According to a popular commonplace whose currency owes as much to modern fiction and cinema as to medieval legend and literature, King Arthur is a “once and future” ruler – Rex quondam rexque futurus – who will someday return from the remote, enchanted isle of Avalon. According to the mid-twelfth-century poet Wace, it was the prophet Merlin who had affirmed that rumors of Arthur's demise were premature, thus inspiring among the credulous Bretons an enduring climate of anticipation. Perhaps a medieval avatar of the “dying and reviving gods” long ago described by Sir James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough, Arthur has lived on in the popular imagination for centuries, but largely as a monarch absconditus, much like the ethereal old king in the next room at the Grail Castle, invisible yet alive, miraculously sustained. Meanwhile, during the prolonged period of Arthur's absence, the Arthurian legend has retained its arresting openness, idling somewhere between the mortally wounded monarch's evanescence and his second coming, healed and hale, to the great hall at Camelot. Moreover, within that indeterminate, ever-lengthening span of centuries separating the legend's conventional end from its promised new beginning, the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table comprise a long and venerable tradition of rewriting and recycling, an ever-expanding corpus of “once and future fictions.”

The present contribution returns to the late twelfth century in order to examine in depth the moment at which a recently burgeoning Arthurian tradition achieved its first extensive literary incarnation.