This chapter discusses ways in which the Arthurian legend was transformed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries by French and English romance writers, focusing on the introduction of new characters, changes to the roles of traditionally central characters, and conflicting loyalties and values. Arthur is often displaced from the central role in the plot and can seem passive and ineffective. Gawain is the Top Knight in the English tradition, but Lancelot (a French addition) becomes increasingly important, not least because of his long affair with the queen, which is a contributing factor to the final collapse of Camelot. Family matters increasingly lead to conflicts of loyalties: Morgan le Fay is hostile to her brother, Arthur, and his Orkney nephews grow in number, some loyal but some treacherous. Mordred is not only Arthur’s nephew but sometimes also his son by incest, destined to kill his father. The Grail quest features first Perceval and then Galahad (Lancelot’s illegitimate son); its spiritual values challenge the ethos of secular chivalry and ennobling love. Does this quest bring glory to Arthur’s Round Table, or is it a critique of a fatally flawed society? Important variations in medieval approaches to the legend appear through this period.

1066 AND ALL THAT, the comic history of England published in 1930, includes splendidly eccentric exam questions for each historical period; one of the medieval ones is ‘What have you done with your mother? (If Nun, write None)’. In the Arthurian legend, the only significant character who is sometimes said to be the offspring of a nun (or a virginal and virtuous princess) is not a king or a warrior hero but Merlin the magician. He is fathered clandestinely by a mysterious visitor, in some versions an incubus, but saved for the side of good by the holiness of his mother; in some she remains a virgin, suggesting a surprising parallel between Merlin and Christ. There is already a link between them in that their birth stories demonstrate Otto Rank's theory that in mythology and legend extra-marital and clandestine encounters often produce great heroes (this is also true of Arthur himself, conceived in an extra-marital tryst through Merlin's magic). These clandestine births often result in accusations against the mother, in both classical and medieval narratives. In Robert de Boron's Merlin, an influential French verse romance written around 1200, the precocious boy successfully defends his mother against a charge of fornication; and Arthur's mother too is falsely accused before the truth about his parentage is revealed (discussed in more detail below). No doubt this reflects historical anxieties about the chastity of queens and aristocratic ladies.

Much has been written about the importance of fathers, and father-son relations, in Arthurian literature; fathers may be absent, but their names convey both noble status and expectations – of inheritance, or a duty to avenge a death, for instance. The popular Fair Unknown motif is frequently used about promising young knights who often turn out to be fathered by Gawain, but little is said about their mothers. How much do parent and child interact, and how do they feel about each other? Some Arthurian knights are deeply moved by discovering the identity of their mothers or by being reunited with them. Some are reproached for not being more devoted to their mothers. Some defend their mothers, but others blame and punish them for inappropriate behaviour. In a range of medieval Arthurian texts, and also some modern ones, the mother-son relationship can be of profound significance.

The material in this volume ranges from Germanic epic and early Welsh saints’ lives to twenty-first century comic books. This is characteristic of the Arthurian Literature series which since its inception in 1981 has always cast its net very widely over Western European culture. We are delighted that the founding editor, Richard Barber, has contributed a characteristically stimulating interdisciplinary study of swords belonging to Arthurian and other heroes. He himself has heroic stature in the world of Arthurian studies, both as an historian and as an editor and publisher. Andrew Rabin's discussion of Caradog's Vita Gildae throws light on the complex attitudes to Arthur of contemporaries of Geoffrey of Monmouth in a time of political turmoil in England, the Anarchy: Arthur is represented both as a tyrannical ruler and a conciliator, an ambivalence which Rabin notes in other Latin accounts of the king produced at this time. Christopher Berard also considers the use of Arthurian material for political purposes: borrowings from Geoffrey's Historia appear in a chronicle of Anglo-Scottish relations in the time of Edward I, a well-known admirer of the Arthurian legend. Berard argues that these borrowings would have appealed to the clerical élite of the time. Usha Vishnuvajjala focuses on women and their friendships in Ywain and Gawain, the only known close English adaptation of a romance by Chrétien. She argues that this text does not align with received wisdom about medieval friendship, or with conventional binaries about stereotypical gendered behaviour. Natalie Goodison considers the mixture of sacred and secular in The Turke and Gawain, and finds fascinating alchemical parallels for a puzzling beheading episode. Mary Bateman discusses the views on native and foreign sources of three sixteenth-century defenders of Arthur, both English and Welsh – John Leland, John Prise and Humphrey Llwyd – and their responses to the criticisms of Polydore Vergil.

In twentieth-century reception history, John Steinbeck was an ardent Arthurian enthusiast: Elaine Treharne and William J. Fowler look at the significance of his annotations to his copy of Malory as he worked on a modern adaptation, the posthumously published The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights.

Everyone accepts that Malory followed the Post-Vulgate Suite du Merlin very closely in the first tale of his Morte Darthur, but it has often been assumed that he did not know the rest of the Post-Vulgate Cycle (also known as the Roman du Graal). Very little seems to have been written about the possibility that he did read it all, perhaps because the importance of this now fragmentary cycle has only relatively recently become clearer as Fanni Bogdanow's researches have produced more and more witnesses of parts of the French version – as Richard Trachsler puts it, the cycle has now achieved the ontological status of a codicological reality – and also because parts of the Queste and Mort were only available in Spanish and Portuguese until the appearance of a complete translation of the cycle. E. D. Kennedy seems to be the only critic who regularly refers to the Post-Vulgate cycle in discussing Malory: he thinks that Malory did know at least part of the Post-Vulgate Graal, though possibly through the Prose Tristan, which in its later redaction includes much of the Post-Vulgate Queste: ‘Although Malory may never have read the Post-Vulgate Mort Artu, what he knew of the earlier parts of the Post-Vulgate Roman influenced his conception of the Arthurian tragedy.’ A critic who goes rather further is James Wimsatt, who assumes that Malory knew all three of the major French cycles, the Lancelot-Grail, the Prose Tristan, and the Post-Vulgate. However, he gives little detail to support this argument in relation to the Post-Vulgate Cycle, and his lead has not been followed. Ralph Norris argues that after the ‘Tale of King Arthur’ the Post-Vulgate is only a minor source.