Famous Last Words: King Arthur

This week I had some readings that I really enjoyed. I read the King Arthur unit, both parts, and they were very different from what my perception of the Lancelot stories were from popular media. There was a lot more focus on the actions of the knights and how grand they were, and a bunch of focus on how some of the knights were good enough based on their passed sins and some were not. I found myself having some sympathy for Lancelot, because a lot of the story focused on how he could have been the greatest knight the world had ever seen, could have found the Holy Grail, but because of his past sins he had to sit and watch others do it. That seemed pretty harsh to me, but then at the end they redeemed him. It just seemed like they made him suffer his whole life and then at the end they were like "Oh, its all okay". But after saying all that, after King Arthur died and they talk about how sad Lancelot is and blah blah blah, he still went to Guinevere and asked her to go with him. So maybe he did not care enough about the Holy Grail at all. I also thought the whole knights going around looking for ways to kill themselves heroically was super overrated and dumb. But I enjoyed the style of storytelling and how it jumped from person to person. There were a few characters that I would have enjoyed learning more about, including Merlin and the Lady of the Lake. Women did not get a very good rap in these stories (as they usually do not in older tales) including King Arthur's sister and Merlin's girlfriend. I might be kind of mean to the knights too if they were always trying to run off and die too, though.

Sir Launcelot in the Queen's Chamber by Dante Rossetti (1857) 

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