Odin And Frey: Drawings By Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones And The Stained Glass They Inspired By Brian

May I just say, non-condescendingly, that I love how we’re all such nerds about these characters that we take weird, obscure tidbits, like Kai’s laundry list of superpowers (which upwards of 99% of everyone everywhere will never know or care about), for granted as common knowledge.

hello. i was wondering sumn. what makes a knight of camelot ~A Knight of Camelot~? there are so many of them and they’re all different but do they have characteristics in common that are found in the average Famous Knight of Camelot and that when you see you think “ah yes that is very arthurian of them”. i hope my question is not a bother to you and too confusing.

Hi! Like every other answer I ever give, it’s highly dependent on the text.

In the Mabinogion, Arthur’s best knights tend to have special abilities, even magical powers. We all remember Kai’s fun list of attributes.

But generally speaking, fame in Camelot comes from 3 things:

Every successful knight is hot. I don’t make the rules.

They have to be good at beating the snot out of other guys. Obviously.

Branding. I’m so serious.

My basis for this comes from the Vulgate descriptions of the Orkney Bros. Specifically, Gaheriet/Gaheris. Not because he’s famous, but because he isn’t.

It’s no accident that Gaheris never makes it to the big screen the way his brothers do. He is, by design, basic. The quintessential middle child. He doesn’t have a Special Trait (such as Gawain’s courtesy or reputation as a ladies man or noontime powers etc.) and that makes Gaheris forgettable. To be a famous knight, you gotta put your whole pussy into it, in front of a live studio audience, or you won’t be famous no matter how good you are. Makes sense when you think about it!

Not sure if that answers your question, but that’s what I got. Take care. :^)

really love dynamics that are like 'it honestly doesn't matter if you view them as romantic or platonic, the point is that they love each other. the type of love is inconsequential, all that matters is that it's there'. gotta be one of my favorite genders.

The Passing of Arthur by Sidney Harold Meteyard

Looking back on this, I’m baffled that I managed to leave out Bedivere. I’m in this very weird writing rut where I keep starting stories using the canon where Griflet is the one who throws the sword in the lake and those stories end up devolving into vaguely metaphysical Bedivere-death-centric angst. Even when Bedivere is theoretically a minor character, it happens. It happened in a reincarnation fic where the Green Knight makes them all sing karaoke and the Palug Cat is Guinevere’s Maine Coon, for goodness’ sake. I think the problem is that there are about fifteen knights who I would offhandedly say are in my top five. Anyway, apologies to Bedivere.

To anyone who loves Arthurian legends, who’s your fav knight? Mine has been Sir Palomides and Sir Gareth lately.

Dindrane: claimed I could remember my unborn sibling from Heaven, then gave a description of said sibling which turned out to be accurate 

Taliesin: went outside during a lightning storm and tried to fly away by using a Mary Poppins umbrella to catch the wind while making dramatic poetic declarations (I got about two feet in the air)

Sebile: tried to practice necromancy to talk to a dead Monarch butterfly

.

This isn’t something I did, but an evangelical organization once showed up at my family’s house to see whether one of us was the Messiah, and that seems pretty Galahad-esque.

arthurian legend characters as weird things i did as a kid

Arthur: created clubs for the sole purpose of making myself in charge of them

Guinevere: played barbies, but the plot of the game was that they were fighting in world war iii

Lancelot: pretended to be an exterminator by spraying actual hornets with a hose, and somehow not getting stung, against all odds

Gawain: held stair-jumping competitions, and regularly jumped down around 10 stairs at a time

Merlin: designated a particular tree branch for reading and refused to let anyone climb this branch

Gaheris: held ‘screaming contests’ in my backyard to which invited my friends (this is exactly what it sounds like and it was banned by my mother immediately)

Dinadan: eaten spaghetti while riding a bike

Galahad: made a graveyard for bugs

Morgana: recruited a friend’s little brother to spy on said friend because she wasn’t talking to me

Mordred: accidentally made a gallon of poison

From Le Roman des Franceis (AKA Li Romanz des Franceis or Arflet) by André de Coutance, in which the poet is very concerned about the widespread(?) slanderous accusations that King Arthur was killed and replaced as king by a giant cat.

for the ask game, 💚💛😤🗡️ !!!

I started writing this and realized that my quest/story arc answer could also work for the sibling dynamic one and vice versa, so the first two are both for both.

I’m very fond of The Story of the Crop-Eared Dog—which is to Arthurian lit what Lilly Onakuramara is to the Barden Bellas, only less important—and its weird anticlimax in which the sidekick shows up and reveals that he’s achieved their key goals by killing a vast number of people, including all of the naked monks on the Island of Naked Monks, then defeating but sparing the main antagonist. (The antagonist—the Knight of the Lantern, henceforth known as Lanny—is Alastrann’s—the sidekick’s—younger half-brother. Alastrann’s earlier speeches concerning Lanny can be briefly summarized as, “My baby brother is sooo talented and amazing, but he destroys everything he touches, so I’m going to kill all his friends and steal his stuff and hope that solves the issue.” Somehow, this works). There’s a lot more to unpack there, but it’s a complicated mess. A charming complicated mess.

Arthur’s sudden ascent to greatness, and the barriers that likely creates between the (formerly unwitting) foster brothers, has its own sort of pathos, but their dynamic in Cullwch and Olwen is heartbreaking and seems to get overlooked. (They aren’t referred to as brothers or foster brothers there, but I’ll count it anyway). They have a falling out over an extemporaneous song with which Arthur ridicules Cai’s tactics on a specific killing errand. It might be meant as a joke, but it angers Cai so much that he leaves, never to return or aid Arthur again. The twist is this: it’s already been said that when Cai is killed, Arthur avenges him by killing not only his killer but also his killer’s brothers. Arthur’s vengeance is brutal and unfair and a mark of extreme grief; clearly, he never stopped caring about his friend/brother, even though he was never able to make up with him in life. 

Your Most Specific Nitpick About Your Fave (anything from "Gareth would not have a beard" to "this is basically a different guy"):

One of my faves is Dinadan, and an adaptational/fandom nitpick of mine is when he gets shipped with random people. I personally headcanon him as aroace. There are some texts where I can understand reading him as being gay and having feelings for Tristan, but writing about, say, him and Mordred makes no sense to me and I find it aggravating. Aroaces (and aspec people in general) have such little representation as it is.

Who Are You Betting On In This Month's Tournament?

Assuming that Lanny is out of town, I’ll place a small bet on Dinadan. He doesn’t win often, so I could get great odds for him, and when he does win, it’s very funny. I also really like Dinadan.

Propaganda:

I generally interpret Galahad as aroace. That being said, if he wasn’t and Galadred were a thing, I think it could save the Round Table. Being in a relationship might stop Galahad from going on the Grail quest, which would stop a great number of people from dying, and having a very Catholic boyfriend might stop Mordred from participating in some of his more dubious hobbies, like plotting murder.

The sad thing about Les Prophéties is that there is no known English translation (yet). There's this translation into slightly more modern French on Internet Archive, which was found by @liminalpsych, but the scan is pretty low quality, at times illegible (including Sebile-related parts), and not searchable.

It's worlds better than nothing, and you can glean many gems just from the contents and introduction, which are in English. Dinadan finds a prophecy in a graveyard, Lancelot hangs out with Lionel and Bors and rescues Galehaut, there is at least one gryphon and a dragon, Sebile and Morgan have a love/hate relationship, Morgan and Bruce have a surprisingly wholesome friendship and he patches her up after a fight, Percival hangs out with a hermit and has some love affairs, one of the Ladies of the Lake does a lot of stuff, Tristan does something, Gawain is there... It has something for pretty much everyone.

Alas, the days when it can be read in its full glory are yet a dream.

vulgate if you don’t have its essential reading

wackier recommendation Les Prophéties de Merlin it has toxic Morgan Seblie yuri and medieval witch power scaling, also everyone wants to bang old man Merlin very chaotic (warning highly misogynistic even for its time )

Oh I don't have vulgate so I will defo get that!!!!

TOXIC MORGAN SEBILE YURI?! YES PLS why does everybody wanna bang that old dude? Can I buy Les Propheties online translated into English?

(Source: Ridder Metter Mouwen)

Oh, come on! Really?!! Guinevere is Kay's niece in this story?!!