Post-Camlann Incorrect Quote

At this point, my categorized Arthurian theme song list has spiraled entirely beyond reasonable proportions. If it’s taught me anything, it’s that at least two thirds of Imagine Dragons’ songs seem like they could be about Mordred.

And now, for the most niche poll I’ve ever posted or even encountered on this website:

The back of my Siege Perilous

Going from left to right and down, the symbols stand for Galahad, Percival, Ragnell, Blanchefleur, the Grail Heroine, the Lady of the Lake who gives Arthur Excalibur, Guinier, Gawain, Dinadan, Ector de Maris, Morgan le Fay, Caradoc Briefbras, Griflet, Isolde, Vivian, Taliesin, Tristan, Brunnisend, the Nine Witches, Laudine, the Three Queens or Morgause, Kay, Dagonet, Merlin, Palamedes, Sebile, Guinevere, Igraine, Melora, Yvain, Mordred, and Arthur.

If you’re confused about some or all of them, here’s my rationale/what the symbols are: 

Galahad and Percival have slightly different Grails. I think Ragnell is found sitting under a tree, and another story has Gawain in a relationship with the queen of Avalon, isle of the apples. Blanchefleur means “white flower”. The square with the spiral in it is the Grail Heroine’s box of hair. The sword under the wave is fairly obvious. That is the drinking horn from Guinier’s chastity test. Gawain’s is a SGatGK reference. Dinadan’s is an aro ring. Ector de Maris, Griflet, Kay, and Palamedes all have symbols or patterns from their attributed arms. Morgan le Fay takes Arthur to Avalon on a boat. Caradoc has to be saved from a serpent which is wound around his arm. The torch is a Wagner reference. Nimue traps Merlin, whose symbol is the bird who shares his name, so she is represented by a birdcage. Taliesin got his wisdom from a cauldron, and there’s a cauldron in the Preideu Annwfn. Tristan plays a harp. The formation of the relationship between Brunnisend and her eventual husband is defined by their dire yet mutually exclusive needs for a good night’s sleep. The Nine Witches’ symbol seemed cool and has a threefold element. Laudine has a magic fountain. The evolution of the nature and deeds of Anna/Morcades/Morgause/etc. seemed to sort of go with the Maiden, Matron, Crone archetype and I really couldn’t think of anything else. Dagonet eventually became a jester. Yblis, who has a magic mantle, is Sybil scrambled, and there is a strong modern association between magic and capes. Guinevere is sometimes given authority over the knights of the vergescu. My justification for Igraine’s is particularly weak and would take too long to explain. Melora wields the Lance of Longinus. Yvain befriends a lion. Mordred has a broken table because he helped break the Round Table. Arthur is King.

Funny story. Due to a very strange series of events, a number of people are now convinced that I'm the reincarnation of Sir Kay. This is not a joke. I'm not really sure what do with that or how to explain the strange stuff which happened. So, yeah. I can imagine it.

Reincarnation aus are funny to me because like. Imagine finding out that you’re the reincarnation of a medieval knight, brought back to save mankind in its darkest hour etc etc. But then you find out that you’re fucking like. Sir Gaheris. Absolutely mid-tier ass knight. Like what do you do with that.

Metaruu’s Headcanon Ask Game

Send in a character or characters and an icon and I’ll give you…

🏳️‍🌈 A sexuality headcanon

🏳️‍⚧️ A gender headcanon

😇 A headcanon about their religion/lack thereof

🧸 A headcanon about their childhood

👻 A headcanon about what scares them

🎶 A headcanon about music

👽 A headcanon about a weird quirk of there

💤 A headcanon about their sleep

🦾 A disability headcanon

💝 A headcanon about their love language

🫂 A friendship headcanon

💔 An angsty headcanon

🪢 A headcanon about their family

📓 A headcanon about their hobbies

👗 A headcanon about their clothes

🔪 A headcanon relating to fighting/violence

🌟 A headcanon about their desires/wishes

🥇 A headcanon about what they’re best at

🍫 A headcanon about food

🎭 A headcanon about what they lie about

❤️‍🔥 A romantic headcanon

💄 An appearance headcanon

🖕 A headcanon relating to anger

😺 An animal related headcanon

😬 A headcanon about the worst thing they’ve done

😭 A headcanon about the worst thing that happened to them.

😶 A random headcanon!

Little reminder that in at least one version of this story, Tristan shoved the tongue of a dragon he defeated down his pants. This nearly killed him.

Brangaine finds him later in the swamp after Isolde deduces the crime scene. My personal headcanon is that every time he gets on her nerves Brangaine threatens to expose him.

WIP Amnesty - This Well-nightingaled Place

This is a fic for Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, so it isn't wholly about Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman, it's more about Stoppard's heavily fictionalised, definitely surreal take on them.

Fog. Twilight. A boat, with two men sitting back to back, gazing statue-still in opposite directions.

The world awakens, the fog is lit by a greenish glow. Sounds of sloshing water, birdsong, faraway churchbells, maybe baa-ing sheep, whatever is necessary to give the impression of a nondescript but idyllic English dawn.

One of the men startles, then the other. They both stand up, the boat rocks, they both hurry to sit down.

A moment of silence as they consider their situation.

One of them moves carefully, and without fully straightening up, turns around, and sits back down, on the other bench. Then the other – they are now on opposite ends of the boat, staring at one another. WILDE is dressed in somewhat ostentatious velvets, HOUSMAN in a deliberately boring suit. They are of a similar, but indeterminate age.

WILDE Mr Housman?

HOUSMAN Yes, I believe so. Mr Wilde?

WILDE Delighted to make your acquaintance again. We’ve met before, but we may not quite have been ourselves, that is to say, not these selves, and not in this place.

HOUSMAN This place?

WILDE Just a moment.

He peers around. Shields his eyes with his hand, looks again.

The light is morning light, but it comes from no particular direction.

Sniffs the air.

Sage and fresh-cut grass.

Licks his finger and holds it up to feel the wind.

The breeze is fresh, and westerly.

Dips his hand in the water to feel the current, then as an afterthought, brings his hand to his mouth and takes a sip, then splashes the remainder on his neck.

The waters of Isis, but clearer than they ought to be.

HOUSMAN Where are we then?

WILDE I would say we are where all writers end up sometime after they’re dead.

HOUSMAN (sceptical) Elysium?

WILDE I’m afraid not. We are in the Public Domain.

HOUSMAN

Why do you reckon?

WILDE I’ve been here before, many times. Mostly miserable biographies, and even more miserable fictionalized biographies, but not exclusively. It is fortunate that my creation, Dorian Grey, stands in for me when the writer merely wants to make a point about beauty or decadence or carnal sin, and I am left in peace. I am only here when they want me in person. A clever young man made an exquisitely drawn comic book about my final days before moving on to woefully mischaracterize Hemingway. I’ve been here in a story about Bosie wearing a green carnation, fighting for my last lost book against a host of batlike tyrants who have stolen the very city of London. There was a radio play of sorts that gave me a government job, impressive magical powers, and a handsome young man in plate armour to grovel at my feet. EMPIRE STAR And of course there was the business with young Mr Stoppard, where unless I am mistaken we last met.

HOUSMAN We did.  It has been a long time.

WILDE It has been no time at all. HOUSMAN Maybe not for you – my sleep is deeper. I am not here unless they sing one of my poems, and even then, I only walk these hills as if in a dream. Most days I am only here to the extent the Shropshire Lad is myself, that is to say, hardly at all.

WILDE So we are in Shropshire?

HOUSMAN The Shropshire I wrote is not the Shropshire you may have been to.

WILDE I have been to your Shorpshire more times than I have been to the Shropshire outside your pages. I have no objection to this Shropshirish, Oxfordish, Arcadia-ish place. It is a little dull, maybe, a little too pastoral, but there are worse places to be.

HOUSMAN What- ah, Reading.

WILDE And Paris, and Naples, and Berneval-le-Grand, and every jewel-bright city one visits as an exile and not as a guest.

Silence.

WILDE Don’t be quite so glum, you are souring the English countryside for me, although I suppose that is the highest and truest aim of all your poetry. To hang murderers from every tree, bury suicides at every crossroads and fill the churchyards with dead heroes, which ultimately seem to be the only sort of hero you really care about. To hell with it, show me what’s in that basket!

Housman looks around, and finds a wicker basket underneath his seat. Brings it out, looks into it, slides the whole thing over to Wilde. He rummages through it.

WILDE Cheese sandwiches. Sponge cake. Strawberries. What are these supposed to be?

He holds up a red metal cylinder.

HOUSMAN (glad to have something to explain) This is an anachronism. A deliberate one at that. I’ve seen prototypes at the Patent Office, but they didn’t start manufacturing stay-tab drinking cans like this until the sixties. Nineteen-sixties, that is.

Wilde still looks nonplussed. Housman takes it from his hand.

HOUSEMAN Here, you push the tab, and you drink from there.

Hands it back. Wilde takes a careful sip from the can, considers it, then takes a longer pull.

WILDE Gin and lemonade, with some spice to it. Pimms, maybe. I suppose absinthe would be too much to ask for.

He picks up a piece of sponge cake, eats it. Housman has not yet touched the food.

HOUSMAN There remains the question of why we’re here.

WILDE Someone clearly thinks we have something of relevance to say to one another. Or at least that my fictionalized, much-distorted form has something to say to your fictionalized, much-distorted form.

HOUSMAN So you have noticed.

WILDE What.

HOUSMAN That you’re not quite yourself.

WILDE I feel like myself, but I cannot do myself justice. I am slower, my words less exact. We are diminished, flattened in the hands of an inferior author.

HOUSMAN A corrupted text?

WILDE Worse. An interpolation.

HOUSMAN We might escape the worst of the corruption by limiting ourselves to things we have said before – things we had the time and means to edit beforehand, whenever possible.

WILDE Agreed. Now, why do you suppose you are here with me?

HOUSMAN I cannot think of anything. Not that I mind this boat on this river in this early morning light…

WILDE But you would much prefer to share it with someone else, or, failing that, much rather spend it alone.

HOUSMAN Quite. I am a textual critic first and a poet only by chance. You are an aesthete first and a poet only by circumstance. We have very little common ground.

WILDE You are too polite to mention that I whole-heartedly believe in a Christ that you find at best slightly ridiculous. I am rude enough to remind you that you declare your devotion to a queen and country that I can no longer bring myself to even jest about.

HOUSMAN So it is going to be…

WILDE There’s nothing else.

HOUSMAN It’s not what I wanted to be remembered for. I do not deny it, but I do not want my life’s work overshadowed by one quirk of my temperament. You too deserve better than to have your name tied permanently to scandal.

WILDE I don’t. I gave my own name to scandal, so now people have something to call it, the poor unnameable thing.

*

And that is how far I got with this story - if you want to get a sense of how it would have continued, I suggest you read all of Housman's poems (there aren't very many, it's three slim volumes), read the Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis, they say anything I could have wanted to say much better than I can say it.

I noticed that Caradoc’s and Arthur’s arms are similar: both feature crowns on an azure field, though Arthur has multiple crowns or and Caradoc just has one crown argent. Caradoc is married to one of Igraine’s daughters in the Vulgate Merlin, and he is the son of Arthur’s niece (but referred to as his nephew) in The Story of Caradoc. It’s quite possible that whoever designed Caradoc’s arms meant them to look like a humbler version of Arthur’s.

Coats of Arms of (some) Knights of the Round Table from a 16th century French manuscript, including most of our favourite Merlin knights.

From left to right:

Galahad, Percival, Lancelot du Lac, Bors

King Arthur, Gawain, Tristan, Lionel

(H)elyan the White, King Bagdemagus, King Edern, King Rience, 

King Carados, King Clariance, Duke Chaliens of Clarence and (H)ector de Maris.

i don’t need gps or directions, i start walking and end up in the story pivotal location like a maiden from arthurian legends

I hadn’t noticed that, but I think that you’re right and that that was the artist’s way of reminding us it’s made of Percival’s sister’s hair. Neat. Or not neat. There’s a lot to be said of hair belts as a fashion choice and most of it is negative, but you can’t say it’s not bold.

The Grail Heroine leading Galahad to the ship, where Percival and Bors wait

Stained glass by Veronica Whall for King Arthur’s Great Halls at Tintagel