret, when the affair is alright with the scorned party until it is known, when your conquering king is made to constantly tend to the home, and when you exclude women from narratives about a chivalric society so predicated on the ability to serve them, the result does not conform to ideas of heterosexuality and masculinity. the arthurian world contradicts itself on a fundamental level unless you understand as queer.